Oh, one thing for you folks in town or visiting: the best undiscovered restaurant I know, and I will hunt you down and kill you if you tip off a tourist guidebook, is the Bodega Manolo around the corner from my place. Two people can have two courses, dessert, and wine for less than forty-fifty bucks, and that's not ordering the cheapest stuff on the menu. It's open for an inexpensive fixed-price lunch every day and that's decent enough. The dinner menu is small, admittedly, but what they do they know how to do very well. The quality is excellent; you get what you pay for here. A lot of their dishes are in a wine sauce because they're a real bodega as well as a restaurant; they sell wine from the barrel. You bring your own recipient and they charge by the liter.

Dinner is only on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, and you'll need a reservation. The place is popular with the staff of El País, who can frequently be seen hanging around there. Since they don't know or care who I am, I leave them alone. Goddamn SocioCommunists.Their phone number is 93 284 43 77 and the address is Torrente Flores, 101. What I like is their salad of homemade pasta, shrimp, and avocado in a red wine sauce, their sole--not filet, you get the whole fish--a la meuniere, with white wine and butter, and the salt cod baked with a mild allioli sauce--homemade garlic mayonnaise, doesn't taste at all like the stuff out of a jar. Remei likes the entrecot. They serve sea urchins, for some ungodly reason. Icky poo. Eating sea urchins is common around the Northwest Mediterranean, from Cartagena around to Palermo. So is eating anything snail-like.

No, I don't get a kickback, nor am I being paid for this here advertisement. The folks who run the place are ace, though, and deserve to get a little more business. Maybe they'd open up a couple of more nights a week or something.