All we really wanted was a spot of tapas. We'd eaten well, treated to lunch at the Ritz by a charming hostess, and anything substantial in the evening would have left us open to the charge of sheer greed.
So we nipped into a cosy little restaurant called Marisqueria, off the Plaza Puerta del Sol in the heart of Madrid. A dozen oysters for €10, it said on the window display, provided you slid them down your throat in the bar. Surely everything else would be reasonably priced, too.
First mistake? To find the bar a little full and climb the stairs to the more, well, restaurantish area of the restaurant. Second? To order, pretty much by accident, what turned out to be the most expensive item on the menu, perhaps the only expensive item on the menu.
We tried to explain to the waiter that we just wanted a plate of langoustines. He pointed to a line on the menu that started with shrimps and ended with a price of €16. No langoustines, so we asked for some to be served as an extra.
I know langoustines are not cheap, unless you buy those tiny frozen ones from Morrisons. But since we wanted only one serving between two, and chose a bottle of the the basic house white, we were expecting a fairly modest bill. What we were not expecting was for la dolorosa to be quite so dolorous. It came to a whopping €206.
It is not entirely clear at what point of the ordering process the misunderstanding occurred.
But the waiter thought we had asked for the seafood grill, and that was a catch that weighed in at €144 per kg. And since we wanted two langoustines each, not one, that took us up to 1.3kg.
We had what is shown in the photograph. Shrimps and prawns of various kinds, plus those 18 carat langoustines. It was fairly enjoyable, though greasy and certainly nothing special and certainly, certainly, certainly not worth any kind of €187 let alone a near-parity-with-the-pound €187 (€10 more for one dish, that is to say, than the cost of that three-course lunch for three at the Ritz).
If writing about it offers any therapeutic benefit, I should be feeling better soon, since I have already given an account of my costly evening out in The National.
There, as here, I point no accusing finger at the restaurant or waiter. It would require an advanced weakness for cynicism to think we were deliberately hoodwinked. We thought we were ordering one thing, the waiter thought we were pushing the boat out for something else entirely. He'd even pointed to the photograph reproduced grainily above; more fool us for thinking that little lot was just a plate of shrimps.
But if ever I return to the Marisqueria, it will be to stay in the bar, however crowded, and pretend I like oysters after all.
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