Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Seville, Spain~Eslava

Restaurant Eslava in Seville was hands down Mike and my favorite restaurant during out trip to Spain. It was so good that we went there twice in one day! We went there on the same day because we found this restaurant on the last day of our trip. 
Another Travel Tip-If there are a bunch of Michelin stickers on the wall/door next to the restaurant, there is a good chance that the food is wonderful!
We could only read a few words on the menu, so we relied on other restaurant patrons for help.  It was a neat experience, Mike was ordering "Un Chorizo por favor," and we received some glaring looks and were told not to order that and everything else on the menu was WAY better. So, for the first time in our lives we had complete strangers order our food (and the freak out for me was we didn't even know the price of the dishes!)
Solomillo-Pork tenderloin in cream sauce
Spinach casserole with cream sauce
Croquettes
Salmohero-So good. Mike and I are not fans of cold soups (i.e. gazpacho, cream of asparagus soup), but this Spanish version of gazpacho was delicious. It tasted like a creamy cold tomato soup topped with chopped boiled eggs, bacon pieces, and topped with olive oil.  I found out from a friend that the creaminess of the soup is actually from ground bread crumbs.  This soup is definitely worth it for a remake at home!
Olives and almonds. This was the appetizer they start people off with
Blood Sausage-Meh. Mike ate it. It wasn't bad, just different. 
Ortigas (sea anemones).  Our new friends also ordered this dish for us. They asked if we liked seafood and I was like, "sure."  While I was eating this dish, I was mentally checking off all the seafood I knew (nope, not lobster, crab, shrimp, fish, squid, octopus, clams, oysters, uni....). I was a bit disturbed, but kept eating it because hey most fried things taste good.  We went back to our hotel and googled "ortigas" and realized it was sea anemones (it's Nemo's home in "Finding Nemo").
Some kind of sweet salty mushroomy goodness topped with a sunny side up egg. Everyone in the restaurant was ordering this, so as a lemming would do, we ordered it, not knowing what it was.  (that's another restaurant tip-when in doubt and lacking the language skills, if a lot of people are ordering a dish and it looks good,point and order).
Razor Clams.  Mike thought he was ordering me mushrooms, but apparently he ordered me clams. I was not complaining because I like clams and this was the second time in my life that I had razor clams (the other was in Barcelona a couple days prior). 
This was the best sangria I've had in my life. It was probably because it was sweet and tasted like juice. 
Sweet short ribs with potatoes. Mike said that the flavor was similar to char siu. 

At the end of the day the damage was not too bad. I think that our lunch bill was about 25 euros ($42) and our dinner was about 21 euros ($36).  That's including at least 5 tapas for each meal and two alcoholic drinks.  Not too shabby, not too shabby. 

c/Eslava 5
tel. 954 906 568
13.00 – midnight
closed Sunday evening & Monday

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Everything looked Ono! Think of the anemones as the crunchy jellyfish dish that you sometimes get served at a nice Chinese dinner. :). You are both quite adventurous.
M&DT

genkitummy said...

That's true about the jellyfish. Although those anemones were more squishy than crunchy.