Spring Reflections

It’s spring, a time of new beginnings, but also a time to reflect about past seasons. Having been married 34 years, we have a few seasons by now to reflect upon. We realized tonight over dinner at one of our favorite restaurants – Devotay in Iowa City – that one thing we’ve never done intentionally is recount our favorite dining experiences. Those who know us know that Chuck is the foodophile, but for a person who grew up preferring peanut butter and dill pickle sandwiches over most other kinds of sustenance, Suzanne does fairly well at speaking foodie. So we’re going to take a few posts to recount our top ten dining experiences, but for tonight, we’ll focus on a meal we had a little over four years ago.

Here’s Chuck’s recollection:

In the category of most amazing meals shared with the one I love, ranking in the top 10 without question is the tapas meal Suzanne and I experienced at Jacinto’s in Gaucin, Spain. Gaucin is one of the quant “White Towns” of Andalucía. We traveled to Spain with some dear friends for our 30^th wedding anniversary.

After exploring the outlying area on New Year’s Day we arrived back in Gaucin expecting to find some place to have a late supper (early supper by Spanish standards). After walking the narrow streets for a considerable time without discovering anything open, enduring the distain of some local revelers, and feeling the blood sugars drop while the lack of food frustration rose, we discovered ( I discovered) tapas nirvana: Jacinto’s.

With no sign to suggest that it was an eating establishment and a front door that was more like stepping through someone’s front window, we entered the sanctum sanctorum sheltering jamon Serrano, aceitunas, and manchego cheese.

It should be noted at this juncture in the story that our co-travelers were vegetarians and Jacinto’s had hanging from it walls copious amounts of air dried porcine hind quarters. At that particular moment I wasn’t focused on their epicurean sensibilities, I was too entranced with what I had discovered to be the quintessential tapas eatery. We stayed.

Sue’s aside: Everyone who knows Chuck knows that he’s as easy going as they come. I have to say, though, that on this night, and for the first time in our then 30 years of marriage, I saw Chuck come close to having a temper tantrum – after I insisted to him, sotto voce, that we find another restaurant that wasn’t so…meat oriented. He wasn’t having it. He was hungry; he was, indeed, entranced.  

Back to Chuck’s recollection: Food must be a universal language. None of us spoke Spanish (European Spanish with a lisp) well enough to communicate that we needed sustenance immediately, however, I was able to greet Jacinto and feebly began pointing to various raw delicacies residing in his counter top cooler and displayed from his ceiling. With the calm assurance of the wisest Jedi food master Jacinto began to create.

Mussels, mushrooms, shrimp, Spanish ham, olives, and a myriad of other common ingredients were transformed both linguistically and delectably into an indescribable feast that satiated my soul.

At the completion of this epicurean epiphany Jacinto humbly came to our table to place his last offering in front of us: a simple palate pleaser of walnuts, soft cheese, and honey. It was then that he smiled his first smile of the night. I’m still smiling.

Sue’s memory: And I’m still smiling about the way our good friends rolled with Chuck’s insistence that we stay, in spite of the myriad ham hocks dangling everywhere from the ceiling. They found some fish and veggies to eat and let Chuck have his way with all that meat. “You’ve found your avatar,” they said to him – our good-natured, gracious friends. And when they visited Italy a few years later, they sent us a postcard with – you guessed it – a large ham on the front.