Food in Madrid

Living in London, I rarely eat seafood anymore as it tends to be quite expensive and not very good, but being half Italian I am constantly craving all the seafood in the world, especially if it's cooked in a Mediterranian style. Well Madrid fulfilled all those cravings!

1€ tapas at the mercado de san Miguel

           
Eating out in Madrid is really really cheap. Ok not as cheap as Hong Kong's $13 congee or noodles, but for Western Europe, it's cheap, especially in comparison to Italy who is essentially Spain's long lost brother. In many of the cafes/restaurants they had lunch deals for 10€ which included an appetizer, main course, dessert and a drink. The food wasn't that great in these places and tended to be quite basic (salads, paella, soup for appetizers. Chicken escalopes, fried fish or steaks for mains and then flan, ice cream or store bought mousses for dessert), but it was still a good meal, and a very good price.

At one of these restaurants.

While wandering around town one day, we stumbled upon this market and obviously ran in with our mouths open and wallets in hand! Little did we know that the Mercado de San miguel is actually a very famous market and one of the to dos of Madrid.

We got there at around 6pm so everyone was drinking wine or cocktails and eating tapas.

I then saw a stall with a Mexican woman, happily drinking wine and selling these things. My friend then told me that they were called gulas and were basically just thin strands of marinated pollack and that they are AMAZING. It was 2€ for one of these and you could have it normally, with mushrooms or with shrimp (I chose the one with shrimp obviously) and then you could drizzle either garlic or chilli olive oil on it. It was so good. So worth it!

I really wanted to get a pulpo a la gallega tapas here for 1€ but unfortunately the lady was taking way too long with the customer before me and I got some sort of cod thing which was really good as well.

Chocolate sculpture - whats not to love!

There was an ice cream stall in the market with some really cool flavours such as violet, meringue and dulce de leche. I tried the violet one as I love anything violet flavoured but sadly i wasn't in the mood for ice-cream.

How could we be in Spain without a churros store?

Churros would have been an awesome snack after that tapas, but we had free churros every morning at the hostel so I could've done without!

There were so many different kinds of pastries, everything just looked SO delicious!!! 

And the wines and cocktails available also looked fantastic.

Caramalized onions and goat cheese tapas anyone??

Of course one night we went for proper tapas at a tapas bar with drinks and everything but that will be coming up very soon in my post about clubbing in Madrid. 

And of course our Madrid trip would not have been complete without the mandatory paella (or 4). This cost me 10€ which is not bad at all. I went for my favourite squid ink paella and it tasted like childhood. Good times!

                                                                        xx Vagabond Girl

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