The eggplant," Mercedes said, spearing a lightly fried slice, "is a very erotic vegetable." In the typical Andalusian way, she drew out the word for "eggplant"--berenjena--so that it twirled fluidly around on her tongue, doing a little flamenco dance.
The eggplant wasn't the only thing looking sensual. We were standing, surrounded by a noisy crowd, at the bar of the Casablanca tapas restaurant, in the center of Seville. Spread out in front of us, like a cocktail party gone haywire, was a smorgasbord of the snack-sized dishes that are tapas (a.k.a. anything you don't have to eat with a knife): a plate of white beans (called habas) in a tomato broth, tender pork served with thinly sliced potatoes, squares of acorn-fed Iberian ham anointed with a sheen of pure olive oil, a hearty stew of spinach and chickpeas.
In Spain, where a popular Madrid deli goes by the name of the Museum of Ham, as if pork qualified as a work of art, the exquisite Casablanca buffet wasn't abnormal. Mercedes was justified in her enthusiasm. In fact, the Sevillians' passion for food was the reason I had come to the Andalusian capital, 334 miles south of Madrid. Determined to spend a long weekend following two natives from one tapas bar to another, I had already been lucky. Mercedes, a translator and avid cook, was a friend of a friend, and because Sevillians never travel alone, she had enlisted her pal Pablo, a literature professor and fervent gourmet. It was Friday night, and after our warm-up at the Casablanca, we were eager to kick off our tapathlon. The only question was where to begin.
"Most Sevillians don't really narrow it down to one tapas bar," Pablo said. "We go to five or six in a night, because everyone has a favorite, and we meet different friends at each."
"It's like a dance," Mercedes proposed. Hoping to avert an involved debate, I suggested we start at Cervecería Giralda, in the heart of the time-warped neighborhood of Barrio de Santa Cruz.
Like many old-school tapas bars, Giralda is so intimate (read puny) that it was hard to imagine where the food was coming from, unless the chef were bent over an Easy-Bake oven. An arched wall that was originally part of a medieval Moorish bathhouse contributes to its historic ambiance. And our waiter had perfected the exaggerated eye rolling and brusque demeanor of a New York deli clerk while retaining the soft sentimentality of, well, a New York deli clerk ("You don't like it?" "No te gusta?" he asked mournfully--doing a hirsute, baritone impersonation of my mother--when, mysteriously, we were unable to finish our ninth dish).
