Speak, Edulis: San Sebastián’s Bar La Cepa and the Conscious Etching of Sense Memory
Having arrived in Spain a day early this year—to get a leg up on my jet lag and make sure I was available to greet everyone at the airport the next day (a control thing, I guess)—I decided to skip Bilbao and hop on a bus to one of my favorite places on earth: San Sebastián, a little over an hour away.
In one of those fortuitous coincidences, my 19-year-old niece, Alex, happened to be crashing in San Sebastián while on an extended European sojourn at the same time, and, knowing she’d been away from home and family for a close to a year, I decided there was but one choice on what to do on our one evening together: go to Bar La Cepa.
Between my last visit to this gem of an eatery in September 2008 and the moment Alex and I turned the corner along San Sebastián’s Concha toward the city’s Parte Vieja, or old quarter, on that balmy Sunday night just a few weeks ago, my sense memory had probably meandered down these same narrow streets toward La Cepa at least a few dozen times.
My mission: to introduce Alex to two dishes very dear to me : revuelto de gambas (soft scrambled eggs with shrimp) and hongos a la plancha (boletus edulis wild mushrooms cooked on the flat-top).
Here was the rub: As long as I’ve known her—which is to say, all her life—Alex has never been a particularly adventurous eater, with a long-standing aversion to all products of the sea. Following an instinct to keep her social circle to within a few blocks of her crash pad, and on a pilgrim’s budget, she hadn’t really ventured out of her safe zone much—geographically or gastronomically—and had certainly never thought of spend €12 on scrambled eggs.
But being that I was hungry and here for just one night, I didn’t really give her much of a choice.
When our plates arrived, she was tentative at first, but then quietly, methodically, she began to dispatch forkfuls of those buttery, mouth-melty eggs studded with sweet shrimp (I’m told the chef here insists that both eggs and shellfish have to be no more than two days from hen/water), with nearly the same enthusiasm as her uncle, the same incredulous shaking of the head, the same wondering, “how can somethings so simple be so good?”
Then came the wild mushrooms, golden and meaty, salty and autumnal. In the center of the plate sat a tablespoon, in which sat a perfectly poached egg yolk—the idea being, of course, to tear the yolk membrane slightly, and allow the yolk’s runny contents to run fatty rivulets under the mushrooms, to bind boletus to bread when the dipping commenced.
The dipping of the bread, the shaking of our heads, the smiles continued. And then my realization: that, despite her childhood gastronomic prejudices, Alex was both fully conscious of—and entirely surrendering herself to—a completely unexpected moment.
And the fact that I was witnessing, and was in fact responsible for, a moment that would likely carve itself permanently into her own sense memory, whether she realized it or not, well, that too, was one for the notebooks.
Time felt no different. The bartender was annoyed that we ordered something of the flat top just as the cook was about to break down. The couple next to us lit up cigarettes while were still eating.
But something had changed, and maybe she knew it already.
An uncle can hope. And he can remember, too.
November 3rd, 2009 at 9:01 am
Aw man, wish you had posted this a couple months ago. We hit La Cepa about 2 months ago but did not try either of those dishes, which sound wonderful. Of course, La Cepa was great, as was San Sebastian in general.