Getting Kinky With Spanish Food

During the days leading up to the wedding, a lot of my friends asked me what our favourite activity as a couple was. The weighing scale, the credit card bill and an entire hard disk full of pictures would prove it – we love eating together.
Though no relationship guru told us to shake things up or spice up our lives, an opportunity to get a little kinky with our favourite activity presented itself and I willingly said yes, while he hesitantly agreed to go along. Arola, the trendy Spanish restaurant at JW Mariott, was hosting a blind-tasting of Spanish food, under the watchful eyes of the Michelin star wielding chef Sergi Arola who also lends his name to the restaurant.

I can almost sense the husband’s trepidation as we take our places at the table, and he lays his eyes on the plastic-wrapped blind set down strategically next to our cutlery. The fact that the chef checks if we’re ok with monkey meat, fish eye soup and other such “exotic” ingredients doesn’t help. Even so, we unfold the blinds and temporarily lose one sense to enhance the other. The chef explains that he needs us to not see food to take us back to the primitive connection between scent and taste. Ok! Then. Blindfolded, we struggle to find our glasses, we struggle to place them back in their place. I am not quite sure how an entire meal is going to be handled, but there was this sense of excitement, of knowing what something smells like but not knowing what it looks like. The first course arrives

and a warm hand guides me to a warm plate of something fried. One can’t miss the scent of fried potato, the one that makes your tummy rumble. Patatas Bravas, warm, with a bit of garlic aioli.

What makes the whole experience fun, is the fact that you use touch to figure out the temperature, the textures, the shapes of what you’re about to eat. Normally, you take these things for granted, but with your eyes closed, you experience them, you get curious about them, and that is something that makes the food absolutely memorable.

When you’re told the next course is a dessert and you sip a velvety Gazpacho, you’re hit with delight. The visual delight of something dressed up to make your mouth water, is always welcome, but to be seduced by an aroma, to be tickled by the texture, is just worth the fork poking your cheek or a piece of chicken dropped in your lap.

I do not know how the chicken wings, so tender that I couldn’t guess it was chicken, or the Baby Pork looked like. But I remember the aroma, I remember the delight of dissecting the hidden flavors. And for that this that the experience can be rated as one of the most memorable meals we’ve enjoyed as a couple.

The sweet ending was a Catalan Pudding with a hint of citrus. As the blinds came off, you felt refreshed. Of course, I felt a bit peckish because of eating yummy khaana that I hadn’t seen, but it was all in the head.