A Late Dinner: Discovering the Food of Spain

Traveling from the coasts of Spain to the agricultural interior and the cuisine-crazy cities of San Sebastian, Barcelona and Madrid, British-born food journalist Richardson (a 15-year resident of Spain) achieves ably his goal of ""hunting down the people and landscapes that had shaped the eating habits of the nation"" by ""workinging from the outside in, as I had gotten to know the country in the first place."" In each section, Richardson (Indulgance: Around the World in Search of Chocolate) visits a restaurant of renown and converses with its chef, revealing the evolution of Spanish food from garlic-heavy infusions to the current, bold trend toward wily deconstruction of familiar dishes. Richardson also attends to home-cooked Spanish food, discovering genuine paella and the majestic olive oil of Spain's interior, and remaining fearless in the face of such dishes as a Catalonia soup ""from which various ingredients could be seen to emerge as from a swamp: a bird's leg, a sausage, the piece of cod looking like a dirty iceberg."" Spain is a big country with many food traditions, and while Richardson goes admirably in-depth on a number of topics, his scope is outsized; a divide-and-conquer approach-narrower focus, multiple volumes-might have proved more satisfying.