Cheesy potatoes and a fire dance

No one does American food like...Spain?

Tortosa, Spain

We found it at a bar in Spain. We showed up late – even though 9:30 p.m. is considered early by Spanish dinner standards – but already the town’s handful of restaurants were full. There were no tables left in the park either, and we had to wait for a group to leave before all ten of us could descend on their table and chairs. It’s not what I was expecting to eat that night, but wow, was it good.

It was the best incarnation of American food I’ve ever tasted.

I don’t speak Spanish (which is irrelevant, because the menu was in Catalan) so I didn’t have much to do with the ordering. The locals among us handled that in record time. We were seated at a long table on the sidewalk on a humid and rainy evening at the end of August in Tortosa, a Catalonian village about an hour outside of Barcelona. It was the village’s largest festival weekend and families and young people were milling about on the closed road.

Soon enough, the server came out of the kitchen across the street carrying the food: One large plate of nachos covered in tangy, tender pulled pork, mozzarella sticks breaded and fried, golden brown croquetas (deep-fried mashed potatoes), two-bite sandwiches on crusty rolls, and patates braves, or baked potatoes covered in a unctuous, spicy, and suspiciously orange cheese sauce.

While most of these dishes have roots in Spanish culture or European cuisine more generally, looking at the pile of salty, tan finger foods in front of me, I instantly felt nostalgic for fairs, strip malls, and my high school cafeteria.

Everything about it felt American, but despite being fried and cheesy, none of it was heavy, greasy, or chemical-tasting. There was a genuine flavor to every dish which left me feeling as though I had stumbled upon the rare but not-yet-extinct predecessor of American bar food. 

It was dark out and for once I didn’t take a single picture. While I used a toothpick to spearfish the patates braves out from under the cheese, I was busy chatting with some of my new Catalonian acquaintances: A pilot explaining how RyanAir is so cheap they actually make new pilots pay to get flying hours with them, and a sustainability major who would later throw soda bottles into the bushes claiming that recycling is worth nothing given the pollution output of China.

We had come to Tortosa for an event called Festes de la Cinta, a weekend celebrating the town’s patron saint Verge de la Cinta (Virgin of the Ribbon). During the day, the town organized team competitions like tug of war and a paella cook-off, and at night, everyone headed to the plaza for open-air concerts and DJ sets that lasted into the early hours of the morning.

On the particular evening of the glorious junk food dinner, we had arrived in time for el Correfoc – the fire dance. The parade consisted of demonic goat or serpent-like costumes worn by one or more people with other participants running around setting off roman candle fireworks attached to the costume. Other performers encircled them and lit fireworks at the end of long poles which they twirled around spraying sparks into the air.

Then the dancers entered the fray. Townspeople young and old were dressed in straw hats and long sleeves and pants to avoid being burned while they gleefully jigged under the fireworks. The flame-spinners would occasionally throw some sparks in their direction and the dancers would jump out of the way, laughing with delight.

We decided to leave our table to get a closer look but soon found ourselves in a tight spot on the sidewalk between a stone barrier and the ever-closer spark spinners. For a while, I held my jacket in front of my face to avoid getting burned, but the fun quickly became a bit frightening and we decided to move along.

Later that evening we decided to go to the DJ set organized by the town. It had been threatening to rain all day, so the event was moved into a giant gymnasium on the outskirts of the village. Being the event of the year, the place was packed – largely by young people rolling around shopping carts transformed into beer coolers, but also by a healthy number of parents, children, and older folks. We danced until around 3 a.m. when the end of the music happened to coincide with an intense thunderstorm. All the partygoers were forced to run through the rain and we left screaming and holding our jackets over our heads as we splashed through giant puddles trying to find our car at the other end of an enormous parking lot.

It was all made better the next day, when we hauled ourselves out of bed at 11 and drove to the Ebro delta, one of Spain's most prized rice-growing regions. While the region has been under threat in recent years due to flooding and climate change, there are still a number of restaurants that serve the local rice, which has a round grain, perfect for paella. 

Our reservation was at noon (which is the equivalent of eating lunch at 10 a.m. in the U.S.) but the restaurant was already packed. We were sent a few seafood starters, which were delicious, but the seafood paella was the star of the show. I was also introduced to Fideuà – a similar concept made with small bits of pasta instead of rice. Someone joked that in the kitchen, the chefs were cracking spaghetti into tiny pieces in a way that would make Italians cry. We finished the meal with a cheese flan topped with berry compote and left the restaurant ready for a siesta.