One of the qualities of Spanish city life overall that strikes an American is the way people live large chunks of their lives on the street – sitting at tables in front of cafés, taking perfunctory walks in the evening with their family, etc. Majorca, as independentist graffitti shouts loudly on walls around the island, is not Spain; and at least in this respect, the tagging is pretty dead on. When St. Paul wrote that no man is an island, I think he was ignorant of island residents themselves, or at least of residents of this particular island, where insularity seems to have the effect of turning people in on themselves to a certain degree. In comparison to, say, Madrid, Palma’s residents tend to keep more indoors.

That is not to say, though, that Palma lacks street life. Here and there one finds streets that seem to operate as pedestrian highways, major arteries directing the flow of foot traffic from one neighborhood to the other. One of the highways that I frequently employ is Via Sindicat, a comparatively straight street that stems from what was a gate in the medieval city walls, cutting through the maze of narrow alleys into the center of the old city.

I find myself walking up and down this thoroughfare rather frequently, because I live not too far beyond the one-time gate to the old city in Palma’s eixample, ‘enlargement’, which sprouted up after the destruction of its city walls. Via Sindicat is the way I get to friends’ apartments, central shops and nearly all of my favorite hangouts in the city. A large part of my experience on Via Sindicat is the brisk, still-enebriated walk home from one place or another in the wee hours of the morning, dodging handsy prostitutes who aggressively push their product along the way. Even at that ungodly hour, Via Sindicat is a commercial center.

During the day, Via Sindicat is a haven of decidedly more legitimate commerce. The street is lined up and down with shops selling clothes, shoes, toys, electronics, what-have-you. It is also the street on which the offices of two of the principal political parties – the Spanish Socialist Workers Party and the regionalist Unió Mallorquina – are located. Locals and tourists alike walk its length in droves, window shopping and providing periodic obstacles for those who are briskly on their way elsewhere.

On a hot day, all these pedestrians needs something to cool themselves down: Enter the granissat. ‘Granissat’ could be translated equally as ‘slushy’ or ‘ice’, and in its texture and mode of production it definitely resembles what you can find at your local 7-11 back Stateside; however, granissats are by no means an imported or particularly new concept here on the island.

The granissat is traditionally flavored by the citrus fruits and almonds that are grown on the island. Nowadays these flavors are complemented frequently with newer flavors, such as mango, cola, or the apparently international conundrum of blue raspberry. Of these newer imports, the majority are presented with colors so hyperreal that it is obvious they’ve been dyed - not that this diminishes their tastiness or their capacity for refreshment. The basics, though, are still the basics, and the basics are good.

Towards the top of Via Sindicat one finds Gelats i Granissats Rosaleda (Rosaleda Ice Cream and Slushies), a diminutive storefront where one can stop for cold, delicious sustenance for a euro or two. My absolute favorite is their ametla (almond), though their lemon does not disappoint. The almond granissat is perfect. It is sweet and creamy, but not so much that it diminishes its own refreshment. In the cupful of crushed ice you can discern flecks of the almonds that were themselves crushed to give you this masterpiece. The lemon granissat is as it should be: tart, sweet, and fresh. I have found flecks of zest in other lemon granissats; not so on Via Sindicat, but no matter - it’s still good.

When I last went to Gelats i Granissats Rosaleda with my roommates, we also sampled the mango and cola granissats, which were essentially as expected. There was nothing wrong with them, but nothing particularly wonderful about them either. The mango may or may have not been made from fresh mangos; the cola, well, was indistinct from any other cola-flavored product you could imagine.

After our stop at Gelats i Granissats Rosaleda we continued on our way down Sindicat to do some shopping. Drink up, cool down, keep walking. Fins la pròxima.

Gelats i Granissats Rosaleda
Via Sindicat, 45
07002 Palma, Spain

In my lifetime there have been few stretches of the day as desolate as closing time at the Unit 2 Dining Commons. Less than year before it was torn down as part UC Berkeley’s dorm overhaul, I was finishing off a late dinner (composed mostly of breakfast cereal and chocolate pudding), by my lonesome, in a corner of the cafeteria’s west wing.

The first notes to “Pretty Young Thing” floated in through the DC speakers. I sat upright, waiting for the bassline to make its entry, eyes darting around to see if any other college freshmen were ready for the funk. Not a single cell moved itself from the sparsely populated dining tables, students continuing to haphazardly shovel the culinary equivalent of talk radio into their free refill engorged mouths.

I lowered my eyes and was about to get up for seconds on pudding when a worn, warm and altogether loving voice cried out softly, “Michael! Ohhh, Michael… ”

I raised my head to see the janitor, a black man just past middle age, just starting his cleanup shift, mopping up the floor of the DC service aisle to the rhythms of truly perfect pop music.

This was the most instructive experience of my university education.

Long live the King.

With James phoning in foodism from Budapest and Stephen operating as a Spain mainstay, I’ve been feeling a little abroad-sick myself, thinking about my adventures in Russia and all of the culinary misadventures I had without the proper photo documentation.

Fortunately, a comrade of mine with whom I shared many of those adventures is spending the summer back in Moscow. Natalia is a photography student at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco and while she’s fairly new to the world of food art, she graciously agreed to extend her photo mongering to include mealtime in Mother Russia. During her summer stay, she will be sending me pictures of our old haunts. I look forward to sharing her photos and my fond memories of Russian edible life with The Eaten Path - starting today.

If you like her style, please visit Natalia Melikova’s virtual portfolio on behance.net.

Teremok is a popular chain of blini restaurants and a favorite snack source for anyone with a starchy sweet tooth (Natasha the photographer not excluded). The blin - or blintz - is Eastern Europe’s answer to France’s crepe, a permanent culinary prisoner of the Napoleonic War and a Russian staple. While blini are easy to make at home, Teremok has managed to successfully market the fast food blin to rushin’ Russians everywhere.

Teremok’s success is no surprise to me. During my stay in Moscow, I quickly learned what it meant to be a full-time pedestrian. Central Moscow is a continuous street fair; metro stations and high traffic streets are infested by kiosks like barnacles during low tide. Wherever I happened to be heading, beverages, snacks, newspapers and cigarettes were always a few steps and a few rubles away. This meant I always had a Baltika beer in my hand, but it also meant that half of my meals were street food, and while my favorite was Moscow-style shawarma and I made too many drunken, homebound stops at Stardog!s, Teremok was the breakfast treat that never failed to interrupt my brisk morning stride.

The orange-dominant Teremok kiosks and restaurants are visually similar to Sixties architecture and Soviet cartoons. I remember peering up into the caged boxes on Tverskaya, making eye contact with the scowling blond women who are sometimes 16 and sometimes 90, and nervously trying to pronounce “with smoked salmon” correctly to avoid the rolling of their pretty blue eyes. Then, once my order was finally translated, I would count out exact change (to avoid further eye rolling), pay and watch my blin cook on the non-stick helicopter pad.

I remember those mornings well. After stopping at Teremok by the Belorusskaya metro station, I still had a long way to class, so I often walked those next few blocks holding the blin, wrapped in foil and wax paper, with one corner exposed, waiting for it to cool down enough to eat while dodging stern, quick-stepping Muscovites. It was not unlike returning to my seat after visiting the concession stands at a ballgame, if the ballgame was a soccer match on the verge of a riot in zero degree weather.

They’re delicious. Thinner than pancakes and thicker than most blintzes, one Teremok blin fills you up but doesn’t overwhelm you with starchiness. The menu offers sweet and savory choices, from chocolate or jam to ham and cheese or mushroom, such sides as kasha or salad, and such beverages as coffee or kvass. My favorite order at Teremok was a sour cream blin and a plastic bottle of Medovukha, Russian mead with 5% alcohol content.

The sour cream blin has a distinctly Russian taste (as do all things covered in sour cream that don’t involve tortillas or beans). Other menu items like caviar and zelyonie (dill mixed with other herbs) drive home the point that Teremok is a Russian institution. In a country where the three largest fast food chains - KFC, McDonalds and Sbarro - aren’t local, Teremok is Russia’s corporate champion. Fortunately, business is booming and the Teremok brand is strengthening. The product of Russia’s Pepsi Generation is racing to catch up with the rest of the capitalist world, slapping a singular logo to an everyday breakfast comfort and finding very little competition in the post-Soviet market vacuum. In 2009’s Moscow, Teremok is becoming less of a sidewalk snack, popping up more as a restaurant and food court option at malls and subterranean hubs. In the coming years, who knows: Maybe the Teremok logo will find its way to America one day. I hope so; after all, I am a fan.

I’ve lived in Majorca for a little over nine months now. In my relatively short time here I’ve come to know a lot of details about the island, meet a lot of people, see and experience what it is like to live in a place of intense physical beauty – a beauty which attracts the millions of visitors the island receives each year, mostly Germans and British, who are responsible both for lifting the island out of persistent poverty and for slowly eating away at the natural and cultural beauty that attracts them here in the first place. If I’ve learned anything about Majorca in these nine months, it’s that it’s complicated. There are a lot of competing identities, changing customs and mores and levels of optimism, pessimism and resignation about the island’s future.

In the midst of this hangs sobrassada, a resilient symbol of Majorca’s centuries of autarky and knack for creating powerful impressions from the fruits of one’s own labor.

Sobrassada is a sausage. The name is cognate to the English word “suppressed,” in an apparent reference to the packing of the sausage inside its casing. This generic term passed into Catalan from Italian, where “soppressata” refers unspecifically to sausages made in this region or that, a generic word for generic product. Sobrassada mallorquina, however, is far from generic.

Sobrassada is a pork sausage. The consensus is that the best is made from porcs negres (black pigs), which feed exclusively on acorns. The meat is chopped and mixed with salt, paprika and perhaps more – depending on whose padrina’s (grandma’s) recipe you’re using – until a creamy, powerfully red paste is formed. This paste is then stuffed into a casing, for which no attempt is made to cloak its colonic origins. A string is tied around the product and it is left to hang. The other ingredients effectively cook and preserve the meat, and the finished product retains both the creamy texture and the flavor of all its component ingredients.

It’s kind of gross, to be honest. I first tried sobrassada as a pizza topping; the meat was in small pieces, melting atop a generic cheese pie. That might have been a good introduction; I could appreciate the strength and depth of flavor without experiencing the grossness of its original form. I mean, I’m an adventurous eater, but the sight of creamy red meat coming out of what is obviously a long intenstine is for very few people a pleasant sight. I’ve since gotten over that. I now proudly buy whole sobrassades to keep in the pantry, in open air at room temperature. Sobrassada is a product made by those-lacking-refrigeration for those-lacking-refrigeration.

The best way to experience sobrassada, or at least the most mallorquí way, is with pa amb oli. Pa amb oli is the universal Majorcan dish – a basic exposition of the staples of Majorcan food. The name means, simply, “bread with oil,” which fails to convey the fact that any standard pa amb oli is also served with tomato. So, pa amb oli is essentially the combination of three foods – pa moreno (an unsalted brown bread), olive oil and tomato. Beyond this one can and does add any of a myriad of ingredients, be it sobrassada, cuixot (air-dried ham, sliced thinly, reminiscent of prosciutto), cheese, seafood or any other fruit of the earth that strikes one’s fancy.

This past weekend I joined some friends on a drive to the northwest corner of Majorca, a place where the Tramuntana mountain range, which constitutes a dramatic spine along the entire north coast of the island, drops precipitously into the sea. We visited the town of Pollença, close to which lies Cala Sant Vicenç (Saint Vincent’s Cove), a small and idyllic beach surrounded by rocky cliffs. After some too-pretty-for-words swimming and snorkeling, we hopped in the car and drove down the coast.

We ended up at Alcúdia, a picturesque town still guarded by walls built during the time the island was ruled by Arabs. Not very far from the town is the site of where the Romans built their capital on the island. We parked outside the walls and walked into the center of town through the medieval gates and up the carrer major (main street). We sat at a table outside of Ca’n Fuat, just off the main square, and I ordered a pa amb oli de sobrassada.

Ca’n Fuat makes its own sobrassada. This is not much of a distinction on Majorca, but Ca’n Fuat makes it very well. They also make a spectacular pa amb oli. Given such an aggressively simple dish, the spectacle lies in the ingredients and the presentation, and Ca’n Fuat scores highly on both counts. The dish is two slices of pa moreno with olive oil and some salt – the first with slices of sobrassada, and the second with slices of tomato, sprinkled with capers.

The sobrassada is, as it should be, rich and pungent. It has the texture and a little of the flavor of raw meat, marinated in copious spices and left to hang in the air. The pa moreno is tough and bland, but it works perfectly in this combination. The tomatoes are fresh and the capers have a salty acidity that cuts the sobrassada’s meatiness perfectly. I think the capers were what pushed this particular pa amb oli over the top – I had associated capers mostly with smoked fish and bagels, and never thought much of them. Now I feel like I know what they’re supposed to do.

After the meal we hit up another beach as the sun was going down, then hit the road back through the middle of the island to Palma. Yes, Majorca is complicated, but when it works this well, no questions need be asked - except, perhaps, to inquire about seconds. Fins la pròxima.

Ca’n Fuat
Carrer Major 1
07400, Alcúdia, Spain

My photo of Jodie’s grits is now part of an iPhone app called “Kiss My Grits!”
Icon representation is one small step for man, but one large step for man-grits relations.

Many thanks to Ben of Tesly for requesting permission and attributing accordingly on the app page.

By the time we stopped to sit down, the hazy weekday afternoon had already begun to falter. The sun was still beaming down on Budapest, but midday was well done. We’d been walking through and around Városliget, Budapest’s central city park, for almost two hours. The directions we’d been given to the biergarten of our dreams were utterly, thirstily wrong. Amit sipped from a Coke bottle and reminded me that we were due for dinner in three hours. I was steeling myself to admit chowhounding defeat and eat the very next thing I saw wrapped in a bun when I looked up and noticed the Lángos sign down the road.

There are few things in this city more impressive than Lángos. This, of course, comes from a man whose love for lamb on a stick exceeds his love for his own mother. Still, it’s a claim I would challenge any hungry visitor to unseat. Lángos is to Budapest as pizza is to New York, as hot dogs are to Chicago and as a great taco al pastor is to Los Angeles. It’s what sandwiches are to white people (alternatively, it’s what Pho is to Asians). It’s the common currency of taste, the savor of the city that every person knows and recommends, the emotionally ingrained bite that evokes solemn smiles and hushed directions to the best lángos stand in the city from the most unassuming of citizen-consumers.

Physically speaking: Lángos (”Lahn-Gohsh”) is a giant, savory yeast doughnut, deep fried, sprinkled with garlic powder, pasted with sour cream and topped with whatever your drunk-out-of-your-3:00-a.m. mind can muster.

It was fortunate for us that Lángos is better experienced sober and starving, because the stand on the southwestern edge of the city park had quite a way with dough. The bread was freshly fried and hot to the touch. Its edges upheld a magnificent, airy crunch. Its innards were fluffy and porous, landing somewhere between a funnel cake and a fresh raised doughnut. Amit’s garlic, sour cream and cheese Lángos was crispy, chewy and satisfyingly rich without becoming too much of a burden for the open appetite to bear (I wouldn’t wish it upon the full stomach of even my greatest enemy). My garlic and ham Lángos, moist, meaty and savory, was just as filling without the richness of cheese and cream. It was, without a doubt, the best single meal of our entire week in Budapest.

It didn’t, however, stop us from seeking out even better Lángos. Later that week, while stopping by the visiting Czech Beer Festival, I discovered that giant savory doughnuts can also be deep fried in animal fat.

This time around, I went the whole 82.296 decimeters: I asked for my lard enlivened Lángos with sour cream, then placed a side order for a particularly seemly sauerkraut and piled pickled cabbage atop the monstrous hunk of fried dough. The resulting behemoth of fats and flavors was admittedly not as delicious as the fresh, everyday Lángos from the roadside stand; nevertheless, it was a behemoth. The edges were crunchier, the innards were chewier, the greasy taste of the dough was heartier, and the tart, peppery combination of sauerkraut and sour cream cut through the bready heaviness of the Lángos so well that, before I knew it, I had eaten enough to feed a pre-medieval Magyar tribe.

On the last morning of our trip, we had left more than enough instances of Lángos untouched to justify another trip to the Hungarian capital. I can see the itinerary now: a breakfast of pastries, fruit and coffee, lunch at Kádár and a quick trip to the bathhouse before shuffling off to try Lángos at a different farmer’s market on every day of the week. A light dinner wherever we can find it. Scotch and cigars wherever we can enjoy them. A round of unicum and a round of beers wherever they’ll have us. That is a summer day.

It’s 11:00 am. June weather in Budapest is brilliant: mid-seventies, a cool breeze along the Danube, the sun shining down through a blanket of fluff, as if waiting for a chance to pummel the city with two scoops of Hungarian raisins. We stroll up along the west bank of the river to Batthyány Tér, where old men idle on city benches and city buses idle on the edge of the square, shifting fixtures of Budapest’s undeniably quaint afternoon townscape.

We grab a quick cup of coffee at the metro station concourse and wait for the green and white HÉV train to arrive. We’re headed north, to the suburbs of Budapest, to Romai, a popular retreat from the cobbled, historicized and renovated corridors of central Buda and Pest. The riverbank of Romai, we’re told, is an idyllic spot for relaxation and simple food, neither of which are enemies to me. It’s a fifteen minute ride towards Szentendre, a more tourism oriented river town to the north of the city, to our light rail stop near the city border.

We step off the train and walk toward the coast. There’s no obvious path for the foreigner to follow, despite claims by our new friends that we should know exactly where to go. We’re in the thick of the Budapest suburbs, an alluring improvement over the flat-earth Los Angeles suburbs that nurtured me through childhood. Public space here is lush and blooming. Private homes are small, modern and fully integrated into the greenery around them. Small grocery stores and cafes dot the small roads and trails that connect everything in an atmosphere of pure contentment.

We work our way west until we see the water. The view is indeed idyllic, in a humble, understated way. Romai Part definitely wouldn’t cut it as a full fledged tourist attraction, but as a destination for locals looking to break off from city life and have a beer on the grass, it’s everything I could want. Tracks of beaten and eroded earth mark the wakes of boats wheeled down from their owners’ riverside homes. Bars, cafes and fry shops perch themselves on the upper bank, many offering patios for their customers to eat and drink along the water. Plastic chairs and inoperable foosball tables are the highlights of the waterfront, eclipsed only by the pervasive aroma of freshly fried fish.

After a couple of beers, we place our order for hekk: Hungarian whiting filet, served deep fried on the bone with chips and a fistful of pickles. The floured and deep fried fish is stunning. Its thin outer layer of breading and skin is the perfect consistency. The meat is tender, flaky and plentiful without a hint of dryness.

The only problem with our hekk is that it seems to know only one note of flavor: salt, and plenty of it. What would have been a perfect lunch is marred by over salting, which is a shame considering how delicious the fish would be on its own, with just a dash of salt, a sprinkle of pepper and a splash of pickled Hungarian paprika. Amit, unable to finish his food, considers his dish to be a “salt accident.” I consider mine a cultural inflection of taste, not too different from seeing soul food regulars tumble godly amounts of salt onto their greens during the weekday lunch break. I clean my plate and down my wine, eager to try the next strip of hekk for comparison but too full to properly function. Heads abuzz with sodium overdose, we set out for the scenic stroll back towards the train station.

Comrades,

I’m glad to announce that The Eaten Path will continue its expansion this week with the addition of its first overseas correspondent!

Teacher and general life enthusiast Stephen Shull will be taking up a weekly post, writing for this site every Thursday from his current home of Palma, Spain. For more details on his column, please visit the About page.

Our ultimate goal is to have six writers contributing weekly food columns from six different regions at any given time, offering readers quality stories about food and life all over the world. If you know any insightful writers who would be a good fit for The Eaten Path, please encourage them to get in touch with me.

Stay Hungry!

While Budapest has plenty to offer in the way of tourism and the arts, my only real concern during my week in the city was to eat as much comfort food as possible. I was told upon arrival by several locals that a home cooked meal would be difficult to obtain. This notion may have been misplaced, given that, over the next seven days, I would be invited into strangers’ homes for freshly picked cherries, a classical piano concert, pork sausage from the corner butcher and a poorly made 4:00 a.m. spliff. Nevertheless, for home style food I was directed to a number of smaller restaurants and diners, local favorites that fall outside the purview of restaurant row in the sixth district. None of them failed to please.

First up was Kölöves (stone soup), a classy, artsy restaurant that delivered a megaton of satisfaction in its roasted goose leg. The skin was crisped to the very edge of a char. Paper thin and bursting with flavor, it floated above a nearly melted layer of fat separating it from the dark meat and bone underneath. Biting into the leg released all of its juices into a perfect bite: crisp, oily, tender and meaty… not to mention ridiculously simple. If ever an argument for carnivorous design were to be made, this would be Exhibit A. It would, however, have been incomplete without the equally minimal boiled potatoes and earthy, sweet and sour pickled red cabbage that accompanied the meat in perfect proportion.

Roma, the beautiful patio restaurant that would serve us fried pork brain, offered equally delicious food on the west side of Danube. Its goose leg was a lighter construction, better seasoned and more texturally integrated than its counterpart at Kölöves but lacking the rush of fat and grease that came with its lopsided layers. The accompanying cabbage and potatoes matched in tone, trading in the earthy and heavy for bright, tart flavors.

Roma’s grilled pork with egg noodles came closer to the ideal of comfort food. Tender, slightly seared slices of pork and mushroom, bathed in a paprika anointed meat gravy and topped with sour cream, sat alongside a pile of springy, chewy egg noodles, waiting to be inhaled more than savored. I was all too happy to oblige.

Highest expectations were set for Kádár Étkezde, a legendary lunch diner (lunch, not dinner, is the primary meal in Magyar cuisine) that was recommended by literally every Hungarian local willing to talk to me about serious food. Originally opened by the Kádár family as one of few privately owned dining establishments in Budapest during its Soviet occupation, Kádár today exists in a bit of a time warp.

Each table, dressed in white and red checkers, is furnished with a bottle of seltzer water and a basket of bread, which you take at your leisure and pay for - working within the confines of the honor system - after your meal. Autographed photos and small paintings blanket the walls, attesting to the eatery’s status as the last game in town when it comes to authentically classic Jewish-Hungarian cooking. If that weren’t enough to convince you of Kádár’s home kitchen cred, every item on the first half of the regular menu begins with the words, “boiled beef.”

I had come to Kádár lusting after its mythic solet, a sabbath specialty derived from a traditional Jewish stew (cholent) and served in decidedly unorthodox style by Hungarian restaurants in Budapest. For reasons still to be resolved, I did not have my solet - it joined halászlé and several other Magyar favorites that I somehow managed to fail at eating during my lengthy stay in Budapest.

I did, however, have a meal that made me wish I’d been eating lunch at Kádár on every day of the week. Lecsós Borda, best explained as pork chops grilled with peppers, tomatoes, onions in a sauce that was completely permeated by the smoky musk of bacon, made good on its status as a blue plate special. Sertéspörkölt-Galuska (pork goulash) was unbeatable in its simplicity: It was a stew crafted from no more than five ingredients but cooked so expertly that its flavors (pork, tomato, paprika and onion) were bolder and livelier than anything else on the table. Töltött Paprika (stuffed peppers) were a delight, much like Polish golabki but heartier in flavor and form. Dessert was császármorzsa, a crumbly and chewy bread pudding served with currants, powdered sugar and blissful pond of apricot preserve.

Unexplored territory on the menu included pork stomach, goose wings, a number of cabbage dishes, all that boiled beef and of course the much vaunted solet that had lured me here in the first place. When I make it back to Budapest, Kádár Étkezde will be my first stop and perhaps my only stop until I’ve plumbed the depths of its kitchen. It may not be someone’s personal dining room, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s home enough to miss.

On February 1, 2009, my roommate and I entered a contest. On April 16, 2009, we were declared winners. He received two round trip tickets to Budapest. I received a bag of women’s beauty products. The products were testers.

On June 7, 2009, haggard, hungry, and hopelessly jet lagged, we took a seat in an amorphous cafe bar called Kiadó Kocsma and downed the week’s inaugural shots of Unicum, Hungary’s national liquor. Technically classified as bitters, Unicum is a blinding infusion of herbs and spice into a deep and intense licorice body. Imagine it as Hungary’s hairy, back-handed slap to Germany’s Jägermeister - Unicum is more powerful and more nuanced, with a range of flavors that reaches well beyond the banks of the Danube.

That evening, after an hour of searching for an eatery open on Sundays, we settled into a generic Magyar Étterem (Hungarian restaurant) situated directly across from an international hotel. My expectations for the meal were low, but they changed upon the discovery of fried pork neck on the dinner menu. ORDER PLACED.

The restaurant’s preparation was impeccable. The meatier part of the neck had been sliced, marinated in what seemed like a century of garlic, and fried to a juicy, tender brown. Crowning my plate was a chunk of pork neck bone, a ring of connective tissue and fat that defied my prior understanding of the pig. Texturally, each piece resembled a cube of watermelon flesh that had been drained of its sugars and injected instead with the juices of a ham hock. What looked somewhat akin to pork belly instead yielded firm, crisp, almost crystalline chunks of porous fat that burst with baconated juices at each bite. Accompanied by a clean lager and a salad of sweet, just-pickled cucumbers, my first full meal in Budapest rode dangerously close to perfect.

A few days later, during lunch at local favorite Roma Étterem, we decided to continue our sojourn through the less recognized parts of the pig, leaping past options of stomach and lung for a straight shot at brain. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the smartest decision. Unfortunately, it was a terrible decision. Unfortunately, we couldn’t finish the plate.

It seemed harmless enough on sight: finely breaded, deep fried nuggets laid atop a bed of boiled potatoes in an appealing hue of golden brown. We couldn’t tell by looking at the dish that this had to be one of the worst ways to cook brain - though, to be honest, neither of us has the experience to know what the best way of cooking brain might be. There was nothing particularly unpleasant about its flavor (mild and slightly fishy). The texture of each bite, however, was a challenging blend of second thoughts. I doubt that brain has a crisping point, but Roma’s flash fry left the cerebral innards of each deep fried chunk in an extensive state of goop.

Imaginings of gummy, springy zombie food granting us the strength of the living were laid to waste. It was as if someone had boiled pasta to mush, mixed it with pulverized fat and folded the result into a healthy dollop of cream of mushroom soup and fish oil. Strings and clumps of what could have been muscle popped up from time to time, only to disintegrate into a fine paste. After eating just over half of one lobe, I wondered whether calling it quits would underscore the name of this blog or shame it for seven generations. More pressing was the revelation that, in the orders of the supernatural pig, I would rather be a vampire than a zombie. Well played, Budapest.