Dec 05 - “Ahí se come bien”
By Famous words of a dear, close friend who has probably said this sentence more times than there are food places in Gibraltar; and I’m not complaining. As a big-time-food-lover I like nothing more than the advice of a fellow gourmand; especially when my indecisiveness makes me stick to two or three safe bets and a handful of dishes. My problem: I am not scared of trying new things, but I have FOMO. “What if instead of going to Mamma Mia I go to Saffron and missed out on something incredible?” Is what goes through my head every time. But that’s not really a problem; the fact that we have enough to choose from is good. From Italian to Filipino, we’ve got it all but it really feels like we’re missing out on the most basic thing.
I’m sure a lot of you reading this will have been somewhere on holiday (no need to go far or exotic) and sat down for a traditional meal. If there’s one thing I learnt from my time in Italy is that nobody loves Italian food more than the Italians, because for them it’s just food. You know? Now analyse what we have here: A bunch of pubs, a handful of places serving pasta, some places for tapas and raciones, about six or seven places that do great curries and even three places serving authentic cuisine from across the Strait. And between all this English, Italian, Spanish, Indian and Moroccan food (not counting the plenty of other places) there isn’t a single place that does local food.
I know what you’re all thinking. You’re thinking of the big queues at the bottom of Tuckey’s Lane, and you’re right. The Tasty Bite at Tuckey’s and Irish Town really is the only place in Gibraltar serving proper Gibraltarian food. Torta de acelgas, calentita and calabacines rellenos are the reason why people are willing to stand in the hot sun in the summer and the cold rain in the winter for sometimes more than ten minutes until they make it into the cramped little area inside. But is it enough? Can this little three by six shop be enough to represent the cuisine of a whole, culinary-rich city? A few months ago I got a chance to write in The Calentita Press about my experience with food and also mentioned The Tasty Bite, my FOMO pulls me away but my love of local cuisine keeps me keen.
If you know me, and as I mentioned in The Calentita Press, you’ll know I love food. So much so that I’ve even, on countless occasions, considered making a career of it: from spending evenings looking for culinary schools online (that I probably will never go to), to looking for ways to open my own eatery (a lo loco with no experience whatsoever), to thinking about how to cook things at home that I could sell. And it’s all motivated by the simple fact that I don’t feel like local cuisine is properly represented.
Imagine you’re a tourist on a cruise: You’ve stopped in Rome and enjoyed a delicious plate of pasta or a pizza, in Barcelona and had enough tapas for a whole family, by yourself, and stopped in Gibraltar for…some cheesy chips. So you leave Gibraltar thinking it’s nothing more than a duty free departure lounge with monkeys, and Barbary macaques. And that makes me feel all kinds of weird.
Right now, with Christmas round the corner, everybody’s got their sights on one thing and one thing only: Christmas food. That bloated 27th of December feeling after you’ve eaten all sorts of things in much the same manner as we’ve been described Henry VIII’s meals, that makes you want to never eat again but you’re quickly snapped out of by your mother waving left-overs in front of your face. I’ve even been doing a little research, asking people what they eat during Christmas and have – from the beginning – wondered why we don’t eat these things all year round. We have, for some reason, attached foods to seasons, holidays and locations (read: la casa de mama); but it’s so unnecessary! And what’s worse, because we’ve done this we’ve limited ourselves: I don’t know any young people in Gibraltar aspiring to become chefs; we’ve given that job to grandmothers.
We are the proudest city in the world: we’ve travelled to the other side of Europe to watch football matches, taught people the ways of the Llanito in universities all over the UK and flown our flag in places between California and Cambodia, but yet we cannot provide someone from just across the border with a plate of authentic Gibraltarian food.
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