Best Spanish Lunch?

I’m normally not given to superlatives and it’s not often that I describe a restaurant or a meal as “best ever”. We ate again at La Nacional on 14th Street for lunch and it was quite a memorable meal. Now I am not saying this was the best Spanish restaurant we’ve ever eaten in; but I can certainly confer the honor of “best Spanish lunch outside Spain” to this favorite of ours. Perhaps I can further qualify it as “the best cheap Spanish lunch outside Spain”.

Our lunch consisted of boquerones, anchovies on top of small baguette slices with goat cheese and red pepper; gazpacho, the classic cold Spanish soup; sardinas plancha, grilled sardines with perfectly crispy and salty skin; and tosta choricera, a new dish of La Nacional featuring a slice of toast, topped with a fried egg sunny side up, onions, and surrounded by slices of chorizo. I’m not a huge fan of sardines and La Nacional is the only restaurant that cooks it the way I like it. The fishiness of the anchovies were balanced very well by the goat cheese and red pepper. Marita was looking forward to some rice to accompany the sardines, but alas, La Nacional does not have side orders of rice.

We finished the meal with pudin de pan, bread pudding with chocolate sauce and whipped cream. It was not enough to get the fish taste out of our mouths. Maybe the waitress read our minds; she gave us two glasses of muscatel on the rocks – on the house. It certainly cleansed our palates; I actually gargled a mouthful of it! Thank God there were no other customers to watch me as I tipped my head back and sloshed the muscatel around my throat. My only complaint – they kept playing the same flamenco guitar recording over and over again. Couldn’t they buy a few more Spanish music CDs to play to the lunch crowd? Then again – Marita and I were the lunch crowd. Perhaps La Nacional is going under? I certainly hope not . . .