Living next door to Valencia’s Mercat Central for a month, we often skipped going out to eat. That’s not self-pity. We liked cooking fresh market produce at home. There was a real advantage to that, since we never made up a menu until we found out what was available. The same doesn’t always work for restaurants unless they go entirely with a chalkboard plate of fare.
Many of the restaurants around the market supplement a printed menu with an occasional special based on what’s in season. But then a place across the square from the market on the ancient steps to the Lonja caught our eyes. Taberna Sants Joan’s (c/Pere Compte, 5, Valencia; +34 963 913 134; facebook.com/Santsjoans) proudly proclaimed that all their ingredients came from the market.
Depending on the harvest is a little like having a CSA farm share. Until you started getting that weekly box of veggies, you probably never knew you could eat that much kale. Or that you could learn to like brussels sprouts or rutabagas instead of the tomatoes and peppers of your dreams. So too with a market cuisine restaurant.
Negotiating a meal of foods in season
On the Monday feast day of San Vicente, we took an outdoor table at Sants Joan’s and snapped the QR code for the menu. The starters were easy. Patatas bravas just because we like fried potatoes with a spicy sauce.
And Valencian tomato salad. The gigantic local tomatoes were in season and the chefs were hollowing them out, chopping the pulp, mixing it with dried mountain ham and strips of mojama (dried tuna belly). The saltiness of the ham and tuna brought out the sweetness of the tomato.
As we studied the chalkboard supplement, the CSA analogy reared its head. Ah, steamed local mussels were on the menu. The waiter shook his head. ‶Not in season,″ he said. OK, the chalkboard had a plate of grilled scallops (vieiras). Again, head shaking. ‶All gone. The market has been closed for two days.″ Then the waiter brightened. ‶Zamburiñas?″
The shellfish we couldn’t get from the Mediterranean had a cousin from Galicia on the Atlantic Coast. The small variegated scallops (Chlamys varia) were beautiful (see photo above). At home, we’re accustomed to the neat lumps of protein called sea scallops. Actually, they’re just the hinge muscles of a large, deep-water scallops. At Sants Joan’s, we were served the whole creature of the smaller zamburiñas. Each looked like a snail, complete with the eyespots or tentacles reaching out from the head. The coral-colored roe (actually the reproductive organs) wrapped around their hinge muscles. Briny and sweet, the roe proved that the scallops had been brought to shore alive and shucked only before cooking.
Purple-striped zamburiñas proved a fortuitous discovery. Who knows? Next time we might even order a side of kale.