"Disaster? What are you talking about!? We're drinking cider out of a bottle with a mechanical apple on top of it."

I basically live in a dead zone for restaurants. There is the Basque place that I love not too far away but aside from that one place, which isn't exactly cheap and has strange hours, a decent bocadillo or adequate pizza is about as good as it gets. Which is basically fine, but I have this friend visiting and I really wanted us to be able to eat good things in the neighborhood and it's not really working. Tonight I tried to take us to a (different) nearby Basque restaurant that has good reviews on a few different websites, only to find it replaced with some kind of Catalan/Chinese fusion-y place that was trying too hard to be fancy, especially in my neighborhood. Dammit.

We probably would have wandered back out of the cider place we wandered into when we realized it was a bar that serves cider and not an actual Asturian restaurant (Asturias is in the north of Spain and they make cider and good cheese there), but by then the owner (?) was talking up all the food and telling us we must stay, and it wasn't so much that we believed him but at that point leaving would have been awkward. So we had cider and adequate Asturian-ish tapas and tortilla that Sr. Asturias insisted passionately would be the best we'd ever had. I like Spanish tortilla, but his talking it up so much was almost as silly as someone talking up toast. Anyway, he was enthusiastic and fun and the food was ok and the cider was good. And we had chupitos of some brown liquor that he allegedly made -- homemade liquor is almost never very good, but I usually like it anyway. And they can't all be good modern Catalan meals, I guess. Especially in this neighborhood.