Pizza Quest

Phew! Even though the first week of school was only three days long, it still feels like an accomplishment to have made it through. We decided to celebrate by taking the kids for pizza to one of our local Italian joints. Except that, like many restaurants here, La Tavola does not start serving dinner until 9 pm. No problem, I thought—we’ll go to Inmortales--the one on the other end of the block; but no, they start serving at 8:30. This is more like the time we need to end dinner with our kids, not start it. And besides, we have a guy coming over to install a DVR machine at nine.

By the time we figure out that our neighborhood restaurants will not work, it is impossible for me to think of eating anything but pizza. The kids are pretty fixated on the idea also. So we spend more than a half hour googling various search terms and calling restaurants within a reasonable radius (we come dangerously close to giving up and ordering Domino's) until we finally find one two FGC stops away, in Gracia. We like Gracia—it’s got a terrific market and a sort of boho neighborhood vibe. And the local equivalent of hopstop tells us it will only take us 13 minutes to get there. So off we go.

Of course at 7 pm, we are the only people in the place. If you show up at 9 pm, when the restaurants open, you are treated like the senior citizen coming for the early bird special. It remains a mystery to me how people eat so late, get home and function in the morning. This is a very laid back culture, and many people do not get to work before 10 am, but still. Somehow it also seems like the kind of place where people would value getting their 40 winks. The kids need to be at school by 8:30, and someone needs to get them there.

And what about the kids anyway? A big topic at the PTA orientation today was whether kids really stay up until 10 or 10:30 at night. Apparently, a lot of them do. Maybe that’s why they are so quiet and well-behaved compared to my kids—they’re too tired to run around shouting in public places!

And while I’m on the pizza theme, I’ve done some thinking about a ritual we began a couple of years ago back in Brooklyn. Taking off on an idea from Barbara Kingsolver’s book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, we started having a weekly pizza and movie night. I got a pizza stone, and we made homemade pizza and watched a movie with the kids. I was completely ready to suspend this ritual for a year during our stay here—who needs to eat pizza every week when there is so much good, local food around? However, this whole orientation thing shifted my perspective. Even though Alec and I would be just fine dining out on tapas or making dinner from interesting new ingredients we find in the market, the kids actually need a thread of routine that bridges our New York life and our Barcelona life. Which explains how I spent all of yesterday afternoon searching for a pizza stone. No luck. In addition, it’s not that easy to find fresh mozzarella here, and when you do find it, it’s pretty expensive. So I ordered a mozzarella making kit and had it sent to Myron and Raquel to bring to us when they next visit.

On our way back to the train from our mediocre-but-entirely-satisfying pizza dinner, we happened upon a kitchen store, and found a serviceable metal pizza pan. Now I just have to find yeast, so I can make the dough…