Lhardy, Madrid

Thursday June 18

This was one of two options from the guidebook for tonight's dinner. We passed it by because it looked too expensive, but when we got to the other (Casa Labra) they announced that it was closed - though there were people in there eating, and it was only 10 PM. What is this, Cincinnati? And it started raining, so back to Lhardy, which boasts of being one of Madrid's oldest restaurants (oh, come on, 1839 - there are places in this town where Goya was a busboy).
It is certainly a genteel period room, with ornate ormolu, dark wood, and pieces of elaborate silver scattered about. The maitre d' was shatteringly polite, and the tuxedoed staff almost too attentive, but we are past the age of being affected by that. The olive oil came in little bottles with the restaurant's name (Mom would have loved them), but the bread was hard, not fresh.

We only ordered main plates, as we were still stuffed from a decent late lunch of tapas-style cold fish and salads at the Prado. One main was very good - Milojas Solomillo, a stack of lovely rare slices of steak with tender asparagus stems between each one, topped with a cream sauce and pink peppercorns. The wine, Tagonius 2004 (which we're told is local) went beautifully with it. Unfortunately, the other main, "Presa Iberica," or pork leg with chestnuts and aroma of truffles, was in fact several slices of fatty - and let's be honest, fatty and tough - meat in an uninteresting, untruffled sweet brown sauce, with a few hard chestnut balls alongside; when you tried to cut them, you were afraid that they would skitter off your plate and smack a waiter in the eye.
Frankly, one of the worse meals we've had here, and at three times the price of the best.