At La Penela, a tortilla with “patatas that crisp and melt with amazing delicacy”

VSUnlike Italy, Spain has few culinary embassies in Paris. Rarer still are the restaurants highlighting regional specificities such as those of Catalonia, Asturias or Castile. While a few butchers now offer cuts of Galician beef, matured to perfection, the specialties of this province in the north-west of the Iberian Peninsula, predominantly maritime and rural, remained largely ignored. Until the opening, in February, of La Penela, rue de la Boule-Rouge (Paris 9^e), close to the Folies-Bergère.

After a first restaurant launched in La Coruña in 1989, the Simon Barallobre family first duplicated its small temple of Galician cuisine in Madrid and Barcelona, ​​before exporting it today beyond the Pyrenees. You might have feared the standardized coldness of a chain, but the sandstone floor, the cane chairs, the light wood bistro tables and the colorful decor of the room offer a contemporary benevolence, before the menu plunges us into old traditions. .

Reproduced from one restaurant to another, the dishes are nevertheless prepared on the spot with raw materials arriving, three times a week, from the Galician coast and countryside. Proud of their Celtic origins, this fishing people has shaped a culinary repertoire oriented towards the ocean. La Penela thus gives pride of place to seafood – with sometimes a little salty additions.

A silky cushion texture

Grilled razor clams or scallops, simply drizzled with olive oil; clams marinière; tiger mussels, stuffed with bechamel sauce oldschool ; fish (hake, monkfish, turbot, sea bass, grouper, etc.), all offered grilled or, under the ancestral preparation of the caldeirada (a Galician and Portuguese soup), garnished with a little fumet mounted in olive oil and paprika.

Two ingredients that can be found in the delicious octopus a feira, a refined and popular classic of Galician traditions, which sees the tentacles of the cephalopod cooked in court-bouillon then sliced, served warm with boiled potatoes, seasoned with coarse salt. Like seafood, these tubers are imported from Galicia. A local variety, the kennebec, which accompanies the majority of these dishes with their rustic generosity, but also an omelette, the tortilla de Betanzos, unexpected star of the house.

A true Spanish national dish, the tortilla de patatas usually comes in the form of a round cake, topped with sliced ​​potatoes, previously sautéed with onions. Its density allows it to be cut into portions or cubes, often served cold in tapas bars. That said de Betanzos, named after a small town near La Coruña, is distinguished by a silky cushion texture and is consumed instantly. Offered in small or large sizes, it is opened with a cake shovel to discover, under the padded skin, a runny and orange interior.

At the heart of this softness, the patatas crisp and melt with an astonishing delicacy. “The potatoes are first cut into chips, then fried”, explains Jessinia Rodriguez, the young cook of the French branch of the Galician institution. “For a small tortilla [une copieuse entrée à partager à deux], I break six eggs, beaten with a little salt. I mix everything with two handfuls of crisps. » Poured into a hot, oiled frying pan, the omelet is turned over three times with the help of a wooden plate, to give it a tight seal, sheltering its runny fluidity.