Wined, dined and rested.

We all know what kind of café or restaurant to avoid, don’t we?  Find the main tourist attraction locally, look around the nearest “typical [insert nationality/region here] restaurant” with its laminated, badly-translated menus with country flags prominently displayed, then move away approximately two streets in any direction and start looking for somewhere to eat.

So when our friends suggested eating somewhere within a few metres of Zaragoza’s main tourist attraction, the Basilica of Pilar (actually one of Spain’s major tourist attractions), they felt the need to apologise and utter a series of “it may be awful but….” comments.

The restaurant is called Tajo Bajo and is the newest of a small group of restaurants of various shapes and sizes, all based in Zaragoza and owned by a local family. The fabulous thing about this upmarket tapas restaurant is their fantastic chef, Rubén García. He is from Aragón, the region in which Zaragoza is located, and prides himself on developing recipes based on Aragonese ingredients and traditions.

Knowing that, I suppose locating the restaurant on Aragón’s most iconic – and giant – main square does make some sense. It was going to have to impress quite effectively to survive the concept in my head of “tapas on main square” – yawn, we even have such things in England now.

However….. given that Zaragoza is one of the most foody towns I know, and that our friends are super-foody, we all decided to trust the recommendations and see what the place was like.

Its location is impressive; we sat on the terrace looking straight at the basilica with its domes, towers and turrets.

As we looked at the menu the restaurant began to claw its way up in our estimation, rung by rung – the dishes while familiar also looked as if someone had given them a twist, plus the menu was not huge. Oh and it wasn’t stickily laminated either, and didn’t have a country flag anywhere to be seen.

Yes there were croquetas, ham and salad, but some of the details were interesting – one of the salads came with a peach vinaigrette, another had thyme ice cream, the ham was specifically D.O. (denominación de origen – a protected origin product) from Teruel, in the south of Aragón, and intriguingly there were fried baby artichokes with “cream of ham” and a tiny strip of pork crackling.

There were one or two endearing features that made us smile – we had been given an English language menu, something that I dislike because so they are so often opaquely translated ( I will never forget the “croaking chocolate pudding” I was offered in a parador once – I could barely speak for the rest of the meal, so distracted was I by the idea of a chocolate-soaked toad popping up out of my pudding) (I suspect the original Spanish was “croquante” meaning crunchy) however these very mis-translations can be entertaining. Here we were being offered a “peach and whine ice cream” which of course meant we were obliged to make certain noises for a few minutes, which in turn may explain why the waiter was so disapproving as he firmly assured us that the wine we had seen on the wine list as from Campo de Borja,

a wine region we like to explore, absolutely was not from Campo de Borja “and if our menu says that then we are lying”.

This was an odd statement since 60 seconds of googling produces the information that the very nice 100% grenache “la Aparecida” is from the foothills of Moncayo in the Campo de Borja region.

That made us chuckle even more than the peach and whine ice cream (and encouraged us in the infantile but hilarious making of the appropriate noises again) so we were in a good mood when our starters arrived. I always like to choose the croquetas in Spanish restaurant because almost every place has them and they are a useful comparator. And gosh this place does croquetas well…..

… they don’t come out well in a photo I suppose, but they were probably the most delicious croquetas I’ve had in Spain. I’m not really sure why they needed to produce them as “pintxos” on a slice of bread, but I suppose that puts them on a little stage and they are definitely stars – crispy on the outside but light and beautifully-flavoured on the inside. The jamón we had was also excellent, and prettily presented:

… but we had already that day been to the city’s best “jamonería”, possibly the world’s best jamonería, Felix Martínez’s place on calle Bruno Solano, so Tajo Bajo was working at a disadvantage here.

The baby artichokes with a creamy ham sauce were superb, with tiny thin and crispy pieces of crackling.

Another Aragonese dish that Rubén García has brought with a bang into the sophisticated world of 21^st century tapas is the traditional chicken chilindrón. Chilindrón is a country chicken stew in which the sauce of tomato, chorizo, pepper and herbs has been slow-cooked to refine and intensify the flavours – like many of the best recipes, it sounds a lot simpler than it tastes, and here Mr García has put it into a tube of cannelloni surrounded by a saffron bechamel sauce so light it’s cloud-like.

None of my pictures really does justice to the quality of the food here, so I won’t show you my sub-standard photo of the amazing thyme ice cream that was casually added to the boring-sounding (to some) “ensalada de tomates” alongside, oh yes this old thing, a smidgeon of the most flavoursome pickled rabbit I’ve ever had. Pickled rabbit again is an Aragonese classic, and there is no way in English of producing a name for it that sounds as delicious as the dish was here, you’ll just have to take my word for it.

And guess what we had for pudding?  I thought the very smart, know-it-all waiter was going to throw it at us as we all tried to order it while simultaneously whining and pretending not to whine because after all it’s not really fair to criticise people for not knowing the correct spelling of one word…. Except, of course, it’s hilarious when you DO know……

Sigh. You’d think that at my age I’d have learned how to behave better.

Anyway, when you make your gastronomic visit to Zaragoza (and you MUST) I can tell you it’s worth risking a visit to Tajo Bajo on Pilar Square. Just make sure you practise your whining first.