Tapas style in Madrid

Madrileños may face tough economic cuts but the one thing that they are not prepared to streamline is their waists. A buxom Madrileña told me as much at 5.30pm on a Saturday afternoon as she begrudgingly put down her ice cream spoon and knocked back a caramel vodka after a five-course lunch at Restaurante Asador Casa Juan, Madrid’s mecca for gourmands.

Tucked away in a residential area near Plaza Castilla, Casa Juan’s modest façade belies the awaiting feast within. As we pulled back the heavy wooden door we were hit by gusts of garlic and sizzling meat and then by Señor Juan himself. Suave and trim, Don Juan is a celebrity in his own right and renowned for feeding the Real Madrid team, whose cheesy photographs garnish the walls; we ate under the watchful eye of a well-fed Ronaldo.

Too proud to ask for help with the menu, my boyfriend Alex and I opted for a tasting menu, hoping to avoid the callos (veal guts) that had outsmarted my A level Spanish the night before. Plates of paté de perdiz (partridge pâté) and foie de oca a la plancha (grilled foie gras) arrived in quick succession and when it came to the main course we were consumed by a cloud of smoke as we seared T-bone steak on a hot plate. For dessert we had champagne sorbet and gnawed on teeth-cracking turrón (almond nougat) until we, too, had to sit back and surrender, after three hours of guzzling.

Unlike London, Madrid’s body clock is slow-paced, verging on soporific. It didn’t take us long to adapt and having finished lunch at 6pm, the evening opened up before us. Luckily our hotel, the ME Madrid, was in the central Sol area. It stretches along one entire side of the lively Plaza Santa Ana, home to the 1904 beer hall Cerveceria Alemana where Hemingway was a regular. The hotel, which has been refurbished from the original 19th-century Reina Victoria Hotel, has kept its grandiose fin de siècle façade and was once renowned as a hangout for Spain’s most famous bullfighter, Manolete, who always reserved room number 220 out of superstition. Now, the interior is slick and there’s a chic rooftop bar designed by nightlife entrepreneur Rande Gerber, whose wife Cindy Crawford would fit in well among the sparkling clientele.

Wanting to be in the thick of things, we walked to the nearby Mercado San Miguel. After years of restoration the Beaux-Arts marketplace buzzes with shoppers by day and friends slurping oysters by night. We tucked into tapas of cod from La Casa de Bacalao and nutty goat’s cheese from La Fromagerie, which at €1 a pop trumped Borough Market’s fare in both price and taste.

We thought it rude not to round off our epicurean day with a nightcap, which we found without too much effort in Cava Baja, a street lined with tavernas. We settled in for a sherry in one of the narrow tascas (cheap bars) and were soon eating again, digging into delicate slices of jamón to balance the sweetness of the viscous Pedro Ximénez sherry.

We managed to spend the entire next day at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum. Together with the famous Prado and the modern Queen Sofia Museum, the Thyssen makes up Madrid’s Golden Triangle of Art but is often overlooked. Up until the early 1990s the collection of 900 works, which range from early religious art to pieces by David Hockney, belonged to the late Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza. As one of Europe’s wealthiest businessmen his only rival in scale of possessions was Queen Elizabeth II, who he once claimed ‘is not perhaps really a collector’. From Renaissance pin-ups to Impressionist masters, the gallery was the most thorough history of art lesson I’ve ever had.

We also ventured outside the city and took a little-known funicular across to Casa de Campo, Franco’s old hunting ground. As we glided out through the suburbs, accompanied by Phil Collins on loop, it was easy to trace the city’s hilly contours. Only after returning home did I discover that, at 667 metres above sea level, Madrid is Europe’s highest capital city. This came as welcome news; not only did it explain the brilliant blue skies but it also meant I could attribute any light-headedness to the altitude, and not to that last glass of jerez we just had to have.

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Rooms at ME Madrid from £220 (memadrid.com; 0808 234 1953). The ME by Melia hotel on Aldwych will open in July.

easyJet flies to Madrid from London Gatwick, London Luton, Bristol, Edinburgh, Manchester and Liverpool. One-way from £24.99 (easyjet.com)