Faith and tapas

Chronologically, our visit to Bishop Auckland last Friday was a lunch of tapas followed by a visit to the Faith Museum, but I find it easier on the tongue the other way around, so I'll let that title stand. They may sound like two very disparate activities, but in fact both are aspects of the Auckland Project, the extraordinary development charity which has grown from Jonathan Ruffer's intervention to save a set of Spanish old master paintings from dispersal (some background here) into a cultural powerhouse. We met friends for lunch at El Castillo (see what they did there?) the tapas restaurant at the ground floor of the Spanish Art Gallery, before visiting the Faith Museum which is the Project's newest venture.

Tapas ought to be the perfect food style for people who suffer from buyer's remorse in restaurants: if you always see what others are eating and wish that you'd ordered that, well, at least you get to share what your companions have chosen. But the more dishes you order, the more chance there is that you will regret some of them. Or perhaps it's just me: certainly, I should get over my conviction that this time the croquetas will be as good as they sound. So it's no criticism of the restaurant that I liked some of the dishes better than others - not to mention that our party was evenly divided between those who really like whitebait, and those who really don't. But I was right that even though I don't like calamari, they'd be worth ordering for the chickpea accompaniment; and I was doubly right to toss in that last minute order for bread, which was delicious. I only wish I'd gone with the impulse to double up on the order for charred broccoli. The carafe of rioja was perfect: we used to drink a lot of rioja, I don't know why we stopped...

Steer cleer of the desserts unless you have a very sweet tooth. An allegedly Basque cheesecake was heaped with cherries in sweet syrup which overwhelmed the delicate cheesecake. I think they were glacé cherries, and I think that was a mistake, but we did spend some time discussing whether they were maraschino cherries, and what are maraschino cherries anyway? Are they a variety of cherry, or does the name come from the liqueur? Subsequent research says that a maraschino cherry is a preserved, sweetened cherry in syrup, originally containing maraschino liqueur. The liqueur is so called because it is made from marasca cherries (from the Italian amaro, bitter), but the cherries preserved in it are varieties of sweet eating cherries. We did not have profound abstract conversation about faith, so this meditation on cherries will have to do.

Time to visit the museum: entry is through the castle:

( More pictures, plus a few words )