In Salamanca, Spain

Rafaela Kottou

Salamanca, Spain is where I had the best steak of my life. It was at a restaurant in the center of the city, which they call the Plaza Mayor. I was in Salamanca for a week and a half with my father, who is a physics professor and had been invited there to speak at a conference. The steak, the waiter told us, was beef from the Morucha breed, native to Salamanca. Its fat tasted nutty and its meat earthy, flavored by the grass and herbs that the cattle had once eaten. It was dry-aged and topped with coarse salt, cooked to a tender medium rare, and served with a side of charred green peppers. The dish came out with a small stovetop, on which we could put the steak and cook it more if we so wanted. We ate the steak overlooking the plaza, where tourists and locals passed through, the tourists marked by their big straw hats and floral rompers, and the locals marked by their lack thereof.

The plaza is surrounded on all four sides by walls made of sandstone in the 1700s. It was late afternoon when my father and I ate our steak, and the sun was just beginning its slow descent, casting a soft orange glow onto each dimple in the sandstone. When our steak came out, it was already cut into pieces, each large enough for two to three bites. The pieces were arranged such that, taken together, they looked like the full steak, the fattier pieces positioned along the outside and the meatier ones on the inside. In the sun’s light, the strips of creamy fat glistened, softening into the meat. The walls in the plaza are four stories high, each story lined with rows of rectangular windows, some opening to balconies just large enough for one to stand and drink a cup of hot coffee in the morning. Closer to the bottom, arches are cut out of the walls. On either end of each arch is a small portrait carved into the stone. As we ate our steak, the sun caked the portraits in a heavy golden dye, their faces made hot like vegetables made to sweat in a pressure cooker. Many of the portraits in the plaza are of Spanish men I cannot recognize. Others are of men I know, Miguel de Cervantes for one, or men I have at some point heard of, like Alfonso XI. Behind the arches are restaurants, like the one where my father and I ate our steak, along with various cafes where university students drink espresso under umbrellas, butcheries where pink Iberian ham legs hang alongside fat links of chorizo, and ice cream shops where lines of young children wait outside.

One of the four walls in the plaza contains Salamanca’s City Hall, jutting out into the square and standing noticeably taller than the other walls. There are five large arches at the bottommost level of the City Hall, then a second level with a balcony large enough to fit a dining table for a dinner with immediate family. On the third level are two stone statues of little round men perched on either end of the centermost window, their thighs extended so far to one side that it looks as though their hip joints are fluid, melted away into the muscle underneath. Five flags hang above the little men, the Spanish flag in the middle, the European Union flag on one far side, and three other flags that I cannot recognize. At the top of the City Hall is a white clock like one that should be in a Cinderella movie and a bronze bell that, in all the time I was in Salamanca, I never heard ring.

My father does research in optics and photonics, among other things. He has never fully explained his work to me, likely because my mother—who is not a scientist and believes that most academic science is frivolous—tells him not to bore us with things we do not care about. Occasionally, when a magazine publishes an article about my father’s work, he sends me the link via email. The magazines say that his team studies hidden symmetries in the equations that govern the flow of light. His goal, they say, is to manipulate the flow of light and to generate ‘extreme’ light-matter interactions. My father typically orders his steak cooked medium well, but in Salamanca, the waiter insisted we order it medium rare. When only the pinker pieces were left, my father put them atop the little stove and let them cook for a minute or two such that the streaks of bright pink resolved to a soft brown, before eating them. Around us, the tables were largely empty, likely because it was too early for most Spaniards, and even most tourists, to be eating dinner. Only one other table near ours was populated, a long table with what looked like two families vacationing together. Their table was littered with dishes—a plate of wet burrata bulging like a sea-turtle egg, a pile of shrimp with their tails removed, and a platter of thinly sliced Iberian ham. Mosquitos buzzed above their table, stopping at the ham, but the families made no move to swat them away, busy craning their necks to see the top of the City Hall and wiping the sweat from their hairlines with the hems of their blouses.

The afternoon sun made everything feel simultaneously sticky and somewhat divine. I wondered if my father saw the plaza in the same way I did, or if he was instead reading the hidden symmetries in the light’s flow and tracking its place in the sandstone particles. I never asked him because I figured that if I did ask and if all he was thinking about was the steak, he might feel guilty, as if he should have been thinking about more. And even if he was thinking about more than just the steak, I figured he could not have possibly been thinking about light flow equations because I cannot imagine anyone seriously thinking about light flow equations while eating a steak in the Plaza Mayor.

Rafaela Kottou is a writer based in New York City. She is a recent graduate of Yale University, where she studied English and biology. She writes essays and creative nonfiction.

X: @rafaela_kottou. 

Featured photo by Rafaela Kottou