Parade de la Vega
Jiménez de Jamuz, León, Spain
tel +34.987.66.42.24, bodegaelcapricho.com
open for lunch and dinner every day
around €100 per person, before wine The three-hour drive from Madrid’s airport northwest to the town of Jiménez de Jamuz takes you across central Spain, where parched white mesas rise from the desolate plain and scraggly brush litters the expanse. Occasionally, a majestic castle appears as if from nowhere, reminding you of a storied past that must have seen much more excitement than you see today. But sleepy Jiménez de Jamuz certainly knows one kind of excitement: the restaurant El Capricho, a remarkable temple of beef cookery.
Upon arrival on the restaurant’s doorstep, it’s impossible not to notice the rows of odd buildings that span the hills behind it. Their consecutive angled roofs are green with grass and chimneys poke up through them. The base of the hill in front of them has been cut away and doorways have been inserted, giving the impression of hobbit houses. It turns out these were never domiciles but were instead wine cellars for a once-thriving industry. A century and a half ago, 250 commercial wine producers operated here. Today, there is only one, and these cellars carved into the clay-limestone hills have found other uses.
After the hobbit-cellars, your eyes are immediately drawn into the restaurant’s kitchen window, where quite likely an enormous side of beef or two will be laid across a table, with a chef standing behind poised to carve off the night’s orders. You might say that El Capricho is a temple of beef, but truly, it’s a temple to ox, a form of beef that is rarely eaten these days. And that’s not all that makes El Capricho unique. The restaurant — or, rather, its owner, José Gordón — also raises its own oxen. Every year, Gordón scours the north of Spain — looking as far away as the Azores — for suitable beasts. He buys them at around three years of age and has them brought to his ranch, not far from the restaurant. There they spend at least five years grazing contentedly on that Castilian brush, which in this area happens to be composed primarily of wild lavender, thyme, and rosemary, with acorns from a scattering of oaks, all of which, Gordón says, helps the beef attain its flavor, which you soon discover is about as robust and full as you may ever find.
When the oxen are finally in the right condition, they are “sacrificed,” to use Gordón’s word. That may be at any age from eight to 12 or even 15 years. He knows when they are ready simply by looking at them, seeing how their fat and muscle hang on their bodies and in what stage of contentedness they are. In the United States, most cattle are slaughtered at between two and three years old. The idea of feeding them for an additional five to ten years is financial absurdity, as Gordón knows. Yet he wants them to have lived a good life, because the original revelation about beef quality he had as a young man came from tasting an ox that had lived and worked with a peasant family for over 12 years. When he tasted it, he told me, he knew that he was tasting its life and that its life had been good. At El Capricho, after slaughter the animals are broken down into their constituent parts and made ready for various preparations. Some pieces receive even more aging.
I shouldn’t have been surprised to discover that El Capricho’s dining room is subterranean, and, with two friends, I was led down stone steps into a deep vault, where nooks containing elegant wooden tables and chairs had been carved into the walls and warm light emerged from lamps fixed into the stone. Although we were there for the steak, El Capricho’s menu features a great number of beef preparations, and if you go you should taste as many as possible.
Not to be missed is cecina, Castilian cured beef, sliced and served in the same way as Spain’s ubiquitous jamón. Gordón’s cecina, from the hind leg of the ox, puts all others to shame. The one we tasted had been salted and aged for at least eight years, before being sliced so thin as to be translucent. The taste was as complex, sweet, and nutty as the best jamónibérico, but with a stunning deep, beefy richness.
We also started with Gordón’s carpaccio, which likewise put all other carpaccio I’ve had to shame. I don’t usually get excited about this form of raw beef, as it lacks flavor. But Gordón’s, made with 180-day dry-aged meat from an 8-year-old ox, tasted deeply of gamy, beefy meat, yet with a silky smoothness and soothing coolness to the palate.
The presentation of the tongue appetizer was simple — centimeter-thick slices arrayed on the plate; the preparation, which takes a couple of months, was anything but. First, the ox tongue is pickled in a spicy brine, then it’s drained and coated with pimiento, paprika, garlic, and salt, after which it’s lightly smoked and allowed to cure for a month. Finally, the tongue is cooked in water for four to five hours, chilled, and kept ready for service. The flavors were complex, mellow, and only slightly smoky.
The pièce de resistance was presented to us first in its raw state on a butcher block: a sprawling ribeye weighing 2.2 kilos (4.8 pounds). It came from an 8-year-old Portuguese ox and had been aged for another 120 days. Gordón’s cooking method, typically for Spain, was simple. The meat was held at room temperature on the kitchen counter until cooking. Then Gordón used a technique similar to what’s called the “reverse sear.” First he put it on a high rack, several feet above his bed of coals. It hung there, at head height, until its internal temperature reached about 37 degrees C (99 degrees F), he said, though I didn’t see Gordón or his cooks actually measure the temperature. Then the meat was taken down to brown on a grill just over hot coals from local Holm oaks. A crunchy, coarse, flaky sea salt was applied to each side as it cooked.
The chief reason American beef suppliers don’t offer older cattle, they say, is that the meat is too tough. The steak at El Capricho disproves that assertion. While it doesn’t have the silkiness of butter or the marbling of corn-fed American beef, Gordón’s steak is not especially tough. It is, however, phenomenally beefy. I’ve struggled to try to describe the flavor and aroma of this beef by breaking them down into smaller components, but they elude me. Beefy is simply a singular flavor for which most humans seem to have a genetically programmed primal yearning. José Gordón’s ox steaks are the apotheosis of this appeal.
As we were but three people, we didn’t come close to finishing the steak. But we took down two of El Capricho’s very fine watercress salads. The restaurant harvests its own peppery cress and dresses it simply with olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and garlic. The salad was the perfect accompaniment, especially as the frites turned out to be eminently skippable.
Gordón, who will soon become the second commercial wine producer in the Jamuz zone (he’s rehabilitating his family’s century-old vines, which had reverted to the wild), has a strong interest in wine, reflected by the restaurant’s lengthy list. It offers all the brawny Spanish reds, but Gordón, a lover of more classically styled French wines, set us down the path of more elegant fare. We drank a delicious red from the Ribeira Sacra region of Galicia, produced by Adega Algueira from the indigenous Merenzao grape. Much more fluid and gentle than the fairly tannic Mencía that usually defines Ribeira Sacra reds, this wine beside the steak offered a Burgundian suaveness. Our next bottle continued in the same line but upped the ante: 1991 Valbuena, the second wine of Vega Sicilia, was all red fruit and earthy complexity.
We spent the next day with Gordón, visiting his vineyards and walking cautiously amidst his paddock containing hundreds of 3,500-pound oxen. Informally, we tried his exquisitely rich morcilla, blood sausage, served not in a casing but warm in a bowl, and spread on grilled bread to cut its richness. We tried his beautifully immaculate tripe stew, which had only a mild, soothing flavor of innards and a lovely soft chewiness. We ate that watercress salad again and again.
If you are a lover of steak and are dedicated to tasting the purest, most impressively beefy beef in the world, El Capricho is well worth the journey. Lunch is ideal, as you’ll likely not be hungry for at least the next 12 hours, perhaps longer. (The next day you can head west to the Rías Baixas and switch to seafood.) ●
From issue 100