Lunch with Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf

February 9, 2014

We’re off to the South in about an hour.  Quick trip to the airport, which is often super crowded but we are flying mid-Sunday and though busy, it’s not hours long to get bags checked or through security.   Security is different.  You don’t have to take electronics out of your cases nor take off shoes and belts.  Very civilized.

Tim got stuck in horrendous traffic yesterday coming to Valparaiso to pick up us for lunch and then the trip back to Santiago.   The freeway was so crowded that it took him nearly four hours to negotiate the 100 km. (65 miles).  It’s a trip of normally 90 minutes.

Anyway, we left the Hotel Thomas Somerscales, named after an Anglo-Chilean painter, who specialized in portraits and marine scenes about 100 or so years ago.  At least one of his Chilean marine paintings is in the Tate.  The hotel was lovely, service was superb, in a very nice section of Cerro Allegre, though a stiff uphill walk from the local ascensor.   The breakfast was good and the bilingual staff was helpful with dinner reservations.   The room was excellent with an ocean view and an expansive vista  of Valpo’s tin roofs.  Every afternoon the wind came up and blew strongly until about midnight.  The room was cooled off to make sleeping under the covers necessary.  

We lunched yesterday at La Caperucita y el Lobo (Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf) looking over the bay and the city.   The food was excellent, though Ben and Tim were disappointed with the pinot noir.  They both gave it four points out of a possible ten.  A harsh rating, thinks John.   We started with salads and crab cakes, then Tim and John had Chilean hake, merluza, and Ben had two more starters, crab cakes and scallops.  He thought the scallops with their roe were out of this world…and even the chef stopped by to ask who was having them because even he thought they were superb!

We had a run around the city and then back to Santiago.

On our trip back we stopped at one of the small restaurants just off the freeway to pick up empanadas for dinner, baked and stuffed with meat, eggs and whole olives.   We enjoyed them in the back garden, talking till midnight, with a bottle of Calcu rosé that is one of Tim’s favorites…and ours.