Antonio González Martín, Sobrino de Botín's current owner´s father, was born in November 1922, so it is highly improbable that he could remember a 1925 visit from Hemingway, then a young and unknown writer who did not speak fluent Spanish and who was writing The Sun Also Rises. There are serious flaws in the chronology of this tale.  Adding to this sieve-like fable, Antonio Gonzalez Martín's parents, Emilio González Sánchez and Amparo Martin did not begin operating the restaurant until 1930.

Cándido Remis – Sobrino de Botín or Restaurant [sic] Remis as it was called in the mid-1920s,  was sold by the Remis family to Luís Mingo, who leased it to Emilio González and his wife Amparo Martín in 1930, four years after The Sun Also Rises was published.  In 1935 González purchased the restaurant. In 1936, when the war began, he sent his family to Segorbe, while Emilio stayed in Madrid to protect his business the best he could in a war zone. Food was rationed, so running a normal restaurant operation, much less serving roast suckling pig, was impossible. The restaurant was closed to the public during the Civil War from 1936-1939 and was reportedly used to feed the Republican militia defending the city.

Dubious is the 1725 inscription on kitchen doorway of Restaurante Sobrino de Botín at calle Cuchilleros 17, since the restaurant was founded in 1865. 

Photo: Gerry Dawes

    Because of the Civil War closures and his fifteen-year absence from Spain, , Hemingway probably could not have dined at either of the Botíns since 1933, when John Dos Passos (right) wrote about lunch at “Bottin” with Hemingway, without specifying which Botín he had misspelled. In The Best Times: An Informal Memoir, Dos Passos wrote with nostalgia: “There were times when the clouds cleared, and everything was like in the old days. Those long winey lunches we had with Claude Bowers (American Ambassador to Spain) at Bottin’s in Madrid. . .  . Bowers loved to duck the diplomatic palaver and to sneak off from the embassy and to meet us at Bottin’s, an ancient Madrid eatery then unknown to Americans.”

From a chapter about April 1937 during the Spanish Civil War, Amanda Vaill in her book Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (2014) describes a credulity-challenged dinner party that supposedly took place at Botín with photographers Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and other foreign war correspondents in Madrid. Vaill wrote that they all went to the party at Botín but claimed that they likely didn’t have suckling pig because of the war, then repeats the gauzy Emilio González story about the party having a paella that Hemingway supposed went into the kitchen with González to help prepare, and González later quipped that “Hemingway should stick to writing.”

A great story but likely an invention, casting doubt on whether the restaurant was even Sobrino de Botín, because in the footnotes Vaill noted: “Presumably on Korvin’s (one of the participants) authority that the restaurant was Las Cuevas de Luis Candelas—impossible, since that establishment only opened in 1949.” This pure conjecture about the place being Sobrino de Botín, including the erroneous information that it was founded in the 17th century (even Sobrino de Botín, founded in 1865, claims 1725), is totally derivative, written by a writer using ill-informed sources, including theoft-quoted spinner of Hemingway yarns, Botín owner Emilio González.

In Don Fernando, his 1935 book of essays about his travels in Spain, Somerset Maugham describes La Antigua Casa Botín without mentioning it by name, but at least he gave the location: “In almost every town in Spain you can find a restaurant in which you can eat well enough to satisfy an exigent taste. In Madrid you can find half a dozen. But there is one that should be known to all travellers. It is in the Plaza de los Herradores.” Maugham goes on to note “you are going to eat sucking-pig. Four or five of them lie on a dish in the window. . .”

Hemingway does not write about Botín again after 1932, when he mentioned it in his non-fiction bullfighting book Death in the Afternoon, “But meantime I would rather dine on suckling pig at Botin’s than sit and think of casualties my friends have suffered.” He gave no indication that the restaurant was Sobrino de Botín.

Neither Miguel Izu nor I have been able to uncover any record that Hemingway visited either of the two Botíns even once in the 1950s.  Izu wrote in Quevedo, Goya y Hemingway en Botín. Así se escriben las leyendas: “Hemingway does not mention Botín in The Dangerous Summer, in which he wrote about his travels in the 1950s, althoughhe does expressly mention many other places. Nor does Botín appear in A Moveable Feast, where he recalls his Parisian period and mentions some of his trips to Spain. Mary Welsh, his fourth wife, did not mention Botín when she recounted her first visit to Madrid in 1953, when her husband was anxious to show her his favorite places, nor do any of his fellow travelers in Spain in that decade who wrote chronicles or memoirs, like Peter Viertel, Valerie Hemingway, Gianfranco Ivancich, or Aaron Hotchner.                                 Ernest and Mary Hemingway with Ava Gardner at a ranch near Escorial

    In July 2024 in San Sebastián and Bilbao, where The Hemingway Society’s Biennial Conference was held, I met Argentinian Ricardo A. Koon, Hemingway historian, scholar and biographer who writes under the name Historia Neuquén. In December 2024, he wrote the following to me: “I had lunch with Ava Gardner at la Cerveceria Alemana in 1976. Ava told me at that lunch that Sobrino de Botín was not the original restaurant mentioned in The Sun Also Rises. A few days later in the Bar at Hotel Suecia (a Madrid hotel where Hemingway stayed several times), Matador Antonio Ordoñez (right) told me the same thing. I think that the current Botin is taking advantage of the Hemingway connection to the original restaurant.”
    Koon claims that he went to Sobrino de Botin later with Ava Gardiner in  her chauffeured car and that she left him there because he was too tired and had drunk too much during their five-hour gab session at Cervercheria Alemana.

         

 

    In an e-mail in January 2024, I asked Valerie Danby-Smith Hemingway (wife of his son Gregory) if she had ever gone to Botín with Hemingway. Famously, Valerie (below with the author) was “taken prisoner” by Hemingway in Pamplona during the Fiestas de San Fermín in 1959. After the fiesta, Hemingway hired her as his secretary in 1959 and 1960. After his death, she worked with Mary Hemingway for the estate from 1961 to 1964. In her memoir Running with the Bulls: My Years with the Hemingways (Ballantine, New York, 2004), she does not mention Botín.

    Valerie answered my January 2024 e-mail query, without specifying to which Botín she went with Hemingway. “About whether I ever went to Casa  Botin  with  Hemingway,”  she  wrote,  “the answer is Yes, once in 1959.  I remember Botin, but vaguely. . . When Hemingway went to his favorite restaurants, he booked a table where he could concentrate on his meal with the maximum privacy and enjoy the food and his company. If he was disturbed during the meal by unwelcome interruptions by fans, he would not return to that restaurant. All I remember about Botin was the excellent food and that we were protected from interruption. Often, when we went to famous places, the booking was in the name of Bill Davis and the restaurant was not aware that Hemingway had eaten there.”  
    At The Hemingway Society Conference, held in San Sebastián and Bilbao in July 2024, I showed Valerie Hemingway my PowerPoint presentation, “Hemingway and Gerry Dawes: A Few Degrees of Separation,” in which I documented with photographs and quotes all the people I have known who were either Hemingway’s friends or who had direct encounters with him. Valerie reiterated that she could cast no light on the location of the Botín where she ate with Hemingway.

All I had to go on concerning the veracity of Sobrino de Botín’s  Hemingway stories are the González family’s own claims, but they have been unable to provide any corroboration of Hemingway visits. In an email I received in mid-February, 2024 from Antonio González Gómez, the current jefe of Sobrino de Botín, he wrote, “Dear Gerry, I have searched for documents that would confirm Hemingway's relationship with our (restaurant and family). However, I have not been able to find anything; I only have the testimonies of my grandfather Emilio, my father Antonio and my uncle José. I am sorry for not being able to contribute more and I thank you very much for the affection you show towards this house.”

Photo: Gerry Dawes

Gerry Dawes will be leading a specialized gastronomy, wine and cultural tour to Western and Southern Spain from Tuesday, October 14 – Thursday, October 30, visiting the great cities and towns of Madrid, Segovia, Ávila, Salamanca, Trujullo, Mérida, Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Cádiz, Sevilla, Ronda and Málaga. For further information contact gerrydawes@aol.com.

 

 

    The recent evolution of Mexican food in New York has been gratifying, not so much because of deviation from the classics but by the  refining of them and giving them a modern twist in terms of color, presentation and better ingredients. In the case of Casa Bond Noho, the majority of those ingredients are what owners Rodrigo, Abrajan, Mike Khuu and Luis Villanueva pride themselves on importing from Mexico. 

         Their last restaurant was Casa Tulum at the South Street Seaport, which I very much enjoyed. The new place in NoHo is about the same size, with a happy long bar that leads to covered tables, enchanting lighting, potted ferns and comfortable chairs. The piped-in music can be annoying and is unnecessary.

The menu draws from Tulum, the Yucatán, Baja California and Sinaloa, starting with a well-textured guacamole (below)with chunks of lobster, pistachio nuggets, a dash of habanero, jicama and cilantro, to be scooped up with totopos corn crackers. It goes very well with a nicely crafted Margarita.

There are three ceviches (you can taste all of them for $49), and I especially favored the one with translucent fluke, cucumber lime, cilantro, arbol chile with a crunch of sea salt.

The true measure of a Mexican kitchen depends on the quality of its tortillas, and Casa Bond’s are absolutely superb––the right thickness, the right puffiness, the right chew and a good flavor of corn or wheat. The latter enwraps a quesadilla of slowly cooked short rib braised in Negro Modelo beer, with shredded, melting cheddar and morita adobo sauce. The enchilada s suizas are a substantial meal, full of abundant chicken, a pretty lacing of green tomatillo, and creamyserrano salsa, with a blend of melted cheeses.

I hadn't expected ravioli on the menu but they're, made with huitlacoche, ricotta, white truffle oil, Grana Padana cheese and fresh epazote  and are a revelation of flavors that encourage more idea like this.

There are three dishes meant for two but will easily serve a table of four, like the juicy confit duck  carnitas  with alubias  beans, pickled onions and a spark of jalapeño.

         For those who prefer seafood the Baja fish (for two) is a mahi mahi with cucumber mango coleslaw and habanero aïoli, while the camarones shrimp are delightfully seasoned and served with wild rice and a puree of plantains.

Every one of these dishes expands the dimensions of traditional examples you may have had elsewhere but rarely with such a synthesis of sweet, sour, salty, hot and other flavors along with wonderful textures, soft, oozing, crackling and crunchy.

This carries through desserts with a lava chocolate cake with pine nuts, mole and white sesame seeds ice cream, as well as light, crunchy churros fritters with the added surprise of caramel mousse and along with the usual chocolate dipping sauce,

 Casa Bond’s wine list is sufficient for those who don’t want one of the exotic cocktails or beer, and includes at least one Mexican wine from Guadalajara.

One always enters a Mexican restaurant with certain expectations for certain favorite dishes, but Casa Bond goes way beyond the expected by adding to the rich diversity of regional cuisines of a kind one will only find here.

 

 

Open nightly. Sat. & Sun. For lunch.

 

 

 

         After a lunch of such proportions and length, it was a lazy afternoon for Katie and David, who decided to walk off some of the fuzziness from the wine. They decided to save the nearby Picasso Museum for another day and walked slowly along the Seine in sight of Notre Dame on the Île de la Cité.
         “I’m thinking, if only we could get our hands on the hotel registers,” said David, “maybe there’s a clue to the perpetrators’ identities.”
         “Do you think Borel would allow us to do so?” asked Katie.
         “I don’t know. Much as I love you, Katie, you and McClure’s are not one of the well-established names here in Paris. I can ask, but Borel’s still finishing off the Nanterre case. And we haven’t got a lot of time left on Alan’s meter.”
         David did manage to reach Borel who said they had no new evidence on who the culprits might be who put the virus into the air ducts. David asked if the police had interviewed all the guests in the hotels who had not come down with the virus. Borel said there were more than five hundred such guests in the three hotels and some had left Paris, especially those from other countries, which, of course, made up at least 90 percent of any of the hotels’ clientele.
         “There was no way we could hold them in Paris,” said the detective. “We’re assuming that the perpetrators left the city right after they planted the virus. Concierges have a vague sense of which guests come and go during the day, but there’s no real way of knowing. There are always side and rear entrances.”
         “And what if the perpetrators were Parisians?” posed David.
         “We’re looking at that possibility, too, checking the hotel check-in records. It’s a very slow process and I haven’t got nearly enough manpower.”
         “Well,” said David, “I’m pretty sure what you’re going to say, Michel, but what if Katie and I checked some of those records for you and let you know if we find anything suspicious?”
         Borel said, “I’d love to have your help, David, but there is no way I could authorize that. You’re not a police officer and you’re clearly not a French police officer. Unofficially, of course, you could try to insinuate yourself into having a concierge provide information, but they are paid to be extremely discreet about all their guests. They are not easy to work with, even with our people doing the asking.”
         “One more thing before I let you go. What do you think of the possibility that one or all of the perpetrators, knowing that the virus would not be fatal, allowed himself to be infected and then just go with the crowd to the hospital, get treatment and recover within a few days? No one would suspect him to be the guy who introduced the disease.”
         Borel paused for a moment then said, “It sounds very farfetched, David, I must say. But if it is true, they would be very dedicated hired guns to allow themselves to get sick. And if it is true, finding them will be even  more difficult.”
         Borel, sounding very tired, told David he had to go and not to expect him to hear anything unless new evidence  showed up. Meanwhile, he was going to get a good’s night sleep.
         David told Katie the little he found out from Borel and said, “I think we’re either spinning our wheels or we’ve come to a grinding halt. Short of looking at all those hotel records, what are we going to do, just sit around and have lunch? You didn’t hear anything new from Baer, did you?”
         Katie said she heard nothing, nor had Catherine revealed anything else. ‘I’m just thinking, David, Catherine must know every concierge in Paris. Maybe she can make some inquiries.”
         “Maybe, but I’d really need to see those guest records. You’d be surprised how much info we used to turn up at NYPD looking for needles in haystacks.”
         “Well, I’ll call Catherine and ask. I’m sure she’ll help if she can. She’d like nothing better than to have some ‘breaking news’ for CNN.”
         David said it was worth a try and turned in early, even skipping dinner.
         Katie watched TV for a while, then her phone rang and it was Alan.
         “You got any news for me?”
         “Hello to you, too, Alan,” she replied. “Not much to report. We’re trying to look at guest registers in the hotels to see if we notice anything or anyone suspicious.”
         “And how’s that going?”
         Katie knew the conversation was to be a short one.
         “We haven’t been able to get into any of the hotels yet much less see their registers."
         “Meaning that the hotels may not be open for weeks and that you have no access,” he said. “Look, Katie, from what I can read, this is no longer a big story even in Europe, and there’s nothing in the Times or the Journal or USA Today. There may well be a story at some point, but it sounds like you and David are just waiting for it to break, and I can’t justify paying your expenses until something big happens. Frankly, I don’t even know what long-term story you might pursue for McClure’s. What’s today over there, Wednesday, Thursday? I’ll pay your expenses through the weekend, then if you and David want to extend your vacation, have a good time on your own dime.”
         Alan wasn’t at all angry nor did he sound frustrated, and he was probably very glad he hadn’t paid to send Katie over to Paris in the first place. It was just another story that went nowhere. Happens all the time.
         “I’m not going to disagree with you, Alan. You’ve been generous so far. David and I will probably spend another few days here in Paris, and we may even snoop around, but I completely understand your decision.”
         “Good, so when you come back you can sink your teeth into something more local. I’ve got a couple ideas we can talk over when you’re back.”
         Katie hung up and lay back on her bed, shut off the TV and stared at the ceiling. At least for the moment, Alan was right. But her instincts told her there really was a bigger story about the attack on the hotels than had thus far been reported, and she thought the French police were dragging their feet.
         The first call after breakfast was from Catherine.
         “Hey, I was able to get in touch with either the concierge or the front desk guys at two of the hotels who have always been good sources,” she said, “and though they said there was no way for them to allow us to look at the books—they’re even restricted from re-entering the hotels because the virus might still be active—but the same info is available on their computers and, without letting us just go fishing, they’ll try to answer any questions that are focused on the investigation.”
         “Fabulous!” said Katie. “Can we meet this morning?”
         “Sure, I’ll come to your hotel. It’s closer to the crime scenes than over at my place. See you in half an hour.”
         Katie told David the news and both began scribbling down questions they would use to collaborate with Catherine’s own ideas. How many of the guests were more or less regulars? Any Russians? Guests with questionable passports or I.D.’s? Any registered for just that one night of the incidents? Any they might recall leaving the hotel and not returning that night?
         Catherine arrived within the hour with her own notes, and the three Americans compared them and narrowed them down to an acceptable number. Catherine said she would submit them by e-mail, give them a call,  then share the answers with her friends. 

         They were sitting in the hotel lobby when David noticed three Japanese women weighted down with Louis Vuitton and Chanel shopping bags entering the hotel. All three were wearing light blue paper hygienic masks.
         “Y’know, a question we should ask the hotel people?” he said. “If when the police inspected the rooms they found any of those masks left behind. One of them might belong to the perpetrator.”
         “If he left one behind,” said Catherine. “I suspect he’d be very careful about removing anything he used to protect himself from the virus he was spreading. I can ask.”
         Catherine added that to the list of questions then called her contacts, who, among them, revealed the following:
        • Overall, the percentage of Americans in the hotels that night was almost thirty percent.
         • EU guests took up another 25% and the rest were of various nationalities, including Asian, Indian and Middle Eastern.          • There was only one Russian couple, but they were elderly and good regulars who always stayed at the Hôtel Anastasia because its name was linked to the Romanov daughter who some believed had escaped her family’s execution by the Bolsheviks in 1917. The couple was White Russian—the name adopted by those who opposed the Reds in the Civil War—and visited Paris several times a year.
         • Of the guests who checked in alone, there were a few dozen, largely business people.
         • None of Catherine’s contacts could say definitively which guests might have left the hotel that night and not returned. Some surely had but the concierges on duty could not recall.
         • As for guests wearing or leaving behind face masks, all reported that, yes, almost all Japanese guests wore face masks, as they did back home, while in public and they would as a matter of course discard them in a waste basket at least once a day, so there were several left behind. A face mask was not something the hotel staff would have kept track of.
         There was, however, one front desk employee—a woman—who said that when the virus hit that morning, with so many people pouring into the lobby to be ushered out by medical personnel, she and several other staff members had gone door to door to make sure everyone left their rooms to exit the hotel, whether or not they appeared to be sick.
         “I now remember something that caught my eye,” said the woman, named Christine, who worked at the de la Reine. “There was no one in the room and the bed had not been used.  And under the bed, just peeking out, was a plastic glove, you know, like the kind a doctor wears? I didn’t think of it until just now and I don’t know if it means anything at all. But the guest must have dropped it and not seen it.”                                 
        Catherine asked, “So can you get us the name of that guest, Christine?”
         “I will have to look—and it is really not something I should tell you, Catherine.”
         “You can tell the police first, if you prefer. They probably would want to know a detail like that.”
         Christine said she would have to think about it—her husband was a lawyer for the Sûreté—and get back to Catherine.