Only very rarely do I photograph food on a plate.
However, at lunchtime on 11 November 2025 in the Spanish, Andalucian city of Córdoba, the pictured salad landed on our table.
It looked uncommonly lovely.
(In our restaurant-dining experiences in Spain, a main course very often proves memorably delicious, but salads and vegetables are all-too-often underwhelming, and/or barely-present)
I picked up the camera, looked straight down, and decided, “if this salad only looks delicious, I’ll delete the photo, pronto”.
As the image’s presence here confirms, the salad was superb.
So was the (less photogenic) fish.
The next photo in this series was also taken in Córdoba, but it looks down from a higher, centuries-older, and very much more famous vantage point.
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Salad footnote:
A couple of days earlier, at a very “historic” restaurant in Granada, we had enjoyed what may well forever remain our lifetimes’ most glorious pork dish.
It was very lean black pig, obviously-expertly marinated prior to being fire-grilled, and accompanied only by a perfectly-cooked pepper/capsicum slice.
Chances are excellent that the great poet and playwright Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) used to enjoy the very same dish, in that restaurant.
In discreet, statue form, Lorca still sits there, at his favourite corner table.
Our sublime main course was further enhanced by an excellent but not-exorbitantly-priced red wine, and by a waiter who had probably worked at the premises for six or more decades; he was devoid of pretension, 100% professional, and an obviously-lovely bloke.
We had decided to order a salad, in order to enjoy a “balanced” meal.
Arriving shortly after the almost unimaginably delicious pig, the salad proved huge…and stunningly dull.
A surfeit of watery lettuce and long-ago-grated carrot was topped with some grey-green, soggy, tinned asparagus.
On one side of our table sat something utterly wonderful, quintessentially Spanish.
Alas, the table’s other side was occupied by a nigh-perfect replica of “salad, as served in Australian country town motels, circa 1960”.