La Vara: Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition

This week’s review is of La Vara, the new Spanish restaurant in Cobble Hill from chefs Alex Raij and Eder Montero, a husband-and-wife duo who take turns in the kitchen creating delicious, exciting food that’s unlike most Spanish restaurants in the city.

The restaurant plays with flavors established by Spain’s Jewish and Muslim communities during one of the darkest times in Spanish history, but it has a lot of fun doing so. Read the full review here.

I was reminded by a few folks to revisit Mel Brooks’s classic History of the World, in which Brooks plays the Grand Inquisitor in a song-and-dance parody:

And, of course, Monty Python’s famous sketch:

Which has me thinking that with great food, as with great comedy, historical accuracy is generally not the point. Historians will not find the dishes at La Vara to be exact replicas of their historical counterparts, but that’s because Raij and Montero aren’t going for correctness, they’re going for deliciousness.