While Planet Hollywood pawns G-rated fare, the XXX crowd have it their way in Madrid's "erotic restaurants." Three competing mom and pop-a-cherry outfits wage culinary cockfights for your oral pleasure as servers fill deep throats with sculpted "Virgin Clit" and "Intrepid Pricks."
Like Jacques Cousteau diving for Julia Child's G-spot, I venture behind the green door (OK, red) at La Olla Caliente ("The Hot C(r)ock"). Tonight's special: "Dwarf Dick." My salivary glands hardly pulsate in anticipation, but I seek the recipe to "Passionate Fucks" and "Orgasm Under the Sea."
The façade has the grace of a skid-row peep show. Florencio Del Pozo, the amiable manager in the faux leopard-skin vest ("This used to be an Argentine Barbecue. I dressed as a gaucho...") resembles Fred Flintstone.
I follow him down the mirrored stairwell to the smegma-free basement dining room, where busty, cartoonish love-murals and pastel green rock walls scream Pebbles & Bam-Bam Bachelor Party. In the kitchen, a stainless steel window ejaculates snacks on demand.
"One clitoris!" a leopard-wench yells over clanking plates.
"Gimme a chocolate dick!" comes a spotted waiter.
Florencio whips out Wonder-Bra Bread -- double rolls with nipples. "And this is a dick..." He drops the Pilsbury Doughdong, severing scrotum from shaft. "... a broken one." Fast-paced cookery turns the "Horny Tribesman's" symmetrical mashed-potato testicles and formidable venison into amorphous lumps of spud and pud. In kitchen haste, "Virgin's Lips" become Fiona's Flaps. The erect ice cream penis emerges splotched with whipped cream on an oval platter. Higinio Rufo, a moustached waiter and would-be Willy Wonka in Panthera pardus sportcoat, presses it against his crotch.
At the bar, a sixtysomething reincarnated gaucho prepares "aphrodisiac" cocktails and flirts with waitresses. "Manolín, show him the milk dick," orders Florencio. He whips out a twelve-inch-plus ceramic trouser-snake with dilated urethra. "We use this for 'cafe con leche.'"
La Olla's old locale was a bone's throw from a live sex/strip joint. It now abuts an X-rated cinema. Loitering geriatric wankers convening for the flick Megatits may inspire suspicions of dubious recipes for the special sauce, but Florencio says the adjacent business is "completely unrelated."
Meanwhile, over at competitor La Almeja Picante ("The Spicy Clam"), the window display resembles a sex-shop vibrator collection -- but with frosting. Penile pastries and T&A tarts make for a veritable patisserie of the perverted. The restaurant's bouncer summons a well-painted blonde in corseted purple evening gown:
"My father will see you now," she announces.
Behind the curtain, violet-lit darkness conjures thoughts of sweat and estrogen as "exotic" lap dancers grind against fire poles. Pubic apron-wall hangings and decorous erections, kitschy prints of busty women in marine settings -- it all reeks of false elegance and forced irony. I penetrate the deep and narrow Clam. At the back of the establishment, proprietor Eugenio García stops eating to offer a semiotic deconstruction of "eroticism" and "pornography." Seemingly irritated, he shows me an adventurous skin mag pimping his establishment. "I don't want this filling up with gays and lesbians and drag queens," he says. "I don't have anything against them, but this is a normal place. And we want to keep it that way."
"I need two orgasms!" his daughter yells to the kitchen.
"Forty percent of my clients are repeat customers," he insists. "Why? Because food is first. I serve a 750-gram sirloin."
Neighboring establishments offer similar cuts, though waiters in penis-horned viking helmets serving "Redbeard's Condom" are rare. García escorts me to his phallus palace door and, enthusiasm ended by his culinarius interruptus, I limply return to La Olla's strip show.
The gaucho-cum-Flintstone orgy of rowdiness gets going around midnight. Chomping on "Avenger Cock" and "Insatiable Widows," soused salt-of-the-earth diners howl from atop chairs, waving dick bread and orange napkins at "Los Top Boy's" and "Las Susi Girl's." [sic] The spectacle is genital-and-penetration-free ("We're erotic, not pornographic," says Florencio). Flirtatious patrons find intimacy jumping from table to table. "Here you'll find patrons parading around in their underwear, be they age fifty or fifteen," says Rufo. "Twenty," Florencio corrects.
Purveyors to perverts are spreading across Spain. Seville now lists eats on its sex circuit. Barcelona has an erotic baker. Randy restaurateurs demand reservations and deny culinary cunnilingus to hundreds of patrons nightly.
And salivating investors see the best thing since Spanish fly.
Brett Allan King lives and writes in Madrid.