"We lunched upstairs at Botin’s. It is one of the best restaurants in the world. We had roast young suckling pig and drank rioja alta. Brett did not eat much. She never ate much. I ate a very big meal and drank three bottles of rioja alta."—Jake Barnes, the lead character in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926).

 

 

Madrid’s Restaurante Sobrino de Botín is one of the most famous restaurants in the world. Known and revered simply as “Botín” by every aficionado of Ernest Hemingway’s defining first novel The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway devotees think the famous winey lunch between Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley was set in this restaurant on Calle de Cuchilleros 17.

My own experiences at Sobrino de Botín, date to 1970, when my first lunch there was the catalyst for a series of events that would have a profound impact on my life.  After having taken my U. S. Navy discharge in Spain in October 1969, by January 6, was down to just 600 pesetas in cash (about $5 back then), barely enough to get by on a standup breakfast and a few meager tapas for lunch and dinner. I did have an $100 American Express Travelers Cheque left from the $500 I had when I left the Navy in Rota, but all the banks were closed, because it was the Epiphany, so I couldn’t cash it until the next day.

To pass that morning––soon to be an epiphany indeed––I opted to assuage my hunger for free at the Prado Museum and there met Bostonians Ed Gilmore, a prominent Boston lawyer and art collector, and his traveling companion  Leona Hyde. Gilmore asked me for a recommendation for a good Madrid restaurant for lunch and proposed that I join them. I told him I would be happy to recommend a restaurant, but I was near broke. “Oh, don’t worry about that, we have plenty of money,” he said. “I will treat you. Besides, Leona is feeling tired and wants to skip lunch. I don’t want to eat alone, and you can translate for me.”

I took Ed to Sobrino de Botín, so this was my first visit, forever engraved in my memory. We passed through an old-fashioned doorway with polished brass handles and crossed the small ground-floor tiled dining room with patina-layered vintage artwork on the walls.  I saw an opening in the wall just beyond the reservations station. Inside was the source of that roast-pig redolence, which wafted from a domed stone oven decorated with azulejos, colorful ceramics tiles. The smell of cochinillo (suckling pig) roasting that emanated from  this  hole-in-the-wall  oven-kitchen  primed our  appetites.

The man working the oven used a wooden paddle at the end of a long pole to slide in, position and remove the deep-dish pottery platters of pig from the oven, with four rows of wooden shelves holding dozens of pigs,  their chins resting on the edge of the platter, their mouths slightly open and their unseeing eyes gazing somewhat disconcertingly in your direction.

We feasted that day on white asparagus with mahonesa (mayonnaise),  then the  cochinillo with potatoes roasted in its juices. Just as Jake Barnes did in The Sun Also Rises, we drank a Rioja Alta red wine. For dessert we had out-of-season strawberries with whipped cream.

             Photo: Gerry Dawes
 

Afterwards Ed thanked me for showing him a wonderful time  then invited me to go to Sevilla as his guide and handed me an envelope that  contained my plane ticket as well as $300 in pesetas and a check with a note from Leona saying she was going to send me a monthly stipend of $30 a month, which at the time would have been about half the monthly rent for an apartment.

That lunch with Ed at Sobrino de Botín ignited a firecracker string of events that would change my life dramatically; thus, my fondness for this emblematic restaurant has endured for 55 years. The money he and Leona gave me allowed me to prolong my stay in Spain. On the ticket they had purchased for me, I flew to Barcelona and got the job as an extra on the movie The Great White Hope, spending four weeks in the city.

 

I stayed six more  years, before moving to New York at the end of 1975.

Though Restaurante Botín is mentioned only briefly near the end of The Sun Also Rises, the notion that it was the real-life setting for the book’s alcohol-fueled, angst-laden lunch has been promoted by the owners, the González family, for decades, and the legend has largely been accepted without question by generations of Hemingway fans. For nearly five decades I also thought it was “pretty to think so” that Sobrino de Botín was indeed the setting for one of the most famous scenes in 20th century American literature.

Now comes the fly in that vino or, better put, the fly on the roast suckling pig. The González family’s claim that Hemingway was a frequent customer over many decades is based on many family-generated anecdotes about the author. But Botín may not be the restaurant that Hemingway wrote about.

Photo: Gerry Dawes

Could it have, in fact,  been that a different restaurant, La Antigua Casa Botín, located on La Plaza de Herradores, just two minutes northwest of La Plaza Mayor, was the actual location of Hemingway’s story and not the similarly named place? In the early 1920s when Hemingway first started coming to Spain, the Plaza de Herradores Botín was considered one of the best restaurants in Madrid, while the other Botin was not held in such lofty esteem.

Miguel  Izu (right),    a Pamplona  lawyer and author of Hemingway in Pamplona and debunker of Hemingway myths, in his unpublished 26-page treatise, Quevedo, Velázquez, Goya y Hemingway en Botín. Así se escriben las leyendas (Quevedo, Velázquez, Goya and Hemingway at Botin’s. How a legend is written, offered the following discoveries attesting to the popularity of La Antigua Casa Botín during the period when Hemingway was writing The Sun Also Rises.                                        Photo: Iban Aguinaga

Izu sent this to me in January 2024: “Beatrice Erskine, in Madrid, Past and Present (London, Lane, 1922), writes about the “celebrated” Casa de Botín on Plaza de Herradores, noting, ‘There is another tavern, not so well known, where the rich Madrileño and the tourist out for a new sensation never come, the Pasteleria de Cándido, Sobrino de Botin.’”

       Also from Izu: "Miss Alberta Clarke, of Los Angeles, California, sends us the following interesting 1923 account of a Thanksgiving feast in Spain: ‘Tucked away in a side street of Madrid, at the Plaza de Herradores, not far from the Puerta del Sol, is a little old tavern known as El Botin, favorite haunt of all lovers of things typically Spanish, and long famed, not only for its delectable dishes .’”

 

Before Hemingway’s first trip to Spain in 1923, American artist Henry “Mike” Strater, who had traveled extensively in Spain, drew a map of the country  on the back of a menu from the Paris restaurant Strix and wrote down a restaurant recommendation—Botín—in Madrid, which then would have referred to La Antigua Casa Botín, not Sobrino de Botín (below). Once in Madrid, had Hemingway asked directions to “Botín” or had asked a taxi driver to take him there, he would have been taken to La Antigua Casa Botín, so it is clearly the more logical setting for that famous last lunch in The Sun Also Rises.

Soon to be Hemingway’s good friend, John Dos Passos, in his  1922 book of poetry, A Push Cart at the Curb, in the poem “Phases of the Moon,” signs off the sixth stanza as written on “New Year’s Day–Casa de ‘Bottin’––which he never learned to spell correctly––but nowhere in his writing does he mention Sobrino de Botín or Sobrino de Bottin.

That Botin (below) was named Pastelería de Cándido Remis–Sobrino de Botín, located at Calle de Cuchilleros 17, founded in 1865 as a bakery owned by José Puertas, nicknamed “Botin” and run by his nephew Cándido Remis. When Puertas died, he passed ownership to his daughter, who died young, and her husband who took ownership.           

The Puertas son-in-law and partner Cándido Remis quarreled, and the disgruntled Remis left the original Botín in la Plaza de Herradores and started his own restaurant “Cándido Remis - Sobrino de Botín” at Calle de Cuchilleros 17 in 1865.     

              

After several lawsuits over the course of a century, the last of them ruled in favor of the original, so that only La Antigua Casa Botín in Plaza de Herradores could call itself  “Botín.” Legally, so that the Cándido Remis offshoot at Calle de Cuchilleros 17 could only use the name Sobrino de Botín.     

 

Miguel Izu also noted that in 1924, writer-and-intellectual Ramón Gómez de la Serna wrote, "(Plaza de Herradores Antigua Casa) Botín seems to have always existed and that Adam and Eve ate the first piglet that was cooked in the world there. . . ” and he “complained about the agglomeration of all kinds of visitors at Botín de Herradores, locals and tourists, rogues and careerists.”

During this same period, Gómez De la Serna also wrote about Sobrino de Botín, where he would go when he couldn’t get a table at La Antigua Casa Botín,  writing, “What all the Botín snobs don't know is that there is another Botín, which I prefer those days when you have to be waiting for someone to finish to find a table; a quieter Botín, lost in a more typical street, and as much Botín's sobrino (nephew) as the more famous one. In the other Botín on the old Cuchilleros street, de cochinillo asado is also good.”

               

          About Hemingway visits to Sobrino de Botín during the 1950s, why are there no verifiable dates or photographs with the González family, and no prensa tosa (celebrity gossip press) reports in such Spanish publications as Blanco y Negro and ¡Hola!?
         This is not to say that the current, now third and fourth, generation family members who run the restaurant are purposefully misrepresenting the Hemingway and The Sun Also Rises connections to Sobrino de Botín.            
     The stories Antonio González Gómez (left), the English-speaking, front-of-the-house face of the restaurant,  echo what he heard from his father and grandfather, although Antonio has never told any of these stories to me personally. But in reports I have heard from others and read, he seems sincerely to believe the stories he shares about Sobrino de Botín’s connections to Hemingway.

Photo: Gerry Dawes

    However, Allen Josephs, a retired professor, author of books on Spain, on Hemingway in Spain and former President of The Hemingway Society, along with  Joe Distler (right), retired literature professor, are defenders of Sobrino de Botín as the Botín of The Sun Also Rises. Both men cite with utter sincerity––Distler with a hefty dose of stridency called me a "supreme asshole"––that since Antonio González––or in Allen Joseph’s case, even Antonio’s  grandfather  and  grandmother––told them elaborate stories about Hemingway at Sobrino de Botín, and so they must be true.  And if the stories are not true, so what?                        
                                                                            Photo: Gerry Dawes

   

    Investigation of the existence and former prominence of La Antigua Casa de Botín as the probable setting for the scenes in The Sun Also Rises is certainly not in the best interests of Sobrino de Botín. This invites speculation about Grandfather Emilio González’s veracity, which includes the upstairs corner table shown to inquiring tourists as “Hemingway’s table.”

Virtually none of the books and articles mentioning Hemingway at Sobrino de Botín acknowledges the existence of the original La Antigua Casa de Botín in Plaza de Herradores. Very few of these writers even interviewed members of the González family. Those who did repeated what they were told. Some even enhanced the family stories with their own imagined twists such as those about Hemingway escaping down hidden back stairways into tunnels to avoid star worshipers.
         In 1984, award winning author Edward Stanton in Hemingway and Spain: A Pursuit (1990) got the information he published directly from Antonio González Martín. Turning a blind eye to Hemingway’s well-documented work habits, Stanton repeated the tale about Hemingway writing at Botín: “Ernesto used to arrive before we opened, around noon,” Antonio says. “He would ask for a bottle of wine and a glass, spread his books and papers on the table and work until his friends arrived for lunch. In those days, hardly anyone would eat before two o’clock.” “What years were these?” Stanton asked.

“Mid-twenties,” said Antonio. “I was just a boy. Ernesto told my father he had a novel that was probably going to be published, in which the last scene would be set at Botin. This must have been Fiesta—what you call The Sun Also Rises in English—but my father never knew this. He did not read books.”

Huh? The father Emilio González didn’t read books and didn’t know about  The  Sun  Also  Rises,  yet  he  made  “eyewitness”  claims that Hemingway wrote part of the book in a restaurant in the mid-1920s. Such anecdotes as those told to Edward Stanton provide the basis for part of the legend, but this story about Hemingway in Sobrino de Botin in the 1920s contains serious problems of verisimilitude. Adding to this sieve-like fable, Antonio González Martín's parents, Emilio González Sánchez and Amparo Martin did not begin running tbe restaurant until 1930, four years after The Sun Also Rises was published. 

There simply is no firm proof or evidence that Ernest Hemingway ever visited either La Antigua Casa Botín or Sobrino de Botín in the 1950s. But as the last line of the novel says, "Isn't it pretty to think so?"

 

Gerry Dawes with 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.