To most non-Spaniards, the historic city and region of Valencia is most famous for paella and oranges. There is, however, an incredible edible número tres you probably haven’t heard of.
Even though it’s popular throughout Spain, for whatever reason the drink called horchata generally doesn’t seem to travel so well beyond the borders. Some in the U.S. West familiar with Mexican cuisine know horchata as a cinammon-laced, rice-based drink. Not so in Mexico's mother country. Made from ground tiger nuts (chufas in Spanish, xufes in the Valencian dialect of Catalan), here it's a usually sweet, almost but not quite milky elixir with a unique taste that’s a little tricky to describe, but practically every Spaniard grows up with it, and it’s ubiquitous in bars, ice-cream shops, and more from Barcelona to Badajoz. Sometimes a place specializes in the stuff, and horchaterías are particularly 
thick on the ground in and around the city of Valencia. Of the several historic examples in the medieval old town, just a block away from La Seu cathedral, theSanta Catalina is more than a century old, and by far the most atmospheric, lined with colorful historic murals in the Manises ceramic tile for which this region’s also famous. It’s an eatery with a full menu and wine list, but the specialty is of course horchata — in traditional cool liquid, semi-frozen slushy, or even ice-cream form — typically accompanied by sugar-dusted local pastries like fartons and ensaimadas. Another old favorite, a couple of blocks away, is El Siglo, also quite venerable but not quite so aggressively decorated.
For more of a 21st-century gourmet take on the staff, you’ll also find a few of the city’s haute chefs mixing the stuff into their culinary creations, such as Alejandro del Toro at his eponymous restaurant; Jesús Ortega at his funkier, more casual La Lola; and Iñaky Vergaz Abad at Tahine; the drink, naturally, is most adapted to desserts, but I had a dandy duck with a delicate horchata sauce recently at La Lola. And you can hop on the metro for a 20-minute ride to the outlying town of Alboraya, traditional center of the chufa-growing and horchata industry. Out here a farmhouse has been converted into El Machistre, a chufa museum complete with fields where you can see how the little buggers grow.
Paella, schmaella — it doesn’t get more Valencian than horchata.
photos: David Paul Appell
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