La Pepica

This guide to La Pepica, the beachfront restaurant in Valencia, opens with Ernest Hemingway swapping his jacket for a waiter's apron to wait tables for laughing diners. It follows his visits after the summer bullfights with his friend, the bullfighter Cayetano Ordonez, and the three pages he gave the restaurant in The Dangerous Summer. It also reaches back to painter Joaquin Sorolla's dinner here, and a kitchen decision by Josefa Marques that changed how the city eats paella. Listen for the sound of waves; Hemingway wrote about hearing them break on the sand outside while he learned to make the shellfish stock himself.