[A Pig At Large by Wilfrid: August 25, 2008]
Veinte años idos como una brisa. Barcelona has been with me for twenty years.
The city has changed, as all cities do. I've changed too. It has been one of my three favorite cities on the planet most of those twenty years, and it's with some sadness that I acknowledge I shall probably never, now, live there.
I began visiting regularly when I lived in London. It was a short flight away; the pound usually bought plenty of pesetas. It was a practical option for a weekend break. I used to rent an apartment on c.Josep Anselm Clave for longer stays. I could buy produce from the great central market, La Bocqueria, and haul it up twelve flight of stairs to the kitchen.
Barcelona was not a restaurant city in those days. This was before Ferran Adrià had become an international sensation; long before his example stirred the ambition in young Catalan chefs to modernize and refine the region's traditional cuisine.
No: if you didn't eat your own cooking from La Boqueria, you ate at tapas bars in the Barri Gòtic. For anchoas and boquerones and mojama, the intense salted tuna served on tomato-rubbed toast, you went to Bar Mundial, then a rough joint in the backstreets the other side of Via Laietana. For fried seafood, the road to Barceloneta; for paella, Set Portes.
Occasionally you'd splurge on one of the old warhorses - Amaya or Quo Vadis, where waiters in bow-ties served stewed pig's feet on fancy plates. But they never quite seemed worth the money.
Most of your time would be spent in the old town, or walking up and down the Ramblas. Barcelona certainly attracted tourists then, but nothing like today - and in any case, I usually visited off-season.
I haven't visited for several years. In truth, I was having an affair with Madrid. And so, of course, I return to find changes. Barcelona was never tapas central. In the Barri Gòtic and along the Ramblas, traditional tapas have now been supplanted by pintxos ( or montaditos): small open sandwiches of varying degrees of ambition, held together by a large toothpick. You grab from trays, and the check is derived from by tallying the toothpicks on your plate.
The pintxo joints on the Ramblas itself were unappealing; by far the best I found was Iraty, which also serves a serious-looking Basque menu in the rear dining room.
I was surprised to see Quo Vadis still gloomily open in the Barri Xinès - ah, now that name has become politically incorrect, and we must call the neighborhood Raval. Amaya's tapas bar, once the best on the Ramblas, seems to have fallen into disuse. The restaurant now serves mediocre selections of tapas to tourists at outdoor tables. My long-time Barcelona favorite, Ateneu Gastronomic, which once served carefully sourced local ingredients (forest mushrooms, artisanal sausages, even fresh thistle salads) is now another tourist dump serving rice in three languages.
And tourists? I was constrained to visit in August, and the old town was thickly carpeted with them - British, French, Italian, German - twenty-four hours a day. A ghastly sea of fake-Irish pubs has opened to slake their thirst. Pakistani immigrants do a lively business selling cheap cans of beer to them in the streets (they turn a profit by buying their supplies at cheap supermarkets outside the city center). Even the tiny, poor apartments of Barceloneta are being converted into tourist flats.
So now you go outside the old city walls to eat. Mainly you eat in the Eixample, the nineteenth century expansion of the city - a somewhat monotonous grid relieved by the grandeur of the architecture. This is where the city's residents eat; and this is where young chefs have been engaged in the fascinating project of applying lessons learnt from the cutting edge of international experimental cuisine to their own rich, local Catalan tradition.
Two such restaurants are reviewed in this week's Pink Pig - Hisop and Cinc Sentits. In the following weeks, I'll look at the modern tapas movement, and at some of the best seafood you can eat. I'll also mooch around town generally, before taking you to the hot south for some lazy days in Granada.
By the time we're done with that, New York should have come back to life again.
