Spain Diaries: Fit to burst
Eating to dangerous excess in Barcelona
Bill Bryson says in his book about Europe, Neither Here Nor There, “I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city.” I could do the same, as long as I didn’t have to eat.
Arriving in a new city, particularly on a warm summer’s evening when you’re ready to explore, is a wonderful, almost incomparable experience. Arriving in a new city and realising you have no idea where you should eat is on the other hand thoroughly dispiriting.
I live in London and know, as all Londoners do, that it is not a good idea to try and find a restaurant to have a nice meal in by just walking around the centre of town and staring through the windows at the diners. And yet when I am abroad, away, travelling, this knowledge goes out the window along with my ability to speak the native language.
In Barcelona L. and I stroll and stroll and stroll and pass restaurants that look too expensive, too touristy, too likely to be harbouring the kind of bacteria that will leave me prostrate for a week on their bathroom floor. The restaurants that we decide, after staring through the windows at the diners for so long that they start looking back, look worth trying, are fully booked.
L. spots a particularly nice looking place on a side street in the Gothic Quarter, but when we ask the manager if he has, by any chance, a table for us that night he looks at us like we’ve just asked if he has the Holy Grail hidden in his freezer. “No, we are fully booked,” he says quickly, and back out into the street we go.
We eventually remember how we find places to eat in London and search on our phones for the best tapas bars in Barcelona. A place called Milk has a table for us at 10pm, and we book it and go to find a bar where we can drink in the meantime, and where we can pretend that 10pm is a completely acceptable time to have dinner. And that we’re not at all so hungry that we would, if pushed, dive into the harbour, catch a fish and eat it raw.
Now the entire nation of Spain eats at a late hour and so I am not going to be the typical British man who travels down to Iberia and tells them they’re wrong for having dinner so late in the day. But I have to say that I found eating so late that if I waited only a little bit longer, my dinner could have doubled up as the next day’s breakfast, a little tricky, to say the least.
Milk was worth the wait, though. Tapas is one of my favourite kinds of food, because unlike at usual mealtimes, it is suddenly acceptable to eat about seven dishes. Tapas in its original form was actually small. The most popular story of its invention is when King Alfonso XIII visited a bar in Cadiz and was served wine with a slice of ham over the top of the glass. This was either to protect the wine from the sand, as Cadiz is on the coast, or insects, it depends on who you ask. Either way, tapas was originally just a small piece of food to have with a drink.
Now if you go to some tapas restaurants the dishes are bigger, practically meals, but that doesn’t stop us from ordering so many that they don’t fit on the table. Soon hurtling our way from the kitchen is chorizo baked in oil with bread, Spanish omelette (also known as the sexiest thing you can do with an egg), and the star of the show, the life changer, prawns.
These prawns specifically are, according to the menu, drunken, and sautéed in garlic, butter, white wine and lemon, and served with some little wraps and a dish of sauce so tasty I would, if pushed, marry it.
This night at Milk is the beginning of our Barcelona tapas odyssey, but the prawns define it. The rest of our time in Barcelona is divided up into two parts: when we are eating these prawns and are therefore happy, contented, and feel that all is well with the world, and when we are not, and are thus still happy and contented, as we’re on holiday. But we’re also in a state of deep desperation, focusing only on how we will get our next prawn fix.
And so the next night we seriously debate returning to Milk with our tails between our legs and asking for nothing but prawns for the next three hours, but instead we go to the place that was fully booked the night before, armed with a reservation of course.
The man who may or may not have the Holy Grail hidden in his freezer is marginally more hospitable now that he knows we’re actually supposed to be there. And it turns out this place that L. just thought looked nice from the outside is actually one of Barcelona’s best tapas bars. Or at least that’s according to the first few search results on Google.
And it is fantastic. The atmosphere is lovely and the food is amazing but nothing that I eat sticks in my mind. There is some particularly good meat but now, trying to recall, it could have been beef, buffalo or budgie, I have no idea. When I try and visualise our perilously overloaded table there may be Spanish omelette and there may be chorizo, there may even be some kind of seafood but ultimately, and this is the one salient point, there are no prawns.
I eat enough to feed an entire class of rowdy children but I am not fully satisfied. I am satiated, that’s for sure. I’m so full the edges of my vision blur and with every step I feel more and more sleepy. Though that could just be the late hour. It is nearly midnight and Barcelona is very much awake, but quite soon I will be comatose, hopefully having made it back to the hotel beforehand. And I have had no prawns and so satisfaction eludes me.
The next morning I awake with a plan. I will, by any means necessary, eat those prawns again. There may be an entire city of restaurants at my disposal and of course I feel should try at least one more but if returning to Milk is what it takes to eat those prawns then return I shall.
Thankfully the good people of Milk, or the company that runs it at least, have thought of me. Whether this decision is prawn-based or not, we may never tell, but they have a sister restaurant called Firebug and what does Firebug have on the menu? Those very same prawns.
We eat them on a table on the wide pavement along with the usual stuff I’ll forget about after ten minutes. Bread and tomatoes, Spanish omelette, etc. Though one memorable dish is a burger, which is tasty, but surely pushing the boundaries of what is constituted tapas to the very edge. Show me the glass of wine you can balance a burger on top of and I’ll show you someone holding it who should probably give Dry January at least a brief look-in.
But most importantly there are the prawns. Perhaps Bill Bryson was wrong in wanting to spend his life arriving each evening in a new city. I’ll happily spend my life arriving each evening in Barcelona. It’s sunny, coastal and temperate. And it has prawns, drunken, sautéed in garlic, butter, white wine and lemon, served with some little wraps and some sauce that is soon to be betrothed.
A recent guest post I contributed to
.I wanted to share a post I wrote recently for
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Some housekeeping.
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This is hysterical and relatable (why aren’t Spanish omelettes a thing everywhere?) and also I have a burning question: what is budgie???
I remember wondering, in Barcelona, how the locals could go to dinner at 10, hit the clubs afterwards, and be bright eyed and bushy-tailed at 8 in the morning at the office. It takes a special kind of conditioning... with or without prawns. Very funny, Tom!