Barcelona: A Tale of Two Meals

Joshua Owens
Sep 3, 2018 · 9 min read

Having come from Madrid, we only knew one thing for certain about Barcelona: it was going to be a lot different.

Huiqi’s a big soccer fan, and she knows all too well about the long-standing rivalry between Real Madrid and Barcelona FC. I, meanwhile, was somewhat acquainted with the history of Catalunya, its pride in the Catalan language, and its ambitions for independence.

We got off the train at Barcelona Sants and our suspicions immediately proved correct. The city shared sunniness with Madrid, but not much else. At the train station I asked someone in a uniform how to locate the Metro station, and discovered that his accent speaking Spanish seemed heavier than mine. Well, I should say he was speaking Castilian (castellano), as is the custom in Barcelona, to distinguish it from Catalan — which I suppose to Catalanes has every bit as much right to be designated as the “real” Spanish.

The bathroom at the station was the first one I had to pay for during the trip: at €1, eminently affordable for one in great need. The Metro, in comparison with Madrid’s, was grimy. Though I couldn’t escape sticking out like a sore thumb as a tourist anywhere I went in Spain, it was perhaps never quite as apparent as when we approached the ticket machines to purchase Metro tickets in Barcelona Sants. A pudgy woman, in her mid-50s, easily discerned that I’d never used the machine before, and was quick on the pounce. With impressive dexterity, she played the part of someone helping an innocent bystander, pressing the touch screen a couple of times until it was ready for payment. No, we don’t want the whole day passes, those are like €10! No worries, she had it all under control; with a few more clicks, the machine was ready to eat enough euros for two single trips.

I fed the machine, which happily burped out a couple of cards and a receipt. It was at that moment she landed the coup de grace, talking about how en el nombre de Dios por favor es que estoy enferma, and so on until it was clear she wanted a donation for her troubles. I had a couple of two-euro coins and some small change from the machine, so I handed her one of the two euros, thinking that should be sufficient. I still haven’t figured out how she managed it, but on the screen of an adjacent ticket machine she pointed me to was a ticket costing exactly four euros, and she told me that in the name of God it would be great if I could help her just buy that ticket, and in the name of God how badly she needed it. Flummoxed as I was, and exceedingly hopeful it would stem the incessant stream of words from her mouth, I handed over the other two-euro coin, not cognizant at that very moment what was happening. I was rewarded with a sentence or two about how my generous deed would surely be recorded in the annals of heaven, or some other such glib nonsense, and walked away as quickly as I could.

By the time I had swiped my ticket and gone through the gate, the thought that I’d just been had was already dawning on me. I looked back and scanned the crowd where we’d just bought the tickets. It took a few seconds, but I spotted her, already preying on her next victim. She didn’t want help purchasing a ticket at all — that was simply her way of making money! A skilled huntress, being good at spotting the weak ones was what paid her bills. No telling how many hundreds, maybe thousands, had fallen in the same deftly woven trap.

Kudos!

She earned those four euros. And in retrospect, it was a pretty inexpensive lesson for me.

Even so, the forthrightness and impunity with which she was disposed to lie outright rattled me, and reminded me that I’d come to a different sort of place, a place so deluged each day with foreigners and outsiders that for some the only (or preferred?) means of survival is to flit among them, taking small nibbles of each as they pass by, like so many mosquitoes.

Her ability to make money through artifice reminded me of another person who managed to earn his keep through his wits alone — and of course a shabby Spiderman costume — but that’s another story, a story of Madrid. For now, we’ll keep to Barcelona’s tale of two meals.

The first meal was at Racó de la Vila, a restaurant in the Poblenou neighborhood, which lies about a half-mile from some of the best-known beaches in Barcelona. On the wall were hung probably a dozen whole cured hams, with little cups at the bottom of each that Huiqi supposed were reservoirs for collecting dripping oil, as well as bulging sheaths of garlic, each containing fifty or a hundred heads. The decor was rustic, with lovely painted tiles depicting pastoral scenes of farming and husbandry, and with farm implements fixed on the walls, and with large wooden beams across the ceiling, and the pleasant aroma of old house mixed with good food.

We ordered a salad, paella (which was one of the items Huiqi simply couldn’t miss during our trip), and a half-platter of Iberian ham, for which Spain is so well known. Huiqi had her customary sangria, and I asked the waiter for his recommendation on a solid red wine. He seemed rather indifferent, saying something like “They’re all good, just whichever one you want.”

That set the tone of his service throughout the meal: gruff and hard-eyed, it seemed we’d somehow offended him just by being there. Pondering on it later, I can think of only three reasons for him to have been so ill-mannered: 1) I spoke to him in Spanish instead of Catalan (or even English), 2) no matter what language one uses, he doesn’t like tourists, or 3) we simply caught the guy on a bad day. He didn’t seem brusque or bilious with other tables he waited, so the third seems less likely.

A poor attitude can be overlooked, but what really made the visit unforgettable was when, nearing the end of the meal, Huiqi made a brief visit to the amenities, leaving me to finish my glass of wine and ruminate on some boring subject or other, and the waiter appeared suddenly and grabbed the plate of ham with about a fourth of the original portion remaining — a good five euros’ worth. I was on the verge of blurting out some tedious polite phrase like espere un momento por favor, señor, but before I could spit it out he’d grabbed some cracked up crab leg from the floor and plopped it heedlessly down on the plate of ham, almost as if to say, in his own passive-agressive way, serves you right. At that point, I couldn’t quite stomach getting the ham back and eating it. Huiqi was most dismayed at this unexpected loss. No doubt those would have been the very best tasting pieces of ham in the whole batch.

I left there thinking that Barcelona restaurants must not be for me. But on the off chance that we might have a better experience elsewhere, we went to dinner at Els Pescadors, a high-end seafood restaurant that had been recommended by our host. This experience was much less disappointing.

We got there around 8 pm, so they were just then opening for dinner. (People in Spain tend to eat dinner really, really late at night.) There was open-air seating with a direct view of the Plaza de Prim, which was basically a rectangle ringed with benches and trees, about a half-acre in size. There was a man with a boy and girl, perhaps his children, kicking a soccer ball. They were using the underside of a bench as their goal; mostly the man just watched the boy and girl having it out, but now and then interceded to teach them a quick lesson. They were laughing and enjoying themselves immensely, and it started to drizzle. They kept playing, not seeming to notice. The wait staff hurriedly shifted around tables, but since we were under an awning it didn’t really matter anyway, so we kept sipping our wine and looking over the menu, which was in English instead of Catalan…come to think of it, our waiter hadn’t mentioned whether they even had a Spanish menu.

He was attentive and smiling even when I spoke in Spanish, though, which automatically put Els Pescadors a few notches above the garlic-ham joint. We ordered several different dishes: there were eggplant croquettes with cheese and El Cantábrico anchovy filling; a zucchini carpaccio with raw cod and vegetables with curry vinaigrette; duck foie gras from l’Empordà, Coll Verd, in salt crust with truffle and tarragon; John Dory from Galicia with browned butter and capers (and a side of mashed potatoes that didn’t appear on the menu but nevertheless deserve an honorable mention); and for dessert a pair of ice cream scoops: one of 72% dark chocolate, decadent and silky, and the other pistachio.

The menu had been whisked away after ordering all this, with what I perceived might have been a slight air of alarm. After a few moments, I asked for the menu back, wanting to glance over the dishes’ descriptions again, and wondering if perhaps we should try out the salmorejo or gazpacho, and the waiter, with a concerned look, informed me “you’ve ordered enough for five people, I think!”

I think he meant five Spanish people. Me and Huiqi, though, we were up to the task. What really made it difficult, though, was the foie gras. It was our first time eating it — you’ve got to try it at least once, right? — and we found it very rich..it was like an €18-euro block of funny-tasting butter with poppy seeds or something. At one point I asked the waiter to confirm: “Este foie gras, ¿de que parte es, el hígado verdad?” (This foie gras, what part is it made from, the liver right?)

“Claro que sí, el hígado, pero es de pato, duck. Pero bueno, no te cuento toda la historia.” (Yes of course, the liver, but from duck. Anyway, I won’t go on and on about it.) He gave a slight nod, and with that, he was gone.

Each of the dishes we tried was tasty, but the John Dory with mashed potatoes was most outstanding. The ladies sitting next to us made the meal particularly enjoyable. They told me they were profesoras at a university in a Southern Spanish town I couldn’t quite manage to commit to memory, one taught French and the other I failed to ask before they’d gone. While Huiqi and I were enjoying the meal and spreading foie gras butter on the crackers, I caught one of them staring in our direction, locked eyes and said hola.

She smiled and said they were just appreciating how much we were enjoying the meal and some other stuff I didn’t fully comprehend, and I engaged them in conversation for a bit until the waiter came to refill their wine glasses. We chatted in brief spurts a couple of times more, usually when they lit up cigarettes, about whether they were enjoying their food, how much longer we were staying in Barcelona, and other suitable small-talk subjects. They stood up to leave just before we were served dessert, and the more talkative of the two, whom I’d seen staring initially, gave some well-meaning advice about how important it is to live life to the fullest and enjoy every moment, or something along those lines.

By the time we’d downed the ice cream, it was nearly 11 o’clock. We plodded back to our Airbnb to get ready to wind down for the evening.

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