My tribal cuisine meals in Barcelona are perpetrated at Bodega Gelida or Can Vilaró (when I need to eat with a bit more gallantry and circumstance, I opt for the magnificence of Ca l'Estevet, where some socialist or other always gets into a good insult, and Pepe Cabot remains unbeatable as honoris causa of our restoration). Gelida signifies the libertarian appearance of Fridays on afternoons of endless gluttony: the Llopart kitchen is a magical factory that regurgitates dishes and its dining room a compendium of shouting, but the tranquility of its tortilla with sobrasada or calçots allows me to abstract myself from the noise and the recurring jokes of my friends. Lately I go to Gelida less because I have popularized it too much and for years now young columnists and wannabes who would like to write like me without paying the price of having burned their eyes in the library and also their throats, bleeding, after having emptied the glass cups and the meat that Manhattan offered us, gather there.
If Gelida represents a nineteenth-century attempt at debauchery and a good space to pity so many tired children, my moral resting machine is found in Can Vilaró. If from Gelida I enjoy the ordering of chaos, from Can Vilaró I love its passion for mathematical order and its purely pyramidal structure. At the bar is always Sisco, who acts as the man (that is, he greets and handles the accounts) while his splendid benplantada offspring weaves a calm service like a slow movement of our Garreta. This natural order, the persistence of the father, gives me the opportunity to rehearse the fallacy of imagining myself a child, and it is thus that in Vilaró I rediscover the spirit of a ñajo, for example, eating the best empanadillas found in Barcelona. The first courses are soft and Mediterranean, because excess in appetizers is something too peninsular; the cap i pota salad has a mischievous sweetness and the trinxat leaves your tongue porous like the wound of a saint.
I hope Siscu's family forgives me for this article, as nothing would pain me more than to fill his place with podcasters subsidized by the Corpo and people who don't know how to properly weave sentences in our dying language. But I can't help it because eating at Can Vilaró is one of the few things that gives me peace in this our dreadful and beloved city. There is a kind of Mediterranean pleasure that satisfies without satiety; there is a Barcelonian happiness that consists of the measure of a second course without excesses and with the same restraint of post-war godmothers. This ethic of reserve is found in the cod with onion, in the delicious suckling pigs, and also in the benignity of the rabbit they bake at Vilaró. At home, we are not much for sweets, but the cottage cheese flan is undeniable and lasts less than an Our Father. You can have your coffee calmly, contemplating Sant Antoni, the only superblock the communists have done well.
When Barcelona has identity crises, the best thing its natives can do is fill the establishments that have honorably persisted in the sacred continuity of days. Can Vilaró is one of these places, and this is how I want to sing its praises before the city's idle children invade it and force us to exile ourselves to an alternative place. It will be very difficult for us, because Sisco and his daughters give us wonderful meals, oases, and peace amidst the mediocre bombs that kill this our Barcelona with boredom.