In Barcelona, one of the best chefs in the world works, and his name is Giacomo Hassan. After passing through Alegría in Les Corts and the Hotel Edition in Santa Caterina, two spaces that failed to exploit the immense talent of this 32-year-old Milanese, Hassan has taken over Bodega Bonay, on the right side of the Eixample, and since November 2019, he has been producing an art there that must be evaluated and enjoyed beyond the dictates of Michelin stars and other nonsense.
Following the academy of Rafa Peña at Gresca and Francesc Gimeno Manduley (Mandu) at Sant Antoni Gloriós, Giacomo Hassan has not only redefined tapas and small dishes with boundless creativity, but has also transformed the very temporality of dinner into an experience where ecstasy happily stuns you like a sleeping pill and the meal transforms into a cascade of questions that trap you for days. The first thing that will surprise you about Bonay's bar is the silence that reigns in the place, as even the most inebriated diners shut up before the alla giudia determination with which Hassan imposes his mutism. The chef is a composer, director, and soloist, and his very worthy kitchen partners, Jordi Mirra and Delphine Toury, and the excellent front-of-house manager and sommelier David Amat, adapt magnificently to him.
At Bonay's bar, we can only hope that his genius dictates, because asking him for a whim would be like perpetrating karaoke in front of Mozart himself. Dinner erupts Mediterranean, and therefore baroque, with a sea urchin royale that leaves us stunned. It would seem that the subsequent leek pesto is a trivial dish, which the chef only serves us so that the throat can recover from the blow of the sea urchin, but Hassan imagines each dish as a being-in-itself, and the aniseed herb and the peanut in the sauce make us travel directly to northern Italy, which is the place most similar to a liberated Catalonia.
When you thought he couldn't eat a better sauce, the chef doubles down by combining the bitterness of labneh with falafel and fried olives. Accustomed to the unbearable Russian salads of Barcelona restaurants, mashed into a kind of execrable vomit, we are surprised by the Hassanian version of the dish with the bean as hard as a baby's metacarpal and a potato at its precise temperature point, for the simple fact that it has not visited any refrigerator. We are in Barcelona, but the diners around us are already beginning to understand that we could be in one of the best restaurants in New York, London or Paris. We continue.
My ideal universe would be a life made up of vermouths and first courses with hardly any pause, as eating animals increasingly makes me lazy. But there is nothing to do against the beauty of the lacquered eel with the very sweet cabbage salad and the grilled mackerel with Maresme peas, with which our guide demonstrates having embraced Catalan identity in its best version. I hadn't tasted meat for months, but Giacomo Hassan watches over the xisqueta lamb as it cooks before our eyes with the grace of a Mahlerian conductor and, once cut, it seems that the meat comes from the neck of the Virgin Mary.
So much joy and freedom are surprising in a dinner that takes place in this Venezuelan and poor Barcelona where ineptocracy enjoys flogging us with increasingly ridiculous restrictions. Bodega Bonay could be the exception, but we, as the Greeks already said, are the measure and norm of all things. We could shout, we could even lose our dignity jumping at each new bite, but there, in the center of the kitchen, Giacomo Hassan stands, autistic and divine, to impose silence.
My ideal universe would be a life made up of vermouths and first courses with hardly any pause, as eating animals increasingly makes me lazyDinner can be closed with the solid almond and tangerine cake or thecanoli of cream-filled pastry, butat home, we have always found it rude to end a symphony with something as pornographic as the sweet. The price does not exceed 50 euros per person (this server does not consume alcohol by express order of his excellent psychiatrist), a ridiculous sum, practically laughable, which would be multiplied by four in any capital of the world and which Barcelonans are lucky to have a few meters from home.
Bodega Bonay is located on the ground floor of Hotel Casa Bonay and it is almost a divine grace to finish dinner and retire to one of its sixty rooms, not to sleep or rub against another organism, but to meditate if what one has eaten was a dream. Let's not get metaphysical, because the hotel that Inés Miró-Sans has given birth to has modernized this neoclassical building in the Eixample (Gran Vía, 700) with a taste for clarity that would have made the genius Cerdà very happy; the attire of the rooms, from the Teixidors house, makes them an ideal place to rediscover peace, escape from this unfortunate Colau-era Barcelona and wake up happy inside the grid.
Hotel Casa Bonay is an ideal place to rediscover peace, escape from this unfortunate Colau-era Barcelona and wake up happy inside the gridEvery day there are more fellow citizens who bypass the city's restrictions to take refuge in their hotelss. Thus a large part of the diners at this dinner, who went up to their rooms with an endearing mix of shyness and beatitude. Hours later, I get up looking at the interior of the block while still caught in the Hegelian dialectic of the sea urchin with itself, the salvific presence of pesto in the throat and the miracle of the lamb that melts in the mouth. We are the scream hidden within silence.While I smoke looking at the patio of Casa Bonay, my agora companion demands more enjoyment and attention in bed, but I, remembering yesterday's debauchery, can only murmur "Giacomo!, Giacomo!" And this is, for now, the only infidelity I am capable of.
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