Restaurants open

We will walk through the city and see, again, bars and restaurants open until the evening. Timidly, with not much product, perhaps, but it will already be comforting to be able to enter a place and say, as before: "A cortado" and sit down (I suppose not at the bar, which is my favorite place, but what can you do?). For some time ---I would like it to be forever--- we will no longer see workers (construction workers or taxi drivers, who don't have time to go home to eat) drinking coffee in paper cups and eating their sandwich on a bench, quickly, quickly, to put their mask back on. We will see them in the bar, seated, again, perhaps not quite believing it.

The idea of a tavern is very old and makes perfect sense. There is one that offers wine and provisions to those who come and go, because he is good at cooking. And he realizes that everyone, more or less, is hungry at the same time. I imagine that the first professional cooks date back to the invention of fire, when they cooked Mammoth Texturesfor the tribe. Now we know, thanks to a site in Peru where a woman was found buried with 24 stone tools, that prehistoric women also hunted (I had always known it, if I think of who I am). Then, cooking might also have been a unisex matter.

In the literary trips I have made in life (readings in foreign countries, presentations of translations...) I have been so grateful that the locals showed me the restaurants and bars... I have been so happy when someone, from there, has shown me Manchester, New York, Paris, Naples, Mexico City, with irony and love, from the dirtiest taverns to the most exquisite restaurants, that whenever they have come to Barcelona I have dedicated myself to doing the same. It's a job I love.

Accompanying them to Vila Viniteca to buy sobrasada from Els Casals and a small bottle of Pas Curtei, taking them to have breakfast tortilla with cava at Celler de Gelida, stopping by Bodega Bonavista for some cheese, going to dinner at Hisop, which has a star and is the restaurant that invented the salt-baked red mullet wrapped in a lady's Guasch handkerchief (one day, by the way, I promise to review the more than twenty Michelin-starred restaurants in Barcelona). Or perhaps to Monocrom, to try unusual wines and eat those macaroni. Or Bar Brutal, to drink natural wines and let yourself be carried away by joy. Or to the very curious La Clara, which has a wine list you can't believe. Or to La Taverna del Clínic, where you can say: "Make me whatever you think best," or to Viduca de Sants, for a hot ham sandwich with butter for breakfast, or to Osmosis, where they will let you try an incredible sherry and where they make some cheeks that will drive you crazy, or to La Boquería, now that there's space, because there are no tourists. I like it when friends call me and say: "I'm in such and such a place. Where can I go?". On Monday, if I could, I would go for an early dinner at seven to any of these places, to which I wish a long life.

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