To die of success or not

On March 24 of last year, I published an article in The New Barcelona Post titled Italia en Barcelona in which, among other things, I talked about Paisano Bistró (Lepant, 277), a small Italian restaurant that had opened its doors next to my house, shortly before the pandemic, and that had immediately become one of my favorite restaurants. One of those establishments where, in addition to eating wonderfully, you feel well-received, largely thanks to the people skills of Salvatore, the patriarch of the family that runs it. A bistro with a short but impeccable menu, presided over by pastas and Roman pinsas, and a carefully selected range of wines from the boot-shaped country.

In a few months, word-of-mouth among its enthusiastic clientele meant that, little by little, queues at the entrance of Paisano became common. In summer, the recovery of mass tourism of biblical proportions further boosted the popularity of the establishment, located next to the Sagrada Família. Consequently, the owners of Paisano hired more staff, even decided to convert the adjacent warehouse into a second dining room and doubled the capacity of the terrace. They opened the blinds in the middle of the morning, to serve the first apperitivos and feed the tourists who were already seated at the table before noon, and did not close until after midnight when, I imagine, physically and psychologically exhausted, they served the last limoncellos to those who resisted ending the evening.

I confess that during these months of tourist madness I only went to Paisano a couple of times and, although the food was still delicious, I sadly noticed that it was no longer a place to dine unhurriedly and talk about the human and the divine, chaining glasses of falanghina and sharing babas or cannoli. The incessant coming and going of customers was, in a way, giving it a fast food rhythm, and I sensed that this was bothering the owners as much or more than it bothered me.

My suspicions were confirmed only a couple of weeks ago. My partner and I were having dinner on the terrace of the Chinese restaurant right across the street from El Paisano. Salvatore passed by us and when we asked him why the restaurant wasn't open that night, he explained with a half-smile of satisfaction that they had decided that, during the week, they would only open for lunch, and also that they had closed the adjacent premises and reduced the number of tables on the terrace. The owner of the Chinese restaurant where we were sitting had overheard the conversation and seemed not to understand anything, but I immediately understood that wise decision. Salvatore knew what kind of restaurant he wanted El Paisano to be and, above all, he wanted to be happy and make his customers happy. I didn't know whether to hug him or applaud him.

The tourism boom has turned Barcelona into a place where it is dangerously easy to die of success. Let's imagine you open a restaurant in Born, Eixample, or Sants and you do it well or extraordinarily well. Let's imagine you start to make a name for yourself among the neighborhood clientele. Let's imagine you get a couple of laudatory articles and a handful of good reviews. It's not hard to imagine what can happen next, right? Every lunchtime and every night you have everything booked. So, you get encouraged and decide to expand the premises. You do two or three shifts per meal. Since your business is booming, you decide you don't need to go every day anymore and start delegating to a manager. You crunch the numbers and see that if you lower the quality of the product a little, you can significantly increase the profit margin and maybe change your car or pay the down payment for that little boat you've always wanted to have in La Escala. You can't hire more staff because you no longer fit in the kitchen and you decide that instead of continuing to make desserts yourselves, you will buy them pre-made. That is, industrial. You have more and more tourists, especially in summer; day in and day out they ask you if you make paella and, even if it's not a specialty, you decide to offer it à la carte: seafood paella, black rice, and even frozen lobster stew. You nail it. You lose count of the pitchers of sangria and mojitos you serve every night.

However, a few months later, things start to falter. You decide to create an economical lunch menu to try and fill the dining room and lower the prices on the menu, but even that doesn't work. Soon after, when you do the math, you see that you don't even cover expenses. You are forced to lay off half the staff. A bad atmosphere settles among the staff and quickly spreads to the clientele, who start leaving bad reviews on Trip Advisor. One day, with your spirits on the floor and drowned in debt, you hang the For Sale sign.

The tourism boom has turned Barcelona into a place where it is dangerously easy to die from success