Drinking and Not Drinking in Barcelona
A few restaurant recommendations within an essay about sobriety
Dispatch, nine months sober. Scroll to the bottom for the recommended restaurants.
I’d been in Paris the week before, and had developed this routine – “I love Paris, it's not beautiful, but it’s nice. Since I spent no time there in my twenties, no time drinking, I don’t feel the stab of absence.” Mostly true, though the stabs did come – outside a divey café in the Second, I asked for alcohol-free beer the waitress replied, with superb Parisian condescension, “We only have beer with alcohol.” Or, drinking a warm Coke Zero outside an excessively charming vintner in the Eighteenth, with a very simple, very good menu, thinking I never drank Beaujolais in Paris. But, mostly, it was easy – with Red Bull, cigarettes and butter as ballast.
But Barcelona worried me. If, as I had been declaring, Paris was to become the city of my sober thirties, Barcelona was the city of my drunk latter twenties. In Barcelona I was an apostate visiting a shrine of former devotion, a lapsed Catholic come to refuse the waters at Lourdes.
On the first morning we slept late, enjoying M and F’s well-feathered nest, and after, lay sipping coffee out of green glass cups engraved with their poetry. Then through Eixample to Apartemento’s offices – which are perfectly as they should be, a large and basically unconverted apartment – to see the new issue, which features our old flat. Months ago, when we did the shoot, I was still drinking Pepsi Max – I drink Diet Coke now – and had hoped the empty cans I’d left everywhere would make an appearance in the spread. O. S. takes us round the corner to a restaurant he praises highly.
Sitting in the sun, it floods back. I remember, no, long for, the first glass of sharp white wine, cool as the cool air, hitting my empty stomach – exhilarating, freeing. I believed daytime drinking was a rejection of bourgeois sentiment, and supported this belief with a base English mentality – holidays are for getting drunk. So let’s have it. Let’s have a second and a third. It’s Europe. I’m a Brit. I’m a European.
We order. “The plates are small here, but the food is considered, and they’re only open for lunch.” I shift into the sun a little, sipping a Vichy Catalan. Vichy is important to my sobriety here, its acerbic taste and mineral grotesqueness echoing the intensity of booze. The food is good, but contemporary in a way that’s a decade out of date: a squash salad straight from Ottolenghi, too many slicks of sauces, too neat. The deep-fried brains are bouncy but come with a spiteful sort-of yuzu sauce which clashes with everything else, a Godzilla among the earthy Catalan flavours.
But while eating I’d been distracted, had forgotten the absence. And after, I was simply excited for Lo and I to be showing T the city. “The Gothic isn’t real, actually, they moved a lot of buildings…” Eating a bad churro on the steps of Barcelona Cathedral I notice a new phenomenon, clowns with balloon animals accosting tourists, their faces a frenzy of desperation, children crying in their wake.
~
Lo and I stayed in Barcelona for a couple of months at the beginning of 2022. My diary is testament to gourmandising, excess and spiralling addiction. Two months of perpetual holiday (I was supposed to be writing, but got next to nothing done) during which I walked twenty miles a day and got drunk at lunch and dinner. Lo was concerned, but I was wily at brushing her off – besides, when else would I be able to live this Hemingway life?
“As I decide to go home I see a sign, La Sirena Verde. The Green Mermaid? Are mermaids green? At the entrance, a large fridge displaying steaks, sausages. Do mermaids make sausages? Nothing is auspicious save the menu del dia, which has tripe with chickpeas. I sit. It is warm but not hot and behind me the fridge burrs. I enjoy the polished wood. The waiter is friendly and the cook sits down for his meal, a bottle of good wine at his side. That is auspicious. A bottle of white wine appears for me. I order a Galician soup — which comes and is an embrace, salty and soft, and after the tripe, which is actually brilliant, sitting perfectly between give and resistance. After, after half the bottle, and a cortado I walk back across the city, almost skipping, gawking at statues.” - February, 2022
It is enticing – this young man, charging about, enjoying the city and its offerings. A correction: the half-bottle was actually the whole thing. And then what isn’t there: I got home and went straight to sleep, fitful and anxious, lacking the energy to tell Lo about the walk, about the ancient ruins I’d seen or the men on the outskirts of the city, filling 10l bottles of water from the public fountains to take back to their make-shift homes. I was colluding with addiction, shielding it – and from whom? In my own diary?
~
In the evening we four take T to Can Margarit
“ … which we call the Bear Restaurant. “The Bear Restaurant?” “Yes, you’ll see!” Big hairy men, with moustaches and grand frames. Bears who serve rabbit. There’s an entrance before the restaurant, this was once a warehouse for wine, and dark wood tables, Catalan jugs, and gigantic mounds of candle wax from candles accumulating for years, twenty? To compare anything to Gaudi here is dull so I shan’t. And then you have a little wine before your meal, filling a tiny glass up from one of the barrels — sweet red, dry, dry white, sweet — and look around at the curiosities as you drink. A ritual. Restaurants ought to have a ritual, even if personal. Inside it is as cavernous again, and odd and beautiful, accumulated statues, cart wheels, agricultural implements, mirrors and yet… not chintzy, not overfull, not the dining room of a tea-room in a country town.” - February 2022
And after the ritual, we’d have more wine, from earthenware jugs that emptied quickly, were quickly refreshed. I detect a raised eyebrow when we all, save T, decline the tiny glass – I insist on showing her how the barrels work. I finish my Coke Zero quickly, order another, and it comes along with our gargantuan order: white beans, peppers, pa amb tomàquet, squid, potatoes with cod, potatoes alone, sausage with white beans, mushrooms in vinegar. The bear bringing the food dithers at how to place all the plates, and in the end stacks them on two levels. We eat, and eat, and eat.
This is the food I wish my grandmother cooked – “I saw one of our waiters on a leaflet for a gay night called Rectum” M says, mouth half-full. The beans – the best I’ve had, sweet soft jewels, but mostly nothing excellent or so of note, rather everything ample and full bosomed and loving, as if – and this is so unusual in a restaurant – cooked with something close to familial love. After this battle disperses the prize is bought, rabbits roughly butchered, cooked with garlic and onion and oregano and also somehow crispy. I delight in eating the flesh from their heads.
In that day’s diary I wrote ‘I almost don’t miss drinking at all, apart from I always do, and that’s what’s so confusing’.
~
When I first discussed becoming sober, with a therapist of all people, I came to the conclusion that all arguments supported abstinence, save two: desire and a belief that my charm and humour relied on the drink. I did not want to become dried out, mournfully going to bed at nine, someone I would not invite to dinner.
For the first three or so months this seemed to be the case – my head ached, and no matter how much sugar I took in, I could not dull the cravings. I would sit at dinner, pained, my hand gripping the table or its leg or my leg, half-engaging in conversation, entirely wishing everyone would go so I could gorge. Gorging was the only thing that dulled the desperation, standing beside the fridge eating anything salty, drinking soda, a tiny Tony Soprano, paw full of cured pork.
This began to pass, unnoticeably, then noticeably. My diary from early sobriety is infrequent, missing large gaps – for the first time in five years – as if recording the ups and downs was too much to write. ‘As if’ – am I writing about someone else? It was too much to write down. But I remember walking home with L and T and saying, with surprise, having realised after a party “I didn’t really miss drinking tonight.” The first written record of this is from Paris – “I feel as if I could spend the night dancing, and am amazed that without drugs or alcohol the possibility of this is very real.”
~
On the second day we visit Encants, but find nothing. The ATM at the market never works, so I walk to Glories, first through the bit decimated by a Westfield and after the charming low-rise of its highstreet and side streets. Caixa Bank charges €7.99 to take your own money out, while all the others charge €1.99, the punchline to a Castillian or Basque or Asturian joke about Catalan greed. Marketward, I pass Bodega el Sidral, a wine shop and bar, once my favourite place to get a drink in Barcelona – lined with barrels, the excellent wine very cheap, plates of jamon or cheese or fish brought quickly, crowded with jolly patrons.
When I’m alone I often think – what’s stopping me? There are the obvious and the morally sound reasons, but there’s also this feeling, quite physical, of being held back. I felt this as a frightened child. It stopped me from jumping from high places. It made me a coward.
We meet the Tiberi – our friends – at Tiberi Bar, which they opened a few months ago. It is full of light, very very chic, with a ceiling that looks like it’s made of dripping plaster. I’m offered wine, explain I’m not drinking – oh – surprise gives way to politely hidden surprise. “But an alcohol free beer would be lovely.” It is tostada, delicious, very cold. A big table and lunch that spreads over hours, perhaps my first long long lunch of sobriety. Today is a pop up serving experimental food, conceptually fascinating but challenging to our mouths, finished with an excellent dessert. I settle back, lazy, enjoy the lazy conversation, drink many 0.0 tostadas, chat, exclaim, laugh, feel jealous of the drinkers, feel superior to the drinkers, feel pathetic in comparison to the drinkers, think that I would be having so much more fun, think that I would be so much drunker than everyone else, think that I would disguise this, think this disguise may have been unconvincing.
~
My alcoholism was underpinned by a belief that I was a good drinker. That I became jollier and more excited. I thought this was because of my nature: it was not. It was because Lo, over many many years, was always there to restrain me, to gently and sometimes sharply hold me back. And so I remember it all, remember the food eaten, the conversations had. The places of my drinking were mostly not haunts of humiliation and misdeed but of joy and exuberance which ended only in the disappointment of going home.
~
In the evening, Apartamento take us to a Mallorcan restaurant, and we are squeezed behind into the corner. The food is interesting because the Mallorcans use capers and a few more spices than the Catalans, otherwise what is noteworthy is how unusually horrible the Russian Salad is. After, at a bar, three of us are drinking non-alcoholic cocktails. “I think it’s terrible when people appropriate sober culture.” We laugh and someone agrees. “You’re sober too?” “Yes, seven years.” I shimmy to their side. This is one of the good things, the bond over shared abstinence, trauma, of our failure leading to a novel sort of success. “I hate people who don’t drink just because they don’t want to.” “Amen.”
I can’t help viewing abstention from choice as a waste. I take pleasure in filling the glasses of my guests, and am disappointed if they join me in not drinking.
I’m not jealous of sensible drinking. I’m jealous of people who are getting fucked up. “Maybe one day you’ll be able to have a glass of wine with dinner,” says someone well-meaning and kind. I think about this. How pointless. Nothing goes quite as well with food as alcohol, but, actually – nothing goes as well with alcohol as food. I don’t want a glass of wine with dinner, I want to attain a specific level of oblivion with dinner. I liked best to get fucked up on martini with steak or Beaujolais with roast chicken or Pouilly Fume with fish at Sweetings, but only a bit more. I’d happily swill cans of pre-mixed cocktails, slick with aspartame, out of date and on special from the Turkish supermarket because, in the end –
~
“I have not found a replacement for alcohol’s flattening quality, save sleep.” September 2023
I have begun to meditate. This helps. It is better and it is worse.
~
The next day we eat dinner at a close friend’s house, where she’s cooked her grandmother’s baccalá. Before going I get confused in the supermarket trying to buy wine – how much to bring, of what quality? Something that was so deeply natural, so exciting, is now an abnegation of my own desires.
At her house is music, soft lighting, high ceilings. She tells us about the feminist library where she works, of the varying nastinesses between people who agree on almost everything. I explain my sobriety to her and she listens and says well done, she is proud. I will not get over people saying this. It is so, so lovely. We eat soft tasting chestnut soup and then the delicious baccalá, cooked slowly in peppers and tomatoes, which she says is burnt, but isn’t. What it is is a channelling of the ur-maternal. I laugh and laugh. L describes some snails – giant, stone snails – she’d seen earlier astride a doorway in San Antoni.
When I would take breaks from drinking, I’d say that the constant clarity was exhausting. This is still the case. But I have begun to enjoy it, to enjoy control. The surprise is that this control can feel much more alienating than drunkenness. This is exciting. While drunk all movements, speech, seemed to flow from some central id, animal and without thought. Now I choose to engage or not, feel like my own puppeteer, one step removed.
~
On the last day we have lunch at Can Vilaro, which my friend A showed me in 2021. “It’s my favourite place for lunch!” I keep telling everyone. We sit outside and are alternatively cold and warm in the shade and sun, moving our chairs and the table around. The placemats are illustrated with a man and woman at table, her hand on her own breast.
The first time I came, A and I got the last two chairs at the bar surrounded by older Catalans sitting down for lunch. These older Catalans, serious people, had a gallic look about them – the men quite often wear berets and look like idealised and well-off French peasants, red nosed and bulbous and since serious people come here, the food is serious too. Today, tripe, pig’s trotter, meat, fat, frying, everyone but me a little upset by the earthiness of it all, but I, enjoyer of earth, am in heaven. The tripe and trotters do not simply melt, but dissolve in the mouth, as if coming home.
The chefs practise a neat precision, with a casual sort of flair, unpretentious in comfortable expertise. When we’re paying, the owner recognises me, grinning, and grinning tells me I must cook with him when I return. Happy – I, egotist, adore to be remembered – and then wonder if he recognised me because I’d been over-excited – drunk – when I’d come last.
~
The last evening we went on pilgrimage.
“A grumpy sky, so F & I jumped in a cab. Not too many outside El X and we wave to Laura. “No Lowena?” “She’s sleeping.” “Clever girl.” It begins to rain, two Greek girls come behind us and ask if the food’s good. “Best in the city.” One of the girls holds her umbrella over F, he moves, she gets wet. It’s snowing in Athens. “Boys, you want a drink?” Laura brings us vermouth, points us to the barrel table outside, F splashes his hand on the table, “like a wet fish.” Splash splash. Vermouth in little glasses, super chic, olives with anchovies in them. Tomorrow F tells me of his shock. “Waiter, waiter, there’s a fish in my drink!”
Laura pops her head out, “I’ll bring you some cockles!” They come, little neat commas all together with a little lemon and pepper, and they taste like truffles. It’s not the oil, it’s these odd creatures. Inside, a good table and the special planning of ordering, Laura popping up now and then to say “get clams” then “are you sure you want clams?” then “when I marry I want to stay on a boat and only eat clams.” I’ve never really met with tinned fish culture, not properly, where they bring the tin to your table and you have a look, like it’s a bottle of wine. F declares he’ll draw everything we eat. I am happy and hungover and damp here, drinking wine chosen by the boss.
We have clams, big creatures, and with the plate a glass is bought — for the juice — and they are good and the juice sings of the sea. Then butter-soft chickpeas with cod tripe — meltier than any other tripe, not fishy at all, caressing — and mussels cooked simply in oil, a little smokey, wonderful, chickpeas with pancetta, forever my favourite dish, pork with peppers (the best pork loin I’ve eaten?) and when we are too full Laura brings us a little plate of copa, as a treat. After, chocolates, biscuits, sweet wine, coffee, and we roll ourselves home, walking first the wrong way.” – March 2022
A visit that echoes all others. El X is my favourite restaurant in Barcelona. In the world? It is perfect. The patroness, La Laura, the People’s Princess, is known everywhere for her charm, kindness, beauty. Everyone is in love with her and because of this, even if the restaurant were awful, it would still be full.
Walking to El X I am nervous, and turn this little well-worn nervousness over in my pocket. Will I have spoiled it? “We used to get pissed there, then swim in the sea.” “It’s too cold tonight anyway.” I would enter a special abandon. I do not think I was ever too drunk here, I was always exuberant. One night I drank from a porron, properly, letting the vermouth cascade off my nose and into my mouth.
La Laura greets us, grinning, energetic, half-writing an email, half-smoking a cigarette. On the way over we’ve had the conversation about knowing her everyone has – all trying to stake a special claim to her affection. “Xampanyet of course?” she asks me, meaning the sweet cava that is the house’s speciality. “No…” Oh well, no one worried, no one cares, 0.0 is bought. Inside it is loud and hectic and I can’t hear everyone. For a second I am irritated, wanting to hide – wanting to deaden the noise and the bright lights. But I adjust. The adjusting is new, this animal readying to an environment. Eyes opening more. The food begins, my voice grows louder, my ears begin to listen. Clang clang clang sounds the tip bell.
Tuna like butter over leeks, charry salty mussels, ceviche with oil which has a deep and forgotten flavour, beans black with cuttlefish ink, a tortilla dripping wet, sausage and celeriac mash, chickpeas with bacon, the best in the world, pork loin, the best I’ve had, Spanish coppa with spiked bread sticks. None of this needs description, description would give nothing – this was a mass, a river, a wave of flavour and care and intelligence made manifest, washing all else away.
Each bite did not offer a revelation, did not say ‘now that you are sober it is better’. But each bite did not, either, call out for the drink. Each bite was its own, each enjoyment individual. This is all I hope for, not an experience that is the same or analogous – I will not lose myself as I did – but one that is novel and fresh, with new troughs, new peaks.
I would be so grateful if you try and spread Greed </3
Not all the restaurants mentioned, just those I’d recommend.
Can Margarit, Carrer De La Concordia, 21, 08004 Barcelona, Spain
Bodega el Sidral, C. del dos de Maig, 213, L'Eixample, 08013 Barcelona, Spain
Tiberi Bar, Carrer de Vila i Vilà, 67, Sants-Montjuïc, 08004 Barcelona, Spain
Can Vilaro, C/ del Comte Borrell, 61, L'Eixample, 08015 Barcelona, Spain
El Xampanyet, C/ de Montcada, 22, Ciutat Vella, 08003 Barcelona, Spain