Obits and Pieces Nº. 3: The Salam Sandwich Bar.

As mentioned previously, my intention with this series is to pay homage to all those wonderfully grungy dives that the Elder and I used to frequent during our first heady years in Barcelona and which tragically no longer exist.

Without overstretching a metaphor it could be said that cities often resemble cheeses, in that it’s usually the little bits of stinky mould that give them their real flavour. By removing these fetid little corners, the city runs the risk of converting itself from a pungent Stilton (say Naples) to a bland and processed Edam. (Stockholm for instance)

This analogy is particularly apt as today I shall be writing about none other than the long-deceased Salam sandwich bar, a gorgeous little eatery which plied its trade with a lot more emphasis on soul than sanitation.

The bar was located on the Gothic Quarter’s Carrer Ample, which literally translates to Broad Street. This either means that the Catalans have a very curious sense of irony or that streets in the middle ages were mind-buggeringly narrow. My vague knowledge of local history and my comprehensive knowledge of local Catalans leave me in no doubt of the latter. You could just about cross the street by drunkenly falling over, I know, I’ve tried.

Why the name ‘Salam’? I just assumed it had something to do with the ethnicity of the previous owners combined with the laziness of the current ones. The sign’s obvious age and gaping holes served to strengthen this theory. It stood on a corner with glass running all round and just enough room inside for a right-angled bar and a barrage of surrounding high stools. Viewing the scene at night, it resembled something Edward Hopper might have painted while suffering from salmonella poisoning.

Stepping inside, you were struck by the wonderful smells of all the wrong food groups. There were usually a few specimens of the local unwashed fauna perched on stools and serving as an appreciative audience to Jorge and Maria, the married couple who ran the joint.

Now lets be honest here, Jorge and Maria were nobody’s idea of Brangelina. I imagine that they would be about as welcome in a modelling agency as they would at a weightwatchers convention. Yet there they were, flirting shamelessly with each other and with the punters, cracking anecdotes and making the whole experience so much more than simply grabbing a sandwich and a beer. Lung the Elder once commented while watching the two of them playfully teasing each other, that he bet the two of them went home every night and fucked like bunnies. This mental image was perhaps the only thing in that bar (among many other worthy contenders) that ever came close to putting me off one of Jorge’s divine culinary creations.

The other contenders in question were the general lack of spotlessness (read: filth), the cat which was allowed to stroll along the bar to greet customers while stepping gingerly over their besandwiched plates and of course the cockroaches. Oh yes, there were indeed roaches and big feckers too. When you pointed one out scuttling across a shelf to Jorge, he would just shrug and say “He ain’t bothering me, is he bothering you?” To his credit, I never once saw Jorge whack a roach with his cooking spatula, although it wouldn’t have surprised me one bit.

And yet all of these peripheral distractions were overlooked by the regular clientele for one very good reason. To call Jorge a sandwich maker would be like calling Da Vinci a doodler. Jorge was a sandwich artiste. Almost all the bready treats scrawled on the bar’s blackboard menu were of his own invention and every customer had his or her favourite. Mine was the ‘Gótico’ and to this day I can still taste it on my age-hardened palette. If I close my eyes and let my taste buds wander back through the fog of time, I recall the fried onions, the escabeche beef and cheese, lots and lots of cheese. A veritable A-fucking-bundance of cheese.

Bringing one of these triple-deck cholesterol bombs to life was never a rushed process for Jorge. That sage artisan took his time, his hands moving so speedily and skilfully it would make a sushi chef weep, only pausing occasionally to point his massive chopping knife at you to drive home a punchline or to coquettishly pretend to stab Maria in the back while winking at us. You were usually on your second beer by the time the oozing piece of toasted paradise was served to you. If you were smart, at that moment you’d quit kidding yourself about your gorging threshold and order a second one immediately.

Maria was a whole different kettle of fish. In retrospect, it’s fairly obvious that she suffered from some sort of bipolar disorder and was ruled by whichever way the serotonin tide was flowing on any particular day. When she was up, there was nobody like her. The wicked eye twinkle, rapid fire wit and brazen playfulness would leave any professional television presenter in the shade. But sweet Jesus when she was down, she was scary. She’d slump behind the bar with an expression of pure malice on her mug, staring daggers at everyone, chain smoking and poisoning any attempt a jovial conversation with nasty, nasty throwaway remarks. Sometimes you didn’t know whether to order a beer or call an exorcist.

Sadly, the lease eventually ran out and Jorge and Maria set up shop in another part of town. Although the new place was bigger and probably brought in more income, it didn’t have a kitchen and Jorge never got around to setting up a work station. We visited a couple of times but in the end it was just another bar in a red light district with fluorescent lights, Formica and an echo so we eventually let it go.

I bumped into a dishevelled-looking Jorge in the street about a year and a half ago. He and Maria had just broken up and because it was her name on the bar contract, he’d lost everything. According to him, Maria had been hitting the bottle and getting more and more erratic in her behaviour. It was just one side of the story but having been acquainted with both of them for years, I was inclined to give Jorge the benefit of the doubt. He was living in his mother’s place and scouting around for a new place to set up his own snack bar. That was the last time I ever met him.

I often wonder if some time in the future, while strolling down some pokey street unawares, I’ll be ambushed by the familiar smell of grime and melted cheese issuing from a pokey café. And through the vapour and grot-clouded windows, I might even catch the glint of a huge chopping knife as the chubby proprietor, gesticulating wildly, regales his customers with his inexhaustible supply of corny anecdotes.

That would be nice.

So I salute you Salam sandwich bar, for your likes will not be seen again.

Next instalment: The Pilarica.

Obits and Pieces Nº. 2 – Chez Popov.

As mentioned previously, my intention with this series is to pay homage to all those wonderfully grungy dives that the Elder and I used to frequent during our first heady years in Barcelona and which tragically no longer exist.


Within the cannon of Spanish-nightlife jargon, one often comes across the word ‘El After’. This little bon mot refers to those bars that remain open long after the standard bars (which already stay open pretty late) have pulled their shutters.

Now to refer to Chez Popov as an ‘After’ would be doing it an injustice. Chez Popov was the last-resort oasis that would welcome you with open tentacles when all other watering holes had dried up and you were too drunk to know better. Chez Popov only began to hit full swing when the street-cleaning machines were hitting the streets. Chez Popov was in essence the ‘After’s After’.

Please note that any difficulty I may have in describing the place is not due to a lack of expressive ability on my part but more down to the fact that when there, I was never, ever even remotely sober. So pray, cut an old drunk some slack.

The bar was located down a litter-strewn, urine-marinated back lane which ran parallel to the Ramblas. One would never guess while sitting during daylight hours in the charming and civilized Café de L’Opera that right behind your bar, another far seedier one sat waiting for night to fall.

So you’re on the streets of the Raval in the wee hours of a Sunday morning after having been slung out of some overcrowded drinking pit. You’re enjoying the oxygen-rich night air, working very hard in the field of optical focus and trying desperately not to have your pockets picked by the local North African entrepreneurs. What to you do? Well heck, you decide to have one for the road, don’t you? This is because you are a moron.

So you tramp back across the Ramblas trying not to slip on the recently hosed paving tiles, pass McDonalds with its characteristic McDonalds' stench, swing a left through the piles of cardboard boxes and suspicious looking puddles. You toss a mental coin in your head as to whether this new stench is worse than the previous one. And finally you arrive at the gigantic wooden door with the proprietor standing outside vetting all those who enter.

A little man with the bitter face of a bulldog licking piss off a nettle, he stares at everyone who arrives with total and utter hostility as if they’d all been dipped in shit and then sent to rob him. He still lets them all in though. You often wonder what he’s looking for with this little checkpoint routine. I mean, if he’s letting every drugged up, drunken lowlife inside the kip, what exactly would it take to get refused at the door?

You enter. The place (if beer-doused memory serves me well) looks a little like an Andalucian tapas restaurant, whitewashed walls with some decorative tiles, wooden benches and stairs, black cast-iron lighting fixtures. Breathing the air in Chez Popov challenges any preconceived notion you may have had about human sweat being exclusively a liquid.

El Diabolico comes over and gruffly takes your order. Poor guy. He may be a wonderfully warm human being when you get to know him but everybody calls him El Diabolico because he has the most evil face you’ve ever seen. It’s quite impressive really. Imagine what the actor Dan Hedaya would look like after knocking back a draught of Dr. Jekyll’s potion.

The moment you take the first slug of your beer you realise what an idiot you are. You have passed the peak of your buzz and this beer is not going to get you any drunker, just woozier. Chatting with your friends has become an effort so you look for some other distraction. As always, there is the video jukebox in the corner, as always there is you fiddling clumsily in your pockets for some change and like on every other visit to Chez P, you observe yourself punching in the same damn code. You sit back on your bench, ignore your friends and wait for the bright and glaring primary colours of Kylie Minogue’s, Confide In Me to appear.

You are amazed at the video director’s skill in being able to reactivate the libido of what is essentially an alcohol-saturated sack of skin and flesh. You can imagine yourself long into the future, a frail 92-year old, not too many marbles left to lose, half-abandoned in a remote old-folks home. And in some televised (or pod-ized or whatever the technology will be then) tribute to the nineties, that video once again pops up on the screen. You’d like to think that, despite your diminished constitution and meagre mental fortitude, the video will still work its old magic and get the sap flowing in your twig-like frame. The nurses will not believe their eyes when they notice that the image isn’t the only thing that’s popping up.

The rest of the evening is a blur and you only half remember the walk home. You of course, realise what an utter spa you were to have tried to squeeze more out of the night and swear never to return to that armpit. I honestly rarely enjoyed my time in that damn bar but now that it’s gone, I really miss knowing it’s there.

So I salute you Chez Popov, for your likes will not be seen again.

Next instalment - The Salam Sandwich Bar

Obits and Pieces Nº. 1 – The Guitar Bar.

As mentioned previously, my intention with this series is to pay homage to all those wonderfully grungy dives that the Elder and I used to frequent during our first heady years in Barcelona and which tragically no longer exist.


The first instalment will deal with the most recent of these to close its doors to the world and the taste of tragedy is therefore still fresh on our palettes. We don’t even know what the dive was really called or if it even had a name, we just refered to it as the Guitar Bar and with good reason.

It stood (or rather slouched) on the Rambla Prat in Gracia, right in front of the Bosque cinema. The façade was so discrete that it bordered on urban camouflage and you would have passed it without a glance, lest you were specifically looking for a tatty pit for casual music. The windows were covered from the inside with a bizarre collage of glossy photos which had long since turned light blue with age.

One entered the establishment by descending several stone stairs into a semi-lit space in which everything seemed to be charmingly tinted in sepia. Charming that is until you realized that the tone came mostly from filth and the years. If my memory serves me right, the floors were checkered with black and white tiles, there were crates of empty bottles in the corner and the walls were the colour of a chain smoker’s fingers.

Ancient photos and newspaper articles of blues artists would stare in around you as you took a seat. The table tops were chipped marble and no two wobbley chairs ever matched. Behind the bar, there was one of those lovely old floor-to-ceiling brown coolers where the bottles were stored behind little door hatches. Just imagine a mortuary refrigerator from the 50s made out of teak.

An upright piano, which we assumed was broken, stood perpendicular to a wall and upon it rested a disorderly pile of magazines from days gone by. I kid you not, we once found a MAD magazine from 1974 there. For some reason I decided against stuffing it into my jacket pocket – one should never commit sacrilege in so glorious a temple.

The proprietors were an elderly couple. I don’t remember her well but he was an old shaggy bear with a beard and bushy mop of hair which grew whiter with the passing years. He quietly sat at a small table beside the bar and always seemed to be writing in some sort of ledger. You had to rouse him from his scribbling in order to ask for a couple of bottles of Estrella and if the fancy took you, a guitar.

And THAT was the most spectacular feature of the bar. As you walked in it was impossible not to notice the slew of guitars hanging by their necks from the ceiling like a gaggle of throttled geese. Upon receiving the order, the owner would lazily return with a couple of opened medianas and then apathetically reach up and pluck an instrument from this inverted forest of frets. If you were lucky, the thing would have a full compliment of strings and all you needed was to spend ten minutes tuning the bejesus out of it.

Usually you were not alone in the bar and someone else would be knocking out a tune at another table. If your musical tastes coincided, you would end up joining this stranger in a laid-back jamming session. Names were rarely exchanged and the acoustic strumming and plucking was never so loud as to stifle conversation. All in all, it was a very difficult place in which to feel in any way stressed.

So I salute you Guitar Bar, for your likes will not be seen again.

Next installment – Chez Popov

H1N1 – The Boogie Nights Solution.

I was musing the other day on all this international hubbub about transmitting the swine flu.

It seems that in social situations, we can no longer even shake hands let alone exchange a couple of chaste bisous on each cheek. It's an outrage. The physical vocabulary of both formal and casual greetings has been completely obliterated by this naughty little bug and we are now left to stand face-to-face with acquaintances and awkwardly wave at each other like complete wallies.

Or maybe not……

I vote that we bring back the hip bump, but as a social greeting instead of an afro-haired seventies disco move. I mean, it’d have to be a pretty hardened virus to be able to pass through a layer of Lois bell-bottomed jeans and Mork-and-Mindy embossed y-fronts to infect some poor acrylic-shirted bystander. Just walk up to the individual that you intend to greet, say ‘Pleased to meet you Your Majesty’ then both of you raise your arms high in the air, put your right feet forward and gently bop the sides of your respective tushes together. Perfectly safe.

And just think how natural Obama would look doing with say, Angela Merkel at a G8 summit. In fact the opening day of the summit would probably look something like a bunch of foxy-suited dudes celebrating Jimmy Carter’s election at a Donna Summer concert.

So listen up you World Health Organisation cats, it’s time you jive turkeys got hep to the grooviest pandemic prevention technique that ever freaked under a disco ball.

The HIP BUMP GREETING.
I mean for God’s sake, the Masons have been doing it for years!

Can you dig it, good buddies?

Misty Porter-Coloured Memories

I am not by nature sentimental and in general, the sentimentality of others gives me a royal pain in the chunk. There is however one exception to this inert rule. Places - any place where I have enjoyed a pleasant experience and retained a good memory, immediately becomes a soft spot in this otherwise icy heart.

A few weeks ago my sage old barber made a comment which rang so true that it almost brought a tear to my eye. He said that the problem with the old historic quarter of Barcelona is that it’s no longer a genuine neighbourhood but instead has become a theme park.

True indeed. The world discovered Barcelona during the 1992 Olympics and has since been sending its tired, rich and huddled tourists yearning to breathe in the storied pomp of the Catalan capital. Which is all well and good, the benefits to the economic well-being of the city are obvious. It’s backstreets are cleaner, safer and don’t smell (quite) as bad as before.

The problem is that any environment will inevitably adapt to its market and the centre of Barcelona seems to have lost too much of its character to the travellers’-cheque brigade. Where once there hailed dingy smoke-filled cafés full of ugly griping locals, you’ll now find a spanking new Irish pub or fusion-food restaurant. And what really chafes is that most of these johnny-come-lately establishments are done up in a pseudo-authentic way to give the impression that they’ve always been there.

A huge proportion of the wonderfully grimy hangouts that we used to frequent when we first arrived in the city many moons ago, no longer exist and that really cuts me up. OK fair enough, one of the reasons is because it makes me feel old but there is more to my chagrin than the vanity of a grumpy middle-aged fogy. These places were truly unique and you always knew that anything could happen from the moment you crossed their thresholds.

So as a homage to these delightful, defunct dives, I’ve decided to do a series called ‘Obits and Pieces’ where they will be deservingly honoured. Of course some of the old haunts still exist but it wouldn’t really be fitting to include them in the series. Partly because they don’t qualify but mainly because as a cynical old fart, I truly believe in the wise adage that one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead nor well of the living.

So if you're reading this, go to Hell.

Getting Old.

Doesn’t the expression ‘INFORMATION SUPER HIGHWAY’ just seem so damn quaint now?

The Parenting Taliban

The wife (CS) and I used to be good friends with another couple, lets call them Ricardo and Nieves.

Now Ricardo and Nieves were great fun to be with, we even holidayed with them a couple of times and I never recall there being any tension. Ric was the consumate gentleman and Nieves, although a bit of a diva, had a razor wit that kept any boredom well and truly at bay. But then sadly….

….kids came along.

Now let me be quite clear about this, CS and I love and adore wee Nic and would do anything for him. If I have one priority in my life, it’s that he grows up to be happy, healthy, safe and loved. Nonetheless, we have tried to maintain another aspect to our existence …. It’s called a life.

We always try to put aside a little time for ourselves as a couple, we try to maintain friends who are not part of the parent cabal, we read broadly and can hold fourth on topics of conversation unrelated to children and we don’t fret about every little thing that Nic says, feels, does, eats or shits.

Kids are resilient, adaptable, devious, fun-loving little buggers that happen to be made of rubber. They need to be fed, loved, exercised and educated, not wrapped in cotton wool. As a result of this philosophy, Nic is turning out to be an affectionate little thug and I have very few worries about his future.

Ricardo and Nieves have two kids and a third has just arrived. Ricardo and Nieves read paranoid articles about parenting and talk about little else. Ricardo and Nieves’ friends are now almost all parents. Ricardo and Nieves have become food neurotics and will only feed their kids some sort of virgin soy extract due to the horrible things that cows’ milk does to the human body. They have held vicious protests at their kids’ school in the past due to the fact that the lunches there consisted of normal food. Ricardo and Nieves almost never leave their kids out of their sight and carry them around in a contraption attached to a bicycle. In short, a long time ago Ricardo and Nieves began to tocar nuestros cojones.


But the best was yet to come.

Last week their third child, Vanesa was born. I shall translate the text message we received from Ricardo verbatim.

Vanesa was born on the 1st of July at home in the bath and breast fed for the first time right there while the umbilical chord was still pulsing with the blood that was both hers and Nieves’. In this way, they were united as one until the chord ceased to softly beat, all taking place before this humbled father. This was the process which inscribed Vanesa into her new life. A true welcome.
Ricardo.

What’s with the fucking gore? A simple - ‘Vanesa born 1st of July. Mother and daughter doing well.’ - would have sufficed perfectly.

It’s amazing the way having kids can turn normal people into David Cronenberg.

UPDATE:

We found out on the sly that Nieves had to go to hospital later on the night of the birth anyway, due to complications. I feel really bad about this but BWAAAHHAAHHAHAHHHAHAHHA!