bars, what places
A bar is a bar (hence the name) that sometimes changed into a tavern and perhaps was born as a cocktail bar, which is the bourgeois and haughty cousin of the bar. In a bar, the kitchen is disguised as an appetizer and many times -the best- of market product, fresh, shameless, exposed behind glass waiting for the order to undress it : “Demo one of those”. A bar with drinks in front of the mirror and glasses that are mirrors of the city that cradles them; In Madrid, vermouth is the norm (Don Ramón Gómez de la Serna used to say that “vermouth is the aperitif that you can call yourself”), as is manzanilla in Cádiz or txacolí in Vizcaya. Always bars.
I didn't grow up in a bar. But I remember afternoons in front of the Ghouls 'n Ghosts screen, the sound of pool cues and last minute notes, in front of a double coffee and a sandwich of whatever. I remember second dates in the university bar, as I also remember shrimp and mushrooms in one of the bars of my life. In a bar where they no longer ask my name.
A bar is the fish of the ** Pimpi in Malaga ** but also the jurucha omelette , the croquettes of L´Hardy or the clóchinas with a (two, better) albariño in ** La Pilarica **. A bar is sometimes a wine-bar but also the pristine bar of the cock , “the last spiritual refuge of Madrid” maintained Jorge Berlanga with a vodka on the wood. A bar is -a little- our Arcadia because we were happy there and with that spirit we crossed its door every day.
A bar is sometimes a refuge (like the embassy , shelter for spies ambushed by both Allies and Germans during World War II) and many times a circle of social gatherings and drones. The drink as a drink and as a divan, as Antonio Espina defended "the mirrors and the marble tables were immediately put by Venice, the musicians, Vienna and the courtesans and the writers, Paris". Literary bars such as Teide by González-Ruano, the **Harry´s Bar that saw the birth of the Bloody Mary** on Rue Daunou or -not to go too far- Tipos Infames, "the bar of infinite opportunities". Always bars.
But why do we love bars?
HOME Hard to imagine any bar opened in the last year in Madrid as a home. Neither is a speakeasy or the fashionable gin club. Some are fantastic - not all - but never the warmth of home.
SERIOUSNESS You go through a pub, you are in a bar. There is a universe in the nuance. In a bar you can read the newspaper, rush through another screen of Rayman jungle run while you wait at the bar, or seek the complicity of the barman . Everything is fine and -most importantly- no one is going to bother you. And it is that every bar must be "the type of club that tells us that we are going to make ourselves comfortable there to spend a long crisis".
WE ARE HERE TO SERVE YOU In this today of eunuchs, timorous and cloyingly well-thinking it's hard to defend this trench , but here I go: I go to a bar to be served. Moreover, I am going to be served as God. It's not about classism or distances, just a service you pay for. The smile, the respect and the freedom not to pick up the coffee cup.
PRODUCT, PRODUCT AND PRODUCT Neither low temperatures, nor siphons, nor nitrogen nor half a damn joke. Let's talk another day about gastrobars (a word that the critic José Carlos Capel first uttered in Spain regarding Paco Roncero's Estado Puro) but in the bars up there, which are always bars, what you see is what you get .
PROTOCOLS, THE JUST A bar is not a restaurant. For better -and for worse- the codes of a restaurant (of course there are) do not apply in a bar. in our bars you can be a little more you, even darn you.
* Absolutely essential for bar lovers is 'Madrid in 20 drinks, bar guide'; an essential work where they present "twenty bars that the very gods of Olympus could have frequented", in the words of Luis Alberto de Cuenca, author of the prologue.