BARCELONA: CRUDA COD

I’ve just returned from Barcelona – a treat for Mum’s birthday.

Before any trip, I pre-book restaurants. My fear is wandering foreign streets and ending up in some chain or a place equivalent to Coffee Concerto. The waste of a holiday meal is one of my many pet hates, along with loud sneezing men and over-sensitive bagging areas at supermarkets.

Mum is different. She believes the best way to discover the ‘real’ city is spontaneously stumbling into a place.

“You can’t find the real Barcelona on Trip Advisor!” she argued, as if European cities make pretend restaurants to keep their tourists away from the actual places. I wouldn’t normally take her advice, but it was her birthday – so we did it her way.

Cut to lunchtime in the middle of our trip. We had been zig-zagging for over an hour from one restaurant doorway to the next, reviewing each menu and moving on. It’s at this point I should mention that I have complicated the situation by being vegan. This is not a problem in England, but in Spain, where the cuisine revolves around meat, fish, and cheese, it was a challenge to find anything that wasn’t bread dipped in tomato.

The dark cloud of hanger began to draw in on us.

“What about this place?” Mum sighed. No doubt pissed off by her millennial daughter’s diet. It was a restaurant in the middle of the street with large rustic windows with Cheri written on in yellow bubble writing. I didn’t look at the menu, I just resigned to the fact it was going to be another tomato bread event.

Cheri had the kind of buzz you would find in Soho on a Thursday lunchtime. The interior was rustic, with murky mirrors and bottles of wine towering up the walls. In terms of ambience, it was perfect. We were taken to a small table at the back, which gave us a view of the whole floor.

Directly in front of us was a table of businessmen sharing paella, their faces wrinkled, pink and bloated. Next to us was a table of four women sipping wine, most probably complaining about men in their native language. Like a true Brit, I can’t speak or understand Spanish, but the face of a woman when she hates her husband is universal.

Our waiter appeared a tanned man in his 50s who scowled as soon as I started my order.

“I’ll have the bread and….” I did one last scan. “Padron peppers.”

“Ham is good,” he said and slapped the menu with his pen.

“Oh, I don’t eat meat.” I smiled.

He stabbed the order into his crumpled notepad, then made a noise at my mum to mark it was her turn. She ordered the cod. Then we both mumbled our usual “gracias.”

He made a noise and stormed off.

“Brexit,” Mum said, nodding. It was the first time she had been abroad since officially leaving, and everything, from Hermes not having her perfume in stock to the queue at the Spanish border, was a consequence of leaving the EU. “We have to queue here. This is where we have to queue from now until the end of time,” she said in the same tone as someone who would be saying, I told you so.

The food came out fast, my bowl of peppers and bread and Mum’s thick fillet of cod lying on a bed of brown lentils. She took one mouthful and gagged.

“It’s raw,” she squirmed. She cut up the middle revealing the transparent centre. “I can’t eat it,” she whispered and gagged again.

I suggested that she should send it back and googled the Spanish for ‘raw’. “See, just say this,” I said.

“What if it’s a traditional Spanish dish?” she cried. It was doubtful looking at the lump on her plate, but who was I to know? So instead, she sawed through the fish and hid it under the lentils like a teenage girl preparing for prom.

Her plan didn’t work, the waiter spotted the abandoned fish hiding under the mountain of lentils.

“No like? Why no eat?”

Mum cleared her throat. “It’s….it’s…crudo.”

“crudA!” the waiter snapped and picked up the plate and marched it into the kitchen. Mum and I exchanged the same panicked look.

When the waiter returned his face had softened. “I’m sorry,” he said with his hand on his heart. The warmth took us both by surprise.

“Aw,” Mum said, “I’m sorry.” Mirroring the same hand on heart.

The waiter smiled then. “So, are you two sisters?” he asked.

Mum blushed and waved her hand down. He winked and she continued to giggle as he walked off. I glared at her.

“…Mum….”

“See,” she said, “the real Barcelona!”