Spain: Barcelona. "Menú del día" (affordable 3-course lunch) dying out

[Art Blade]

I can't count the number of days and weeks and even months I spent in Barcelona, most of which during the 1990s. I reckon it is equivalent to about one year total. During that time I witnessed the city turn from a dirty grey concrete jungle with slums to a great multicultural and architectonic marvel. I loved to have lunch at small family-owned restaurants that offered food as if cooked by "mum" herself. Which it often was. Three course menus for a fixed price. Choose from starters like soup to main course like rabbit or pasta to afters like fruit or ice cream. It came with a full bread basket and a drink of your choice, like a glass of wine. Before the first course there were often tapas like olives on the table as well. ALL of that for around $6 to $10. I loved it.. it was great local cuisine for almost nothing. I avoided the typical tourist traps like paella restaurants and of course I avoided fast food like burger restaurants. I wanted to eat local cuisine.

However. In more recent time and not so frequent visits I noticed that many of those small restaurants had disappeared without being replaced. As a matter of fact, I had a hard time finding restaurants offering a menú del día that was anywhere near remarkably low-priced (they now ranged from like $10 to $20) and at the time, when they offered it, the menu had very, very limited options to choose from and typically didn't interest me anymore because they were just the common tourist type of dishes or weird stuff. I only was successful when exploring the dark and narrow alleys that are even dangerous if you're a typical tourist (you know, Hawaiian shirt, camera across your chest, backpack..) but I didn't quite fit that picture. I ran around like any "normal" guy and was fluent in Spanish. But it wasn't the same as before, it didn't feel like a relaxed lunch in cool urban environment, it was more like the urge to watch my back while sitting in a run-down cheap restaurant in a slum.

And now I found this article that describes the fall of the menú del día culture.

Should be an interesting read for you guys.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/nov/11/no-more-two-hour-lunch-breaks-the-slow-death-of-spains-menu-del-dia

[Dweller_Benthos]

Interesting how differently they regard lunch to here in the states. Two hours for lunch? I don't know what I'd do with all that time. 20 minutes to half an hour you get for lunch here, if you're lucky and of course that's not paid either, you punch out and go get lunch, or if you're like me, you eat lunch at your desk, still on the clock, and field phone calls and e-mails while eating. I bring my lunch to w0#k, usually stuff to make sandwiches with, as sending out for lunch every day got expensive and more and more of a hassle. Usually we had to decide where we were going and who was going to go pick it up. Eventually I just bowed out of the "lunch club" we had and fended for myself. Bringing stuff to make a sandwich, that I enjoy and know what I'll be eating and when I'll be eating is much better than wondering what and when lunch will be. Though either way I'd still eat at my desk and deal with phone calls and e-mails.

[Art Blade]

yeah, we get half an hour and have to punch out but we can't "sit it out" at the desk as that half hour gets taken away no matter what, forcing people to actually take a lunch break. I'm used to having lunch at the subsidised staff restaurant because hey, it's subsidised.. like $2 - $5 a meal, and they've got various dishes. Salads and desserts cost extra but also like $1/2 -$2. Total typically about $4 - $6. Can't lunch out for that plus you'd have to get there and back, too, within the lunch break. Too much hassle.

[Art Blade]

By the way, I was there during the Olympic Summer Games of 1992 that took place in Barcelona They prepared the city for the Games I'd say from 1988/1989 until the Games started. They literally removed the remaining parts of a slum (kind of a Gypsy colony) known as La Barceloneta which was right there where there is now a popular beach and area for restaurants and all that. When they cleaned it for the Games (actually, they did not want Barcelona to be perceived by the world during the Games as being ugly and were kind of ashamed of La Barceloneta) and so they publicly advertised that action with the slogan, "Barcelona opens up towards the sea." As a matter of fact, Barcelona didn't have a proper beach before that. And they built a whole new part, the Olympic Village, from scratch. The whole town got wiped clean, facades and streets, everything was being polished to make the city shine. We're talking a city of about 1.6M inhabitants and about 4.6M if you take into account the urban area. Ever since, more and more cool modern architecture popped up across the city. That's when the grey dirty concrete image changed to what it is now.. world class. Just add like 1M tourists to the whole mix to get an idea of what it feels like Probably not that many but some areas are really brimming with tourists.

By the way, here you can take a look, "1st person view," what the part of Barcelona looks like where I used to hang out and have lunch/dinner or just a coffee/beer a lot. It's from 2018, a guy walking around there just filming a normal day in the streets of the Gothic quarter. That aspect of a normal day hasn't changed much The 2nd vid shows you around a bit more, different quarters but still nice ones where I was also hanging out quite a bit.

Good thing: very good video quality, stabilised camera, no commentary, no music, just pure.

side note: a lot of what you can read isn't "Spanish" (which the Spaniards call Castellano) but Catalan which is a co-official language of the Spanish autonomous communities of Catalonia (Catalunya) the capital of which is Barcelona. The Catalans call their language Català.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Pretty cool, though I didn't watch everything in those, but nice to see what it looks like from the street.

[PZ]

I also like the street view videos depicting real people doing real things. I like to people watch, and would probably do the 2-hour lunches if I had a good conversation mate.

[fragger]

Heh, living where I do, I find it hard to get my head around being able to get in a car or a bus or a train and be in another country in an hour or two. Depending on the route, it can take me 12 to 14 hours just to drive across my own state

[Art Blade]