Carrer del Baluart, 56, 08003 Barcelona, Spain
‘There’s no sign outside,’ my informant told me over a beer in the Ramblas,’and you’ll think that there simply can’t be anywhere good to eat in that tourist area, but honestly, it’s the bomb.’
Outside the La Cova Fumada (“The Smoked Caveâ€Â) it looks as rough as heck; a door to get behind the bar and one for the customers and nothing to suggest it’s a tapas place and not simply a store for the more obvious restaurants that flank it. Iron-grilled ancient windows seem to serve only as areas to stack crates and not to look through.
A few cheap tables to share, which if you arrive around 12:30 lunchtime you may get to sit at, and the boss, a remarkably thin man who keeps a permanent cigarette smouldering on a windowsill outside, will propel you to once he has satisfied himself you aren’t just after a drink.
He is impatient, telling me in basic English to sit closer to my unknown neighbour as my legs are blocking the path of his scurrying waiters. The menu is on a blackboard, it’s in Spanish, I can’t speak Spanish but I do know my menu items so it’s okay.
My immediate neighbour helps out anyway, he does speak Spanish but is in fact an Israeli Professor of Economics from Tel Aviv and he and his wife always come here as, he tells me through a mouthful of chickpeas,’it’s one of the best in town’.
The kitchen is the other side of the room, a hole in the wall where the sound of frying can be heard and from where come aromas to waken the deadest of appetites.
The butifarra sausage comes chunked and adrift in a sea of beans clearly cooked from soaked, as the texture of the exterior is fluffy not slimy like tinned ones always tend to be. These taste of beans and that’s not a criticism.
Outside the queue is building, although as it’s Spain it’s not so much a queue as a milling mob, so we neck super strong espressos and get out to give someone else a chance. The bill is €25, cash please.
I wish I’d eaten more things, I wish I was back there now. Ah well, there’s always next time and while I appreciate the irony of my saying this, I hope it hasn’t become even more well known by then.
Hours: Mon.-Wed. 9am-3:20pm; Thurs.-Fri. 9am-3:20pm & 6-8:20pm; Sat. 9am-1:20pm; closed Sunday & holidaysClosed in August