Do you see the pattern here? High-end chef with expensive, possibly Michelin-starred restaurant is bored. He wants to return to the kind of cooking that his mother did, while offering his adoring dining public a more affordable night out. A designer jazzes up the joint, and lo, a ‘new bistro’ is born.
Unfortunately, Barcelona’s top chefs have still to catch up to the idea that we’re in a recession—restaurants in both New York and London are now doing ‘eat for free’ nights to keep their customers faithful—and that means way more than just eating on the cheap. It means being flexible and making us feel special, because the crashing economy means that our rare nights out need to be exactly that.
As such I wasn’t expecting Fonda Gaig to be particularly cheap, which is just as well because it wasn’t, but I was expecting that warm, fuzzy feeling that comes with being in the bubble of a great restaurant. After all, in chef terms, Carles Gaig is a force to be reckoned with. And that I got in spades, from the deep, red leather armchairs good enough to sleep in, to the gentlemanly patriarch and his handsome family who bade me ‘good day’ as they left, leaving behind the warm glow and empty glasses of a celebration.
The Fonda, you see, is as much a lunch spot as a dinner place, and it’s packed whenever you go, thanks to clever lighting that leaves you feeling bathed in buttermilk by day, intimate by night. Either way you never want to leave. The menu: hard-core Catalan from the trenches of culinary history. Daily specials include buñuelos de sesos y setas de burdeos—fried brain fritters with wild mushrooms (€10), and the much-esteemed if rarely seen Catalan becada, woodcock (€27.50).
We begin with ensalada fresca de la huerta (€8.70). I’d hoped it would include a fist of a tomato, rugby-ball sized wedges of lettuce, spears of sweet onion. It was fine—escarola and lollo rosso, a peeled tomato, a sliver of sweet onion and a handful of top-notch arbequina olives—just not terribly thrilling in the way mother-earth salads can be.
The canelones de l’Avia Maria (€12.75), though, live up to their name. We share one order (half portions are available for everything) and get two fat fingers each, oozing tender braised beef, slathered in creamy bechamel. Just the kind of glammed up comfort food to put you at peace with the world even when the world is not at peace with you.
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