Keep The Faith

BEING SPANISH - PART SIX (RESTAURANTS)

The impetus for this "being Spanish" series was mainly comments about Alcúdia's Mile, i.e. it doesn't look "that Spanish". No, it doesn't. Or it does, if you accept that being Spanish is an adaptation, a cultural inversion for the mass tourist who needs a spatial reassurance of a conformity that could be described as "being tourist". Take a wander along The Mile in Puerto Alcúdia and contemplate its restaurants. Where do you find "being Spanish"? No, I'm struggling, too. The occasional name, Olas for instance, but otherwise it is anytown, anytouristtown Spain; Spanish by location, but a Mediterranean-lite of grill, entertainment and pizza with a splash of the Orient. At the top of The Mile, there is S'Amfora, where there is the temptation of tapas, and a restaurant with a not undeserved reputation. Close by The Mile is La Traviata with its bullfighting paraphernalia. Here are semblances, but these aside, what is it that defines the restaurant as being Spanish?

Take, as ever, our hypothetical holidaymaker anticipating a fortnight of some ill-defined Spanish experience. What does he think a Spanish restaurant might be? He suffers from a lack of experience in his homeland. Where there is familiarity of French, Italian, Greek, Indian, Chinese, is there the same appreciation of Spanish? Not really. But even if there were, a certain look would be difficult to conjure up. Indian and Chinese restaurants may follow generally similar patterns - many of them as wallpaper - but their European counterparts do not. What, after all, is a French restaurant supposed to look like or be like? Some might expect it to have strings of onions hanging from the walls, waiters in berets, an accordion player getting pissed on Pernod, and bottles of Listerine to combat the garlic-induced halitosis, but it would be an idiotic stereotyping.

If there is a preconceived notion at all of the Spanish restaurant, then it is likely to be one formed out of what might be dubbed the country-cottaging of imagery. In this respect, the Brit falls back on his own cultural symbol and reconstructs it for a different environment. Accordingly, the Spanish restaurant becomes stone-walled and flower-terraced. It is the transportation of quaint and of ruralism, and in some respects it is correct, as physically there are such restaurants, although not along The Mile. To what extent they can then "be Spanish", however, is a factor of personality and of keeping faith with a tradition not only in terms of cuisine but also style. Restaurants may be run by Spaniards, but that doesn't mean to say that they are Spanish.

Yet one asks, well what is this style? At an extreme, it might be typified by slovenly service and a salacious waiter who wants to roger your 18-year-old daughter. Some might say that this is "being Spanish". But this would be to succumb to a sort of Queen Motherly xenophobia. However, that borrowing of one's own culture is not inappropriate. For rural in Britain, think rustic here. It's the same word in Catalan, albeit with an accent on the "u". Rustic, rústic. It is redolent of a by-gone era and of an artisanship that seems at odds with the chicness that informs much contemporary restaurant design, wherever it may be. In the same way that a proliferation, surprising perhaps to a British visitor, of dry-stone walls cuts across the local landscape, so ruralism is symbolic of a certain Spanishness of restaurant. There is something of a link perhaps to the country pub, albeit that ceilings tend to be much higher. If the Spanish bar is a thing of mundaneness and atmospheric coldness, the restaurant is not. It is the pub alternative if you like - one of cosiness, of beams, of stone, of wood, of artefact and adornment, and often of low and discreet lighting.

And it is in the keeping of a tradition and of personality that one finds a different type of reassurance, one of that tradition not having been betrayed by a newer generation. There are several examples, but one such is La Parra in Puerto Pollensa where the barrels of a bodega collide with something of the pub, a grandfather clock for example. Height and stone work are perhaps no more clearly expressed than in Eu Centro in the town of Pollensa. Beam, stone, wood and barrel can be made to transform the unlovely, as was the case with Sa Taverneta des Moll in Puerto Alcúdia when the insipid interior of the one-time bar was ripped out. The floral or garden terrace can be experienced in restaurants which can occasionally truly aspire to the overworked hype of "romantic" - L'Aup on the turning to Cala San Vicente or the elaborate, lush and aptly named Jardín in Puerto Alcúdia.

For all that these restaurants may be said to typify a being Spanish, there is still the question of context. Only L'Aup in its rural setting and Eu Centro overlooked by the church in Pollensa might be said to benefit from a contextual position that makes unquestionable that Spanishness. Jardín, for example, seems like a mistake: in staggering distance of The Mile and next to a "snack grill" that was once Molly Ryans Irish bar. Some struggle alongside the anytouristtownisation of the resorts. Brutalisation-by-Dakota, for instance, has brought a hard-nosed but home-grown internationalism to Puerto Pollensa but is perhaps also an unsentimental realisation that, though the tourist hankers after a seemingly hard-to-define restaurant being Spanish, he is also at ease with a culinary, design and thematic imperialism.

* Please do feel free to send me - to the email address below - any of your suggestions as to restaurants that you feel are particularly "Spanish".


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - John Waite (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUz9ZfegpIE). Today's title - American mega group.

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