When one of my oldest friends is trying to lovingly needle me, he will mention the Barcelona Speakeasy Incident. Not a terrible down-the-bill band at Lovebox in the early 2010s, but a reference to a lightly shaming holiday-dining memory.
It was around two decades ago, if memory serves, and the two of us had gone to the Catalan city for three days of the kind of Moritz-fuelled haplessness that only a pair of know-nothing twenty-somethings could possibly devise. At one point, I became completely fixated on finding a clandestine bar and tapas spot that I had read about in a guidebook, apparently hidden beyond an unmarked, buzzer-entry door, just off Las Ramblas. “I think it’s just up here,” I said nervously, as we walked in confused circles for an eternity, ignoring dozens of wholly viable, lively pintxo spots and cervecerias.
Do I even need to tell you that the guidebook bar – a resoundingly vibeless 1920s-themed room with a scant crowd of locals just about discernible through clouds of cigarette smoke – was a totally underwhelming disappointment? Perhaps not. But the important thing is that my mate never let me forget the Barcelona Speakeasy Incident, or the glaring spotlight it shone on my tendency towards guidebook-induced tunnel vision.
It’s a memory that feels especially relevant at the moment, as we enter the season of weekend minibreaks, continental getaways and frenzied international restaurant research. As the capital warms and empties throughout the summer months and social media floods with 12-part photo dumps from Marseille, Milos and Margate, restaurant-loving Londoners will be invited to pick a side in what feels like an eternal debate: as holidaying diners, is it better to be spontaneous or to stick to a rigorously sourced itinerary? Should we, ultimately, embrace chaos or scrupulously spreadsheeted control?
In fairness, it’s a more nuanced and complicated issue than that binary might suggest. There are plenty of vast, gastronomically rich cities where a little bit of preparation and planning is almost non-negotiable. To experience the food culture of, say, New York or Mexico City exclusively through the medium of desultory tourist-trap meals would be an exquisite kind of agony (and I say that as someone very recently dragged to a Madrid terrace bar where the primary view was of men selling counterfeit football shirts and one of the complimentary “tapas plates” was a bowl of pick-and-mix sweets).
Similarly, if advice is offered up, it feels churlish to ignore it. I think of the DFL friends who have excitedly forwarded on a lengthy Whatsapp message of recommendations for their patch of coastal East Sussex, and the acquaintance who followed up a chance meeting at Gatwick with a brilliant, unsolicited map of under-the-radar eating and drinking spots in Lisbon. On each occasion, whether it led to an especially fresh, oven-warm pastel de nata or an exceptional coffee shop in Rye, the knowledge enriched the experience.
But the desire to find a particularly elusive and highly rated “hidden gem”, can be dangerous. A rigid itinerary can – as my youthful Barcelona wanderings proved – induce a kind of self-sabotaging fun-blindness. Or turn what should be a gastronomic adventure into a robotic ticking-off of experiences with a pre-approved Google rating threshold.
The key, I think, is to find a balance between hyper-organisation and something more freeform and anarchic – to have a plan, yes, but to also remember that the walk-in establishment is your friend and any list of recommendations is just a loose framework to improvise around. When I think of some of my most vivid recent holiday dining memories – stumbling on an outstanding waterside gelateria in Rotterdam; swiping sharply crisped parsnip hash browns through beetroot ketchup in a Ludlow cafe – they have tended to be the product of both reliable intel and a fair bit of seat-of-the-pants openness to wherever the gastronomic cards have fallen.
What’s more, even if travel is not on the cards for you this summer, London is full of holiday-coded restaurants that embody this spirit of spontaneity. Tollington’s transposes the vermut sodas, salty bravas plates and impromptu vertical dining culture of Spain to the Costa del Finsbury Park. Brutto still upholds Russell Norman’s legacy in the form of £5 Negronis, ruggedly Florentine chicken liver toasts and a dark, inviting bar kept aside for walk-ins. And a berth at Lucia’s in Hackney Wick, a modern, Mexican-inspired counter laden with large-format cuts of meat and pliant corn tortillas, is accessed via the kind of last-minute, human interaction that feels almost transgressive.
Global reservation and access culture can make you forget that if you are polite, inquisitive and not visibly Martini-blitzed, you often have a decent chance of snagging a coveted table. So, whether at home or away, let this be the summer that you loosen your grip on the guidebook. And, of course, if any of your friends start muttering something about an ersatz speakeasy they’ve read about online then, please, for the love of god, put a cocktail in their hand and tell them to pipe down.
This article originally appeared in issue 4 of Broadsheet London's print magazine.
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