Las Corts and the Art of Looking Unremarkable
By Delekta Editorial ·
An old friend, a 1970s storefront, a showman with a glass jar of truffles, and a Mediterranean lobster that did not live to see Barça lose. A field report from a restaurant that hides on purpose.
Wednesday afternoon, Les Corts. A Champions League quarterfinal match is tonight — Barça against Atlético — there is tension and excitement in the air but I am here for an entirely different reason. I am here to have lunch with Alfonso.
Alfonso is the kind of friend who arrives in your life once and stays. Thirty years ago I was an exchange student in Sevilla and the family who took me in had a son my age, and that son became one of my closest friends. Somehow, against the long odds of geography and time, we are both now living in Barcelona and we are both married to Catalan women named Alba. Life is curious.
Alfonso is a journalist, and he is also — and this is the important part here — highly adept at finding restaurants that fly under the radar in a way that makes you suspect he is operating on an uncommon intelligence. When Alfonso says "there’s a place," you go. He is covering the Champions League match tonight and he has chosen Restaurant Las Corts because it is near Camp Nou and because it is, as he says "a restaurant you should know about."
You wouldn’t know about it.
Restaurant Las Corts sits on Carrer del Pintor Tapiró, which is one of those quiet residential streets in Les Corts that you probably would never have a reason to walk down unless you lived or worked there. The exterior is so completely unremarkable that at first, I walked right past it. The sign over the door looks like it has been there since approximately 1973. It has the same generic signage as a thousand other aged storefronts in the city. Except for a well-placed fern outside, it gives the appearance of a place that has put little thought into aesthetics - or a place that is actively trying not to be noticed.
But as I have learned from years of eating in this city: when a restaurant looks this unremarkable from the exterior, and the food inside is somehow exquisite, the disguise is never an accident. Whoever runs the place chose it. Someone with taste decided that the building should look exactly like every other building, and that the magic should be inside the kitchen.
As I open the door, a man greets me and tells me that Alfonso is already seated in the back. As I will learn over the next ninety minutes, the man’s name is Alex. He owns the restaurant and he is a consummate showman. Stylish but comfortably dressed and bespectacled, Alex has the bearing of a man who has been performing the same one-man show every lunch service for years and is still delighted by it.
There are no menus. There are never any menus. Alex pulls up a chair to our table and begins to recite the menu of the day, which is extensive and almost entirely seasonal. Teardrop peas from el Maresme with chipirones. Raw shrimp carpaccio. Grilled calamari with garlic and parsley. Oxtail cannelloni with fresh black truffles, sauteed morel mushrooms in season. I lost track after that but Alex kept reciting options - all of which sounded utterly appetizing.
Then on to the main courses. Alex places a large Mediterranean lobster on our table as he is talking — tempting Alfonso with a slow tentacle wave. The lobster is two hundred and forty euros, which was more than we could justify for a Wednesday afternoon. Later, I noticed that someone at the next table had ordered the lobster. It was an unfortunate ending for the lobster, but at least it did not live to see Barça lose the Champions League match later that evening.
We start with the teardrop peas followed by the morel mushrooms in a creamy sauce with hints of brandy. I realize that I had previously not actually tasted a morel, only experienced something adjacent to a morel. Whatever Alex is doing to these mushrooms — the brandy, the cream, the patience — produces a dish that is delicate, concentrated and complete.
We split the seared tuna steak. There is also a raw tuna dish on offer, and we briefly consider both before settling on the seared, because we are weak and because the raw tuna was the obvious choice and we wanted to be surprised by the other one. The tuna comes with mashed potatoes and a tomato compote, and the three components together are doing something that should not work as well as it works. We pair it with a local white garnatxa, which Alex selects on the basis of approximately three seconds of consideration and which turns out to be exactly what the food wanted.
The food is outstanding. The food is exquisite. The food is unpretentious — it is simple because the chef knows exactly what he is doing, and complicated only where complication is necessary. The result is the kind of meal that you will remember a year from now without effort.
Outside, the city is still bracing for the football match. Inside, Alex is moving between tables with the easy choreography of someone who has been doing this every day of his adult life and still loves it. Alfonso is telling me about his Alba and I am telling him about mine, and we are both, briefly, twenty-one again and sitting on a curb in Sevilla in 1993 with no idea what the future holds for us.
The bill arrives. It is more than I would spend on a typical lunch. But this was no typical lunch. We shake Alex’s hand. We walk back out into the quiet residential street and the unremarkable façade and the faded 1970s sign, and the disguise is back in place, and Restaurant Las Corts is once again — to anyone walking past — just another aged storefront on a street you have no reason to walk down.
That is exactly how Alex wants it. I am sure of it.
Featured restaurant: Restaurant Las Corts