A charming pastry shop
I’m always surprised that Catalan specialty cafes offer cinnamon rolls, carrot cakes and lemon pies instead of ensaimades, chuixos and fruit cakes. It’s a very strange kind of self-censorship: if in your country you don’t have a patisserie with a face and eyes, it’s normal to import what’s most fashionable, but in our case, what do you think, that when someone tastes ours sweets and pastries will get an attack of wound? Let the tourists taste different things, man! If I go to Istanbul or Cape Town, and there are, the last thing I’ll ask for is a tortellini or a gypsy arm!
La Pastisseria Ideal: a place with history
In the Gràcia neighborhood of Barcelona, there is Pastisseria Ideal, which has been run by the same family for more than a hundred years: an elongated place, with marble, glass, mirrors and mahogany as the main elements, but nothing touched and set. You can tell that they have been dedicated to it for three generations so that you feel at home: Miquel Àngel and Lluís Álvarez, brothers, and Maria, Lluís’ daughter, are in charge of this he gives them a hand. When the pastry shop caught fire due to a short circuit on January 22, during the three months it took to reopen, people in the neighborhood left messages of encouragement and drawings to show their support.
Delicious traditional sweets
L’Ideal has a few tables where you can have a coffee, a pasta or a sandwich. It’s small and everyone knows each other, there are even people who have been there for years, like the group of centenarian grandmothers who come every week. Lluïsa, the mother of Miquel Àngel and Lluís, is over ninety years old and has retired from the front line, but she comes down every day to give it a shot and on Tuesdays and Thursdays she makes some omelettes that the angels sing : many patrons come specifically to have one of these legendary flautas de truita (€6.5) for breakfast.
Miquel Àngel and Maria are in the shop and Lluís, helped by Verónica, in the workshop at the back, where they graze the wonders that have made Gràcia salivate since 1919. The chuixo (€4) is championship : lavish — if you take two, overdose! They make traditional sweets such as the queen’s biscuit (€4.5), cream crowns (€18 for a large one), fruit cakes (€2.5 for an individual), puffs (meringue with hazelnuts and chocolate) and such as secalls (delicious and crispy pieces of corked pasta at €2.50 a bag).
A tradition that endures
Lluís, while making a Selva Negra (with cream and shavings of dark chocolate) explains to me that everything is made from scratch, following his grandfather’s formulas, and details the making of the chuixo, which is a filigree (the dough, each step to give it shape, fermentation, injection of cream). They are the antithesis of industrialization and the ultra-processed: as their parents and grandparents did, they arrive at six o’clock every morning to roll up their sleeves and dedicate themselves wholeheartedly to this profession that spreads so much happiness around the world. What a great ideal!