The Bar Avenida

I've been chided many, many times, by friends and acquaintances, for choosing to go into "old men's bars". If you live in Spain you know the sort of place. It's not a particularly lavishly decorated spot. In fact, normally it's a bit dowdy, poorly lit, a bit grubby. It has a tiled floor that has seen better times, the tables and chairs are a bit worse for wear too. Probably there are piles of abandoned kit in plain view - beer crates, extra tables, mop buckets and over there, by the toilets, an old fashioned chest freezer, emblazoned with a company name, now used just for ice and as a resting place for flotsam and jetsam. The bar of the bar is probably quite long and it's not particularly decorative  - stainless steel or some polished stone maybe. In the old days there used to be heaps of used serviettes on the floor by the bar. The telly will be on, though usually the sound is muted. That's not the case with the rest of the place. If what your eyes see is something a bit worn, a bit past its best then what your ears hear is a medley of very loud intertwined sounds. The coffee machine hissing loudly, the coffee grinder grinding, the clattering of washing up or something being chopped behind the bar. And, over the top of these ambient sounds there will be the people. Unlike the servants in the dining room at Downton Abbey the staff will not be going about their tasks silently. They will be communicating in a loud voice or simply shouting. The clients happily join in. As someone enters the first thing they do is to greet the bar - not anyone in particular but the throng. Metres from the bar they will be making their order whether they are heading for the bar or for their usual table. If they are of a more restrained nature they may wait until their chair has been dragged, squealing, from its parking place underneath their table to shout their order to the Pedro or Santi or Concha.

I just heard that an estimated 85,000 bars in Spain succumbed to  Covid. That's out of an estimated total of 250,000. The bars, the sort described above, are nearly always family run businesses. They open at some hideous time in the morning, for the regulars on their way to work or, in rural areas at the weekends, for the hunters. They close late at night. The money they make isn't sufficient to refit the place nor to provide a decent wage to the family who run it. But they keep going because nobody in the family draws a real wage. It's more like spending money or housekeeping money from a common pot. They are almost certainly the type of bars that went to the wall during the pandemic.

It's not as though these bars are an endangered species but they are definitely on the vulnerable list. They were a product of a poorer Spain, a Spain that went to the bar to watch the football, a Spain where the bar had regulars who formed a community and never considered going to another bar, the sort of bar which sold the same Christmas lottery ticket to the whole neighbourhood. In most cases regulars didn't really need to order anything because the people behind the bar knew that Manolo wanted a brandy with his morning coffee, a Mahou when he came in at 11am, the menú (which was almost certainly basic and cheap) at lunchtime and so on. In villages the bars were the social centre, they were the club, the meeting place, the place where post was delivered, the place where advice was sought. Nowadays it's quite common to see depopulated villages offering the village bar for free to anyone willing to see if they can make a living from it because, without the bar, the village is just some houses. 

These posher bars are usually owned by venture capital groups, by a pension fund or maybe they're a franchise operation with a carefully designed image. Naturally there are still individual bars but it's a bit unlikely that the new, enthusiastic and optimistic entrepreneur will set out to produce a bar with formica tables and plastic chairs. The difference of course is that the styled bars are there to make money, to sell you things, whilst the traditional bar might have had that same end aim but it did it with more care, with more sense of belonging, with more feeling for a neighbourhood. So, probably the days of the "old men's bars", a Spanish institution, are numbered. I feel it's our duty to use them as often as we can before time does away with them.

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Just before I go. How many Spanish bars have you ever been in that you might describe as comfy? A handful at most. Until very recently, around here at least, when it got cold, most of them never put on their heating and they'd leave the front door open. The chairs are never comfortable. Even with their considered design the trendy bars will still make you perch on high stools inside while outside, on their terraces, they are perfectly happy to use those plastic chairs, supplied by the brewery, that seem custom made to dig into the soft spot in your back.