The Madrid Cafés and Bars

Down past the Castellana, on the bit called Paseo de Recoletos, opposite the Biblioteca Nacional de España, is a famous old watering hole called the Café Gijón, founded in 1888. It’s probably Madrid’s most famous joint, along with the Bar Chicote (perennially popular since 1931 for its cocktails), Viva Madrid (where the hep out-of-towners would meet), the good old Cervecería Alemana (there used to be a sign there: ‘We don’t serve hippies. They don’t like us, and we don’t like them’), and there’s the Café Central (for the best live jazz since 1982). 

I used to enjoy the Café Gijón. It was olde-worlde and had mirrors everywhere, a house bootblack, free newspapers in a wooden frame, elderly waiters in white jackets, and an inevitable clutch of poets or philosophers arguing happily between each other while seated around one of the tables (it didn’t run to a bar). Spain used to do these things so well.

I had a French girlfriend back in 1980 when I was living in Madrid. Walking into the Gijón one day, I saw her sitting by herself at a table next to a window and enjoying a coffee. I ambled over and sat down – Qu'est-ce qu'il y a? I asked (those ten years of French at school stood me well with Huguette).

‘Who the hell are you’, she answered – and as it happened she had a point, since it turned out to be somebody entirely different.

Does that ever happen to you?

There’s a scene in La Colmena (a book about the penniless intellectuals in post-war Franco’s times) where a poet drops something on the floor. When he looks up from below – he finds that his marble-topped table is in fact a reversed tombstone mounted on the ornate metal legs of the slab with the inscription of some departed Spaniard inscribed thereon.

All the tables, he discovers looking around, are the same.

Do you remember those old off-white tables, before the Mahou plastic ones came along?

The years pass. Now the Museo Chicote, with its Guinness Book collection of bottles, has a disc-jockey. The Viva Madrid (1856) still sounds good – although it has turned into a cocktail bar, the Cervecería Alemana (1904) the best for ice-cold beers (rich hippies welcome), now only with table service and the Café Central (where you could see jazz greats like Pedro Iturralde and Jorge Pardo), well, the owner just put the rent up, so the jazz bar closes on April 15th to move to El Ateneo de Madrid, just a few minutes away.

As for the Café Gijón, the very best of them all (where I would meet my father when he was in town), the place was closed last year but has now reopened as a more professional operation.

Let’s see what they say: OKDiario gushes with ‘The historic Café Gijón, located on the Paseo de Recoletos, is embarking on a new chapter after its acquisition by the Majorcan Cappuccino Group, a deal that has generated considerable excitement in the city. After months of closure and renovations, the establishment is reopening with a promise to respect its legacy, but also with a necessary update to adapt to modern times…’

Here’s El Mundo: ‘Madrid's Café Gijón reopens, 'asking' for tips in the US style and targeting international luxury tourists’. It says that ‘…The lively conversations that used to fill the afternoons have given way to an offering geared towards high-spending tourists, in which traditional dishes have been replaced by an international menu’.

The bill, when you ask for it, comes with ‘a suggested gratuity’ of 10 or 15% on top.

Now, here in Spain – until yesterday at least – we don’t tip. The staff’s emolument is included in the bill. Half the time, if you do leave the change (a few coins, not more), the boss gets to keep it anyway.

Per Svensson Has Died

News reaches me from Sweden that Per Svensson has died at the age of 92.

Per was responsible for me launching my weekly bulletin ‘Business over Tapas’ (so called because Spaniards like to seal their deals over a beer in the bar downstairs). His own weekly mailings were called ‘News from Spain’ and he passed on to me his subscription list when he retired in 2012.

Per was the leader of a Norwegian communist youth group and was charged with looking after the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on a good-will visit sometime after 1961. Per told me that the official schedule of speeches and photo opportunities was soon broken as Gagarin wanted to go drinking. He presented Per with a Soviet watch and twenty-five different ways of saying ‘Cheers’ in Russian.

We next hear of Per moving to Spain in 1966 where, he writes, ‘…I became a privileged witness to the great transition from a rotten dictatorship to a modern democracy…’. Per’s first business was in real estate, working out of Tenerife – where experience and tricks learned there set him in good knowledge for his main role, as founder of the Institute of Foreign Property Owners out of Altea in Alicante, a service started in 1982. In 1985 he published a book called ‘Your Home in Spain – before and after the purchase’ which was followed by another 15 editions in six languages. He warned against property-fraud, the time share industry, municipal corruption (we remember the scandal of thousands of homes without building licences sold to unwitting foreigners) and buying off-plan – receiving many threats from local politicians and speculators in the process.

This consumer agency would produce a regular magazine for its many thousands of subscribers with news about property in Spain – the joys and the pitfalls – and included a list of any foreign-sounding name that appeared in the Spanish provincial government bulletins (fines, alerts and so on).

Later Per and a few friends (including me) started Ciudadanos Europeos, a political agitation group pushing to get the vote for foreign residents in Spain. In 1995, we EU citizens were allowed by Felipe González to vote in European elections (whoopee!) but the Minister of the Presidencia, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, managed to stop us from the town hall vote (he thought we would vote for the PP) until 1999.

With this going on, plus meetings in Alicante and Málaga and presentations in Madrid at the Complutense, The Valencian government gave Per an office to run his program, but then de-funded it the day after the local elections of 1999 when its use was no longer important.

I next met up with him on a project to open a retirement village for Norwegians from the city of Bergen, with the idea that elderly Northerners would rather move to Spain if the municipal heath service could somehow finance a retirement home for senior citizens (it would be cheaper than one in Scandinavia – and certainly more enjoyable for the residents). The project eventually fell through.

Per spent his later years between Bulgaria (‘it’s marvellous here, and much cheaper than Spain’, he told me) and Hamburg, before finally returning north to a Swedish nursing home where he died earlier this month.

He leaves behind his wife Heidemarie, two sons and a daughter, and our fond memories.