…also sell alcohol.
I’m not referring to posh cafés, but small neighbourhood shops that are primarily for coffee and drinks, with only the bare minimum in food.
Walk in at 9 am (I found only a few are open before that – maybe the mediterranean life?) and you’d spot older men chatting with each other over coffee…or beer (again, mediterranean life). Occasionally, there would be a few women who had come to the shop after exercise or walking their dogs.
Many coffee shops also had a jackpot/slot machine. It looked tacky with loud noises and flashing lights, and almost always, there was an elderly man playing on it.
Coffee orders in Madrid shops I went to only gave the coffee, but those in Barcelona also gave a little treat along with the coffee. Most often, the treat was one delightfully buttery and crisp biscuit, and once, it was a tiny, ridiculously cute muffin.
In one shop, early one rainy morning, a frail, elderly man walked in and sat quietly in a corner without giving an order. The shopkeeper saw him, picked out a tiny wine glass, and poured some light red alcohol that I couldn’t quite recognise. The elderly man quietly accepted it. He finished it in a few minutes – I was still drinking my coffee – then paid up, and left as quietly as he came.
Nearly every such shop I saw was run by someone of east Asian ethnicity. English didn’t work, so after Google Translate attempts, I tried to order my coffee in Spanish (luckily it worked just fine in Barcelona which prioritses the Catalan language): Café con leches, dos (coffee with milk, two), muchas café, pocos leches (lots of coffee and not much milk), because otherwise they were heavily milky and tasted bad (probably why I saw that many people had espressos). Each time I ordered using my rudimentary Spanish, I struggled to convey that only one of the coffees needed to be this way; the other, for my husband, could be ‘normal’ (thankfully the same word in Spanish and Catalan – and English).
On my last day there, much to my embarrassment, instead of pocos leches, I said poco loco! (which means ‘a little crazy’ – a phrase I learnt thanks to the delightful song Un Poco Loco from the movie Coco). Thankfully, the busy but quiet shopkeeper didn’t skip a beat; I got my hot café con leches with a biscuit.
Random things to remember from Spain – in what I hope is the first of at least a few parts.