The Road to Hell is Lined with Bravas Or, How Not to Win the War of Potato Attrition by El Equipo

Generally speaking, the BCN Week investigative team is of an antiauthoritarian disposition, particularly when it comes to overblown marketing. We like to think that we can make up our own minds, and suspect that lurking behind any major popular consensus is a small, wrinkly man with a bag full of gold that he uses to bribe the right people to love the right things. By contrast, we view ourselves as a tiny but dynamic group of combatants, easily mobilized to fight for the cause of truth in advertising. Despite our enjoyment of most alcoholic beverages, they are a mere accompaniment to the deadly serious business of derrotando the unbeatable champions of Barcelona’s leisure establishments. This month: the patatas bravas of Bar Tomás.

I. “KNOW YOUR ENEMY.”

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

First, a few words about our opponent’s mythic status. When you google “mejores bravas barcelona” and the first two pages are filled with one and only one bar, you know you’re up against a behemoth, or at least an establishment with incredible Web optimization skills. Still, we hopped the L6 up to Sarrià with minds intent only upon the careful observation of our enemy’s strengths and weaknesses.

Here’s how that went. Strength 1: accessibility. Major De Sarrià, 49, is two blocks from the train stop. Strength 2: comfortably cutre. A row of pigs’ feet nailed to a board so better to hang up one’s coat. Strength 3: great potatoes. Light, crispy, and cooked through. Strength 4: perfect salsa. Strong allioli instead of heavy mayonnaise, combined with a picante more oil than vinegar and that wasn’t just Tabasco sauce. Strength 5: comfortingly gruff service from men in blue vests. Some might find the posters they sell for 3€ (“Las patatas más bravas de Barcelona”) to be in poor and arrogant taste, but the camareros were no-nonsense. Strength 6: price. Bravas 2.20€, caña/vino 1.30€, Voll Damm mediana 1.70€. Weaknesses? “The potatoes are shaped kind of funny.” “Um, they’re really good, but I think Barbarela’s are better.” Why? Silence.

Shit.

II. “THE GREAT UNCERTAINTY OF ALL DATA IN WAR IS A PECULIAR DIFFICULTY.”

Carl von Clausewitz, On War

And now a few words about our strategy. We assumed that Tomás’s superiority had more to do with consumer laziness and lack of information than with intrinsic excellence, so we focused on hitting places with bravas we had heard were unusual. First stop on our campaign to glory: La Pausa (Montseny, 13), home of the whiskey bravas. No, we’re not complex, and we’re not gourmets; we like whiskey and we like bravas. We don’t like being disappointed, as we were when we entered and the bartender languidly informed us that they opened kind of late that day, so no potatoes. Licking our wounds on the way to Barbarela, it suddenly seemed like a good idea to jump into La Violeta (Sant Joaquim, 12) to make up for what we had missed. And that small, impromptu decision set in motion a train of events whose consequences affected us out of all proportion to the innocence of their genesis.

There are bars that you go to for bravas, and there are bars that have bravas. La Violeta is one of the latter. Don’t get us wrong; we dig La V. The prices are nice (though not as nice as Tomás’s), they have futbolín, and the patrons and bartenders are cool. But their bravas are a travesty of pasty white uncooked flesh, drowning in salsa rosa. In the name of research we ate about 75% of them before we were overtaken by a leaden feeling in our stomachs and the spontaneous appearance of sweat on our brows. Also, the desperate fear that we might never be able to move again.

It was at this point that we realized we were not battling Bar Tomás but rather the bravas themselves.

III. “TACTICS MUST DECEIVE, TEMPT, AND CONFUSE THE ENEMY.”

Mao Tse-tung, On Guerrilla Warfare

Thrown off our guard, the hunters became the hunted. What should have been a triumphant march into Cafetería Barbarela (Travessera de Gràcia, 150), where we knew the bravas were good, turned into something of a last stand. Unbeknownst to us, the bravas had gone guerrilla after severely weakening the troops with the barbaric frontal assault at La Violeta. It started innocently enough. We ordered wine, which came, not in small glasses, but in the form a bottle left at the table. We were starving for something other than tubers and we lost our focus looking at the carta. Soon enough, in addition to the bravas, we were eating ham, cheese, olives, pinchos, and ordering another bottle of wine. When we snapped out of it an hour later we realized we were in Gràcia, we love Gràcia, and it was cubana time. The problem was not the preparation of the bravas, which had a very nice peppery salsa and were, indeed, probably quite good. The problem was not the price, which for everything mentioned above, plus 6 medianas, came to only 33€. The problem was that we had lost our initiative and, shortly thereafter, 25% of our soldiers.

If at this juncture we could take a commercial break, our first-choice sponsor would be Pepto Bismol, or perhaps the clinic of a gastroenterology specialist. Working instead with the resources at our disposal, we would turn your attention to our ad for Sushi Express. Some tekka maki and a little green tea would have been like manna from heaven at this point. As if the sheer volume of consumed potato weren’t enough, we were also now dealing with roiling guts full of mayonnaise, and we will leave the results of said state to your imagination.

IV. “DISCIPLINE IN WAR COUNTS MORE THAN FURY.”

Niccolò Machiavelli, Art of War

By the time we dragged ourselves to BJ 100 (Joaquin Costa, 36), after failed attempts to procure bravas at Imprevist and Fidel, we were in a seriously bad way. We were exhausted, dysenteric, and we might as well have been walking through Russian snowdrifts without boots. We had malgastado our last physical resources by trying desperately to fulfill our mission despite the total breakdown of our plans, and that is how we ended up in a Frankfurt in the Raval staring at a plate of salt-encrusted, fresh-from-the- freezer potato cubes dumped unceremoniously next to a ramekin of salmon-colored sauce. We don’t even know how much we paid for our beer, or whether we drank it. We were in full retreat, and one by one our remaining troops drifted away into the shadows.

V. “IF YOU KNOW NEITHER YOURSELF NOR YOUR ENEMY, YOU WILL ALWAYS ENDANGER YOURSELF.”

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

After a long convalescence, we have come back to what we always knew: the bravas at Bitácora (Balboa, 3) and the papas de mojo at Babia (Sagristans, 9) are delicious and found close to home. A comprehensive bravas survey can only be undertaken by the whole of the population, not a small band of swaggeringly confident idiots. Tomás, keep the highlands, and congratulations on a job well done.