 |
 |
|
The Free Michelin
by El Staff |
We’re sure you’re all familiar with
the Michelin Guide, that yearly
publication that separates the extremely
nice restaurants from the
unbelievably nice restaurants, and
probably still inspires 18th century
duels deep in the backwoods of the
French countryside. Unless you’ve
managed to land yourself a job with
an expense account, however, you
probably don’t see the need to shell
out for a Marshmallow-Man-bedecked
book you may never use.
The guide was actually free until
1920, when the Michelin brothers
supposedly discovered a stack of
their obra maestra propping up a
workbench in a garage. Disgusted
by the improper application of their
work, they decided that if they
wanted to be taken seriously, they
had to start charging.
Here at BCN Week, we’re pretty
much all Bib Gourmand, all the
time, and we encourage creative reuse
of our paper. You could swaddle
a baby in Siberia in that shit and
we’d applaud you. It’s not that we’re
not interested in exclusivity, it’s just
that we prefer it to be of a more organic
kind. For instance, when’s the
last time someone who knew how
to make a proper samosa invited
you into his kitchen? Though we
live shoulder to shoulder with people
from all over the world, we’re
rarely afforded an excuse to interact
on a personal level outside of
our narrow cultural boundaries. It’s
a colorful multicultural wonderland,
etc.; buy a beer and get moving.
As always, the investigative team
set out with clear goals in mind:
1) Find the best samosa in the
area of the Ramblas. Not all delicious
triangular pastries are created
equal. You’d be surprised by how
many variations there are in dough,
potato and spices within a kilometer.
We assembled a crack group of
gourmands whose backgrounds
have given them unique taste-testing
skills (see qualifications below), and asked them to rate the
overall samosa experience on a
scale of 1 to 10. See the key to decipher
what they felt were the most
salient qualities of each offer. We’ve
also included a personal comment
or two, so you can feel like you were
there.
2) Find out who makes the samosas.
Two principal theories held
sway before our empirical survey.
They were a) The samosas are all
bought from the same factory to be
resold or b) Are made by teams of
the sellers’ wives, sweating away in
Raval kitchens. We admit that we
had some communication problems
during our experiment; queries
to this effect posed in Spanish,
English and Catalan all tended to
deliver the same answers (“Vegetarian,”
“Pakistani food,” and “1 Euro.”)
Nevertheless, the team’s tenacity
and the sporadic but helpful presence
of translators led us to conclude
that both our theories were
wrong. These gentlemen’s wives are
all in Pakistan, or don’t exist. They
make the samosas themselves.
3) Replicate the experience.
Information’s no good if you can’t
reapply it to achieve the same results.
Despite a brief chat with the
Mossos, in which we were warned
that we shouldn’t buy street samosas
because in the kitchens where
they are made the sanitation “No es
la limpieza ibérica,” our team came
out just fine on the other side. We’ve
tried to give you names and semiprecise
selling locations so that the
next time you’re out, hungry, and
drunk, you don’t have to despair.
Just face the man approaching you
and ask, “¿Eres Mahamoud, de las
samosas de canela?”
Critic Qualifications:
LB // American // “I grew up on LA street food.”
MM // Catalana // “No tengo mucho hambre.”
HN // British // “It’s all about the Cornish pasty.”
FC // American/Catalan // “I, like, lived in India.”
DS // Catalana // “Nunca las he probado.”
RD // American // “Doughmaster.”
|
|
