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.”