As good as popular

The third week I was living in Barcelona I was speaking with some friends about the areas where each one lived. After saying I lived in Guinardó, somebody told me that, if I lived close to the Paseo Fabra i Puig, I had to know an Aragonaise Bar called "LA ESQUINICA". I'm afraid I didn't, but I still tried to remember the name of the restaurant. Two weeks later, a good old friend of mine who has been living in Barcelona for years, told me about a "very cañí" place at Fabra i Puig, where there were different types of "tapas", and not expensive at all. The name was again LA ESQUINICA. But three weeks ago, a friend from Figueres told me he had once been hours in a car with his boss, looking for a restaurant called LA ESQUINICA. Well, definitely, I had to go to such a popular place.

So I did. I must say I expected something much more grotty than what I found, after all the seedy descriptions I had heard (people from Aragon are really humble; the place was more than fine). It's a simple but cute place, very typically decorated. The ceiling had plenty of "cachirulos" (the typical shawl from the village festivity in Aragon) with different colours, depending on the town or village it comes from. The waiters were very pacient and friendly, singing all the tapas they could offer as the multiplication table; obviously, he had to repeat it a dozen of times. Once we had made up our minds we asked for longaniza (the spicy pork sausage from Aragon), some toasted bread with tomatoe, sauté mushrooms, and spicy potatoes (spécialité de la maison). Everything was tasty and we could hardly finish it, so plentiful it was.

Fortunately, we had gone dinning like the French do: 8 pm, otherwise, we would have had to wait about an hour to get a table. After 20:30 people have to get a number, as at the greengrocer's, and wait in the street until there's a table for them. The system is quite primitive but it works. When living, someone gave me a lollipop, but I still don't know why (something related to the fact of being in the smoker's area, but I have never smoked; weird...