Poor Blenders

It started innocently enough, as a search for decent pastrami, an item not easily found in Western Europe. We were emerging from lockdown, and while my American passport had allowed me to travel back to the United States a few times for family reasons, everywhere in New York seemed closed, and I only passed through for a day or two anyhow on my way down South, where you could go out to eat, but, again, there was no decent pastrami. The pandemic was a good time to be in Barcelona, perverse as it is to say; it had been decades since the city felt normal, a place belonging to and defined by its residents as opposed to the hordes of tourists who make it almost uninhabitable. Everything was open; Spain’s willful transformation into a glorified lemonade stand for anyone who can afford a Ryanair ticket meant it had become far too dependent on hospitality money to shut restaurants down, so if you didn’t mind a bit of hygiene theater—wiping your feet on a disinfectant mat, showing your vaccination record, scanning a QR code menu—you could go out without much worry of getting turned away without a reservation.