Comida Chronicles Part III: The Punch Card Edition

And so it continues... more restaurant reviews that barely review the food.


Montana
Barrio: El Born
Address: Carrer de Comerç, 4
Price: €10.90 for the menu del dia

This place is 1/3 art gallery, 1/6 streetwear shop, 1/6 graffiti accessory shop, 1/6 restaurant, 1/6 cafe. The restaurant only does lunch, but their menu del dia is pretty, pretty damn good. Almost every restaurant in BCN offers up a menu del dia, which gives you a three-course meal (plus bread!) and the drink of your choice for  €8 - €12. It should also be noted that only real bastards up-charge you for an alcoholic beverage.

They offered up some traditional Catalan dishes that I knew were traditional Catalan dishes because the waiter told me really slow in Spanish. Sarah and I had some ground cabbage, a nice mushroom soup, some onion dish, and some meat thing I kinda can’t remember. The desserts were strangely not Catalan but instead a terrible attempt at cheesecake and a decent scoop of icecream with Oreo crumb sprinkles.

Montana is also the first and only place I've been to that's gave me a frequent flier punch card, meaning that 16th menu del dia is going to taste oh-so good.



Carrefour
This is not a restaurant but it's the grocery story that supplies me with the vast majority of my food, so I’m putting in on this list. It was Carrefour that first introduced me to el mundo of tortillas de patatas (like potato latkes on crack) and for that I’m forever grateful.

They also sell discount beer which is all sorts of gangster. I actually have not seen the 40s in real life, but they sell discount cans of store-brand brew for 23 cents a pop.

The closest Carrefour to me is the one directly on Las Ramblas, which means it’s some times over ran by tourists, but most those motherfuckers don’t know about the bottom floor or the secret check-out lanes in the back of the shop. Except for today when I had to wait a good five minutes because apparently motherfuckers do know about the secret registers.

I recently became a Carrefour socio card holder, which means I get no further discounts or promotions but for every €8 I spend I get a sticker and if I collect 15 stickers, and then pay an additional €3.95, I get the right to buy a 10-inch stuffed toy piece of produce.

So really the only advantage of the card is access to what is a €123.95 toy broccoli. Currently I'm at 8 stickers and you better believe that once I get 15, I’m getting that plush broccoli, because that my friends will be a status symbol.