Gringa All Day, Barcelona
A classic Catalan... diner?
Gringa All Day probably isn’t the first restaurant to come to mind when you think of Barcelona.
It doesn’t serve tapas, for one. There’s no seafood either. In fact, the food isn’t even Spanish: this is an all-American diner, sat in the heart of Catalonia. By all rights, it should be terrible, let alone a place worth detouring too on holiday. And yet.
It probably helps that one of the co-founders, Priscilla Alfaro, is Mexican-American and grew up in LA, so Gringa isn’t that sort of dreaded diner pastiche drawn primarily from Tarantino movies. There’s still as much Americana as there is America to it, but this feels more of a piece with modern diner-inspired spots like New Orleans’ Turkey and the Wolf than it does the kitschy imitations you’ll normally find outside the US.
I’ve not been to Gringa’s original spot in Raval, which takes bookings and is only open for lunch or dinner on certain days in the week. I’m sure it’s good, but I see more appeal in El Born spin-off Gringa All Day — the clue’s in the name.
What Gringa All Day captures — in a way that I find most of Barcelona’s compact coffee shops don’t — is the feeling of a place where it’s okay to linger a while. Order the filter coffee, take advantage of the free refills, eat slowly or just sit and drink and think. It helps that the filter is actually good, sourced from local roaster Three Marks, without losing the essentials of a diner brew: a little weak, slightly bitter, endlessly sippable.
When it comes to food, the menu runs the gamut of diner classics, from pancake stacks to burgers, but the smart move is to gravitate towards anything with fried chicken on it. That’s what made Gringa famous in the first place, and here you’ll find it everywhere from a chicken sandwich or waffles to a caesar salad and eggs benedict. That Fried Chicken Benny is the best iteration I’ve tried: a heaving hunk of chicken, sitting crisp in thick, spiced breading, atop a slice of toasted brioche. Above it all a poached egg and a dollop of chipotle hollandaise to drip down alluringly. As a dish, it’s daft but delicious: after all, if ham or smoked salmon work here, then who’s to say fried chicken shouldn’t? It also feels distinctly Gringa: a simple twist on a well-worn classic, executed excellently.
There’s some of the same energy to the chicken and waffles, which tweaks the formula with another touch of chipotle, this time in the maple syrup, and follows it up with a spoonful of red cabbage slaw and a wedge of lime. Chicken and waffles is one of those orders that usually sounds more appealing than it is, the onslaught of fat and sugar overwhelming a bit by the time you’re halfway through the plate, but things work better here. The additions of heat and acidity cut through just enough to avoid monotony but let the superbly tender chicken remain the star.
Gringa may do a good job of delivering American appeal, but there are a few tell-tale signs that this is a European joint — not least the inclusion of a natural wines section on the menu. Another tripped me up when I ordered what’s billed as Tam’s Breakfast Burrito. I’ve got no idea who Tam is, but someone should tell them that mayonnaise has no place in a burrito, breakfast or otherwise. The rest is right enough, solidly packed with bacon, eggs, and fries, seared crisp and topped with pink pickled onions. But adding mayo feels like a parody of a European burrito, and an odd blemish on a restaurant that gets so much else right.
Still, if you can forgive a little mayo then you won’t find many places on this side of the Atlantic doing a better job of delivering a diner — albeit in a bougie, modern form — in all its trappings.