Madrid's taverns

An emotional journey through the most authentic tascas, bodegas, houses and taverns to drink the capital in gulps.
If anything defines the soul of a city, it is its bars, where any bar is the centre of the world; that small universe on which we lean to keep walking. Madrid is at the top of the planet when it comes to taverns for "cats", which turns it into a mirror as Valleinclanesque as it is luminous, always knowing of shipwrecks and resurgences
Although they are not a Castilian invention, the saga of illustrious bars has not ceased to grow from the Middle Ages to the present day, to the delight of the local public, always a lover of morapio and farra. During the Golden Age, they were the place to live, to settle scores or for the nobles to mingle with the populace... Until the expansion of the bodegones, wine bars and eating places for drinking wine or having a bite to eat. A world narrated in a traditional language. From the most classical to the new expressions, the tavern wit and the cat-like bizarreness of the zarabanda, they have gone through time until reaching those stereotypes canonised by the chroniclers of the Villa: the costumbrista glosses of Mesonero Romanos, the Galdosian chronicles or those of the prophet of El Rastro, Ramón Gómez de la Serna. All of them, tinged with legend and picturesqueness about the life that nestles in the figones, survive with their own laws and rites... and are surpassed in the present
Not only rogues have passed through their counters, but also kings of many stripes, thuggish writers, manolos and petimetres, chisperos, liberal journalists, pamphleteers, the crowd of the Pradera de San Isidro, the "No pasarán", the Movida of the 80s, the beginning of the XXI century.... and the wine and the well-drawn beers, as silent witnesses.
These pages are as well strolled as drunk and aspire to leave traces of our Madrí, Madrí, Madrí, Madrí, whether wearing a trench coat or not, but inevitably wet with the ink of "tintorro"... Come in, eat and, above all, drink!
"There is nothing that vertebrates Madrid more than its taverns. Here is a marvellous tour of some fifty of them". Luis Suárez De Lezo. President of the Royal Castilian Academy of Gastronomy.

Publisher: Almuzara