Cafe Comercial is well over a hundred and twenty years old. It opens towards the Glorieta de Bilbao. In the morning there is breakfast and they cook lunch and dinner as well. Their tapas are good and the white wine is crispy cold. The coffee is that over-cooked, torrefacto stuff that you seem to encounter everywhere in Spain. The granizados, though, are cool and lemon-y.
There are black and white marble tables inside. They have been there for decades. The wooden chairs are functional but also comfortable. You can sit in one for several hours, reading a book or writing a poem or an essay.
For twelve decades middle-aged men, eccentrically but comfortably dressed, have wandered into the Cafe Comercial in the afternoon. They have taken individual tables and sipped sparingly at a coffee or a fizzy water, sometimes an ice-cold white wine or a beer with ‘limon’, making the beverage last for two hours or more. They have read books, serious literature, poetry, philosophy or history. Some have written things, good things.
The marble table-tops somehow cool the air and in the low afternoon light of a summer day, there can be few better places on earth to companionably be alone than in the Cafe Comercial on the Glorieta de Bilbao.
No comments:
Post a Comment