Secrets of Barcelona: Gatsby

This week my book The 500 hidden secrets of Barcelona gets released. In the next couple of blog posts, I’ll expand on some of the book’s entries. Today: a restaurant I discovered after the guide went to printer. 

Not actually in love, but... 

Practice your best duck face, because Gatsby Barcelona is where people take their selfie. Even on a weekday, the restaurant fills with men and women in their twenties and thirties, the men in suits, the women in daring dresses. They look half amused, half serious: they’re here to have fun, but at the same time, make no mistake, the hunt is on. Gatsby’s slogan succinctly sums up this ambivalent attitude: ‘A little party never killed nobody.’ 

The interior of this popular up-town restaurant is fashioned after Baz Luhrmanns’ lavish 2013 movie version of The Great Gatsby. It’s all gold and art nouveau-y figures and lines. Its only flaw is the giant photo of the New York skyline, covering an entire wall and sending the erroneous message “try our cheap spring rolls”. They need to get rid of that. 

The food at Gatsby is reasonable, if a tad predictable. Salmon on stir-fried vegetables, beef carpaccio, steak tartare, a bit of cake for dessert... There’s nothing wrong with any of it. It’s just that you can get it anywhere in town, and cheaper too. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the red tuna tatiki with eggplant puree. And it was nice that a girl walked onto the little stage and started singing. What I didn’t realize: this was only the start of the show. 

When the girl returned for a second performance, she came with scantily clad dancers. And during the third appearance, she was alone on the stage, because the dancers, now wearing the shiny, fancy version of a swimming suit, had scattered across the room and were dancing, smiling and playing with their top heads among the tables. This was, indeed, a spectacle. 

Gatsby aims to provide such a show every day of the week. They have a dancer and choreographer to take care of the entertainment: Fidel Buika, well-known thanks to Operación Triunfo, the Spanish X Factor. If Buika, who sign off on the shows as artistic director, was aiming for light-hearted, enjoyable and silly in just the right way... then he’s hit the target. And then some. 

It’s remarkable how The Great Gatsby has become synonymous with opulence, wild spending and even wilder partying. It seems we forget the novel is about a crook, a gangster, and the main part of the novel is taken up by a love story of unforgettable sadness. Scott Fitzgerald was going to call the novel Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires, which neatly describes the dramatic side of the Roaring Twenties, but admittedly doesn’t make for a great restaurant name. (Just think of the website address. www.amongtheashheapsandmillionairesbarcelona.com) 

I found Gatsby a wonderful place to have dinner while looking around. There is a lot of posturing going on, a lot of roles being played... Yes, there’s a show being put on by singers and dancers on the small podium, but it’s far from the only show in the room. To use a line from the novel: ‘I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity’ – that’s more or less my view of the restaurant called Gatsby. 

In my guide The 500 hidden secrets of Barcelona, there’s a list of restaurants and bars where you can hang out with the locals. But “locals” come in many shapes in sizes. Now if you want to get a taste of upper-class Barcelona, Gatsby [Carrer de Tusset 19, +34 937 00 44 53, www.gatsbybarcelona.com] should be on your list.