Toasted, crisp coca bread with tomato, olive oil and salt. It goes with everything on the menu, at Carrer de la Cera, 49.
We make it with coca bread, thin and crisp, toasted, with tomato, olive oil and salt. It comes to the table cut into strips, to eat with your fingers alongside everything else: the anchovies, the cured sausage, the pâté or the fritters.
€4.20
Contains gluten. We have gluten-free bread: just ask our staff.
This is not an ancient dish: tomatoes came from the Americas, and bread with tomato is perhaps two centuries old. The first written record dates from 1884: the writer Pompeu Gener tells a friend, in a letter in verse from Paris, that bread with oil “amanit amb tomaca” (dressed with tomato) had become fashionable there, and that even the great Sarah Bernhardt had made herself a slice. The same year it turns up in a Barcelona stage play, La taberna.
According to a theory by the food writer Nèstor Luján, it was born in the countryside in a year of plenty, when someone rubbed tomato onto bread that was going dry so as not to waste it. It used to be a summer dish; in winter it was possible thanks to hanging tomatoes, tied in bunches and kept hanging for months. For a long time farmhouses kept them for themselves and they were not even sold at market.
The rules are few but firm: good bread, ripe tomato rubbed on by hand (never tinned or blended), oil and salt. The rest is argument: the poet Narcís Comadira jokes that there are only two kinds of Catalans, those who rub the bread on one side and those who rub it on both. Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, in La cocina de los mediterráneos, settles it in four lines: bread, tomato, oil and salt.
Put the salt cod esqueixada (€16.00) or the salt cod fritters (€10.50) next to it.
Further reading: Història de la cuina catalana i occitana, vol. VIII, by Vicent Marqués (Edicions Sidillà, 2025); Àpats, by Alba Sunyer and Clara Antúnez (Parcir Edicions Selectes i Joviat, 2022); Cuina catalana, by Borja Sierra and Òscar Gómez (Montagud Editores); and La cocina de los mediterráneos, by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (Ediciones B, 2002).
