There is a rare book about Barcelona that explains the history of the city’s Republican boxers in a Republican Barcelona where boxing was still fashionable and its followers gathered at the Bar Mundial, a bar in a Born that, at that time, was a motley popular neighborhood of the city and not the tourist landscape it is now.
That Bar Mundial survived the Republic, the war, Franco’s regime and the arrival of democracy, but died in 2020 with the pandemic, when it closed and never reopened. Until now, when the Mundial has reopened almost the same as when it opened and seeking to respect the essence of what it was: a neighborhood bar and popular culture.
What the Born was
El Mundial has now reopened with the Confiteria group, which has respected almost everything: much of the interior decoration, the marble bar, the bottles, the tables…. And it has enhanced other things to make it more like 1925, when it opened, and less like 2020, when it closed. Hence its modernist sign and the old photos recovered.
The menu is the same. The Mundial was an informal seafood restaurant before they were called that, and the new Mundial respects that essence with a menu based on simple seafood dishes: anchovies, salted shrimp, dogfish or, what we liked best, fried eggs with glass shrimp. Something more elaborate, although we liked it less, was the tuna pepito and the seafood tripe, that is, a cap i pota with scallops. As they sum it up, seeking to concentrate the World Cup from before: “fried, griddle and shell”.
With wine, the same thing: goodbye to natural wine, hello to wine in bulk, in jugs and out of a pump. Hello also to the noise, the small table and the garbage cans on the floor. Hello again to the queues and the crowd, which has returned, for the moment, to fill the place with enthusiasm, remembering, when they can, that they already came when this was open before, when the Borne was for the people here and not there.
Many will sit under the plaque that reminds us that Gabriel García Márquez said he would not have written his 100 Years of Solitude if he had discovered the Bar Mundial earlier. For them, and perhaps also for García Márquez if he were to raise his head, to see the Mundial reopened as something like what it was, and not just another brunch or cevichería in the Born, is a reason to rejoice.
