Brunch & Cake, Eixample

My first impression of Barcelona was that there were so many cafes, delis, bars and restaurants that you would have to be a fool to consider entering the local food and beverage market. But now that the dust has settled on my move and (most of) the boxes have been unpacked, I am retracting that sentence.  The bars with neat rows of tapas are endless, the paellas, the plates of fideua are everywhere.  Good coffee?  Non-existent (seriously, I have identified 6 shops in Barcelona that use La Marzocco coffee machines (their official distributor for Spain is a company called Coffee People and they list all their clients).  Breakfast places? The ones that do an epic layout a la what I was used to in Berlin, not so much.So I am not at all surprised by the cluster of people I always see outside Brunch and Cake (who are one of the 6 to have a Marzocco).  Their breakfasts are American style and then some.  A perilous tower of pancakes.  A wedge of cake, thick as a dictionary.  The so-called bagel turns out to be the size of my (Smart car’s) steering wheel.  There is also a leaning towards the strange combinations that are widely accepted in the US.  My poached eggs on waffles for instance comes on sweet waffles, with hollandaise sauce – it’s really too weird for me.  And I have always struggled with overly large portions of food, finding myself feeling bloated and defeated before I have even started eating.

I will stick to the coffee and maybe next time go for one of the big bowls of salad with quinoa.  But at least two people in my family have fallen hard for this place.  And they are not the only ones, in a city that doesn’t seem to do social media with the fervor of London or Berlin, Brunch and Cake are rocking Instagram with over 1,000 followers (that is seriously a big deal here, on a par with Albert Adria’s Tickets.)

Brunch and Cake
Enric Granados, 19
Eixample 08007
www.cupcakesbarcelona.com