Spanish Tortilla, the Brock & Kate Show at the Greatest Apartment on Earth

By Rob Curran

I learned how to make Spanish tortilla at a dinner party in one of the world’s greatest apartments in Barcelona.

It was a sprawling, three-bedroom apartment, with a tiny balcony overlooking the Gran de Gracia, the main street in the hippest hood in Europe’s hippest city. Oh, Lordy, it’s one of those memories that’s easy to blur with fantasy. If Peter Jackson or some other visionary had tried to dream up the ideal 1990s apartment, it could not have touched this one. It was like the apartment in Friends without all the annoying friends.

I had become a quasi-tenant of the apartment in an almost untenably tenuous fashion; Kevin Bacon probably had more claim to a bed there than I did. Late one 90s summer following a school year of teaching English in the eastern bloc, I landed in Barcelona looking like an extra from the “Lives of Others.” The lease belonged to a trio of French lads, including Daniel. Daniel’s girlfriend, Emma, had moved back to London and bequeathed her tenuous spot in the apartment to my girlfriend, Grainne. So Emma was Daniel’s plus one, and Grainne was Emma’s plus one, and I was Grainne’s plus one. So a plus three? There were already five people in three bedrooms when I arrived. The math would get even more abstruse. To comprehend how one of my younger sisters came to live in the apartment later in the summer would require years of training in Irish derivative calculus.

During a seven-month stint teaching English in Moscow, Grainne and I had stayed in touch. Much of the correspondence was a kind of love-letter bragathon over which city was cooler, a tug-of-war over who would come to whom. I reluctantly conceded the advantage, and, wearing specially purchased porridge-grey square-wear from the Moscow markets, with my army sack full of Russian orthodox souvenirs on my back, I flew, via Frankfurt airport to the Gran de Gracia.

Location, location, location, they say, but in this case you could add: and then some location. There was a train station two doors down so that you could teleport anywhere in the compact city in a matter of minutes. From the Gracia apartment, it was a ten-minute walk to Parc Guell, the most exquisitely weird of Gaudi’s impossibly exquisite LSD-topping fantasies. I used to walk down there and play football against kids in a court that was bordered by undulating blue ceramic walls, like the fringe of a pottery ocean. My God! The greatest location advantage of the apartment was not the train station or the park – it was the world’s most delicious bakery directly under the apartment. I had never even heard of almond croissants when I landed at the Gran de Gracia. I would eat little else for an entire summer.

The interior was every bit as good as the exterior. The sitting room-slash-dining room must have been 700 square feet, and every bit of that covered in fine parquet. There was a dining table at which we routinely sat 10 people for dinner. The week Grainne and I cooked, we served chicken sushi, the guests gamely eating around the bleeding sinews.

“It’s not blood…it’s pink,” I said, digging myself deeper into the hole of food poisoning.

Sometimes we even emerged from the Gracia neighbourhood. There was a nightclub with three dancefloors, like a Barnum & Bailey circus without the elephant abuse. The Barcelonetta beach had just been reclaimed . There, we took bottles of cheap Spanish champagne, cava, from the aptly named Cava bar. There, we took my cousin Steve and taught him to swim after a couple of bottles of cava. It was a temperate summer in Barcelona, meaning, basically, your body temperature seldom had to adjust to anything. 

Barcelona was luring wild and wonderful people from all over the world. There was Miriam, a whirling Irish friend of mine, who loved to dance salsa on the street, every time she heard the strains of a Spanish traditional band from one of the open-air bars. There was Jamil, the English chuckle hound who was teaching a generation of Barcelonans how to speak in stoned West Londonese. “Jameewl haha,” as his students must have learned to call him. There was Fernando Soto, who would go on to become a distinguished Mexican artist. Fernando was officially on the dry, and he cursed incessantly, possibly because it was such an unfortunate time and place for sobriety. I did get to drink with him a couple of times from a tequila bottle he kept hidden in a filing cabinet.

The wildest of them all was Brock Fownes. Brock Fownes has now returned to the gale-battered coast of Nova Scotia from which he was carved, there burnishing his legend as the frontman for folksters the Keltic Kowboys. Brock had lived in Barcelona for more than a decade by the time I got there. He was the uncrowned king of late-night Barcelona bars, a crown for which tens of thousands contend. Brock is to pub banter what Wordsworth is to lakes. I have strong suspicions that he’s the love child of Ernest Hemmingway and Sarah Silverman. One night, we went out to a Mexican restaurant and there was a lull in conversation. Brock went around the table logging birthday dates. The closest – mine– was six weeks stale. No matter. Brock led the entire restaurant in festive serenade. I remember a flan appearing from the kitchen. It was one of my better birthdays.

It was one of Brock’s American friends who took it upon herself to instruct the whole  Gran de Gracia apartment and guests on how to cook a Spanish tortilla. She was a bubbly character herself, Kate. She and Brock teased one another while she gave her tips.

The first instruction I remember was the eggs. You had to whisk the eggs – I use five or six, depending on the size of the pan – until they were frothy.

Kate set the eggs aside, and had us peel the potatoes, which she then cubed. She showed us the sizes of the cubes, about a half-an-inch on each side. Six or seven potatoes would do the trick, she estimated. She used a large non-stick pan. First, she poured in the vegetable oil."Wait til you see this...you're going to get a kick out of it," she said. She poured the oil about two-and-a-half inches deep in the pan, enough so all the potato cubes were submerged, and all the guests feared oil burns. She put the oil on a very high heat. She tossed the cubes in. The oil bubbled. "You're going to dig this," she said. "Right, Brock?" She salted the potatoes liberally. "You already salted them before you put them in," someone said. "I know!" she said, salting the potatoes some more. "Salt is the most important ingredient."

She diced half an onion. Once the potatoes start to brown she, added the diced onion. "Nearly time," she said. "OK, let's add the egg." Once the potatoes were crisp on at least one edge, she used a dinner plate to drain most of the oil into a cup. She then added the egg froth. Move the pan to make sure the egg permeates all the spaces between the cubes. She used a fork to peel the hardening egg from the wall of the frying pan, and she showed us how she was using it to shape the edge of the omelette, like a nice piece of half-round wooden moulding. "OK, showtime!" said Kate. Brock removed his cowboy hat so he wouldn't miss anything. 

"Can't be much worse than the chicken a-la-blood," he pointed out. 

With a spatula, Kate made sure the egg was not sticking to the bottom of a pan. She removed the pan from the heat, holding it by the stem in her left hand. With her right hand, she fitted the dinner plate over the top of the pan. She held the pan over the sink. "Tada!" she said. In one swift movement, she flipped the pan over so that the omelette transferred to the dinner plate in her right hand. She raised the empty pan to reveal a perfectly moulded egg pie. She added back a drop of oil and returned the pan to the heat. She allowed the omelette to slither, uncooked side down, onto the bubbling oil. 

"Wow," I thought. "I will never be able to do that."

I must have done it 100 times since.