Joe Ray

March 1, 2006 - The Chicago Tribune

BARCELONA—I grew up with a vague dread of canned food. Perhaps I was spoiled by Dad’s vegetable garden out back and Mom’s cooking, but everything that came out of a can had a dreary gray look to it. Add to that a nasty childhood experience that involved eating a whole jar of baby gherkins, and you can begin to understand my pain.

In this era of fresh, fresh, fresh, Perez certainly is taking a different path, but one rooted in the country’s tradition of eating canned food.

Walk into the tiny tapas bar where all four walls are lined floor to ceiling with wine, cava (Spain’s version of Champagne), whiskey and other bottles and you’ll find Quim Perez standing behind a bar lined with his real star products.

Tasteful selection

Here, anchovies, so often limp and salt-encrusted on our shores, are plump and glimmering enough to tempt the uninitiated. Baby artichokes from a glass jar still hold their crunch. It’s like this for most every product in the bar. Only a few items are made from fresh foods.

A Perez favorite: mussels with a dollop of herring eggs over a house tomato confit—all on a toast round. Photo by Joe Ray for The Tribune

Asked how many different suppliers they have around the world to get so many high-quality canned products, Perez and the visiting Quim senior make the same sound simultaneously, “Fiuu!!” (a Spanish “wow!”) Pressed, they agree on “about 100” for suppliers they work with on a regular basis and “about 50” they work with less frequently.

When Perez goes to work, he calls on personal taste, travels, memories, food shows, inventiveness and even a bit of Web surfing to come up with deluxe tapas that attract people from across town.
There’s smoked salmon over thick yogurt on a custom-made toast round, all drizzled with honey. Currently, he’s big on a pair of mussels served with a dollop of herring eggs over a house tomato confit, spritzed with a balsamic glaze, heavenly olive oil and a shake of oregano on that same toast round. He confesses that this idea is actually a souped-up version of one of his favorite dishes from his military service.

Recently, he has been combining a local sheep’s milk cheese with an unsweetened green fig paste that tastes quite a bit like green tea. A bite of that and a sip of one of the many wines he serves by the glass and it’s easy to understand why customers often have to elbow their way to the bar to place their orders.

Curiously, specializing in top-quality canned goods began as a way to keep the family business afloat. About 20 years ago, the shop was much less specialized. Tapas represented only about 20 percent of the business, and were offered more as a means of giving clients a snack. Perez’s dad recalls how the courtyard behind the bar was for their horses, which he used to make local deliveries.

Selling specialty products grew out of an effort to combat supermarkets, which were beginning to infiltrate the city in the 1980s.

Filling a need

Now Perez is well-known for the products he stocks and the tapas he makes with them. When asked to talk about which one he likes the most, a few of his employees interrupted, insisting on what they simply call “the clams.”
The clams, actually Galician navajas, are one of the few products he serves straight from the can to the plate without adding anything but their own juice. When the cans arrive, Perez tucks them in a corner of the cellar and waits a year or two to improve their flavor. When he takes them out to sell, they are one of the most expensive items in the whole bar.

Skeptical? Perez begs to differ.

“It’s like drinking a beautiful 30-year-old Scotch,” he says.

Perez said specializing in canned food came about slowly. “It wasn’t like we woke up one day and said, `Let’s do this!’ ” But the supermarkets were growing, he said, so it was helpful to specialize in quality. “This was a way to do something different.”

Judging from those crowds spilling in and out the door, Perez’s version of “something different” seems to be just right.