There are so many restaurants with the appearance of a branch and with that catalog interior design, based on plywood and blackboard with the dishes of the day, that when you cross the door of Rafaelli (Luis Antúnez, 11) you feel that you have just entered the house of someone with a name, surnames and an old family history, in this case of remote ancestry. It is the house of Greta and Gioia Rafaelli, who allow us to browse among those objects that occupy every corner.
They say that the robust wooden extendable table that presides over the small dining room on the mezzanine (each of the three rooms at different heights bears the name of a sister, although only two are members), is part of the family. And that before landing in Barcelona she passed through Brazil, where her father was born, and through Lucca, the walled town in Tuscany where the Rafaellis come from and to which Viola, the third sister, returned.
The others fell in love with the Catalan capital, although it was here that the lives of the three were suspended for a while when their father suffered a heart attack that nearly killed him. “It was on the Costa Brava, when he was closing the seasonal restaurant that he ran. They transferred him by helicopter to Vall d’Hebron, and they saved him,” explains Greta. After that, she and Gioia decided to stay working in the restaurant industry. Until eight years ago their father set up the restaurant for them with the last name of the family that they both run.
The paintings that shine on the walls, they say, were painted by his nonna Giovanna, an artist and mainstay of the family who in her last years lost her creativity (never her passion for cooking) and preferred to copy rather than let go of her brushes. Listening to those old stories from Tuscany that the sisters weave together with grace while serving the dishes and those wines that they themselves bring from town, whets the appetite for good homemade pasta.
We find out that there was a passionate and lasting love between her parents, she modeled in Milan, he raised in the beautiful Villa Luisa, among olive trees, vineyards and cypresses, in the hands of the family since 1700. “Our mother, who is also called Luisa, was speechless the day my father showed her that paradise with her own name.” But the family would end up selling Villa Luisa with everything that was inside, including the remains of the poor great-grandfather, “buried in the hermitage”.
We also find out that their father, another artist, raised them and that the flavor of their childhood is associated precisely with one of the most successful dishes on the menu, which changes with the seasons: pasta with Tuscan ragout, which in months of hunting They are prepared with beef but at the beginning of June they serve us in the version of beef and pork, with tordelli lucchesi. “We eat ragù because my father said it was a complete dish, with vegetables, tomato, meat, pasta….†We understand it and attest that it is filling. Except for spaghetti and linguini, the rest of the pasta they offer is made in-house, as is the dough for the fried pizzas (Marguerita or Marinera), or the focaccia, today less spongy than they would like due to the Barcelona humidity.
We tried the refreshing Puglia burrata salad with tomato in different preparations (dried, confit, cream) and Cantabrian anchovies. For some time now, the Sardinian Michele Piggioni has been in charge of the kitchen, who has prepared some delicious culurgiones (with potato and mint filling) that he offers off the menu. The linguine alle vongole and the impeccable spaghetti cacio and pepe are classics of the house. Pasta dishes fit the old Rafaelli stories so well that we leave meat and fish that are advertised on the menu for another occasion. But not the tiramisu, which is excellent.
