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The Granja Royal restaurant was one of several establishments that appeared at the beginning of the 20th century using the word Royal in its name.
It was built in 1911 by Esteve Sala i Canadell, one of the most prolific businessmen in the restaurant industry at the beginning of the last century.
Sala and Canadell had found a lot on Rambla de los Estudios 8, managed to convince Romeu and Aixelà, two former employees of Casa Esteve Riera (one of the most famous pastry shops at the time) to agree to open a cafe farm in that area of the current Rambla (today occupied by the restaurant and Cafetería Moka).
The future premises were designed by Jaume Llongueras with three different spaces: a pastry shop, a tea room with restaurant service and a luxurious room for parties and banquets with a platform in the center intended to liven up meals and banquets with a piano.
The pastry section soon managed to capture a large part of Esteve Riera’s clientele, since Romeu and Aixelà, connoisseurs of the most in-demand products in their previous location, decided to expand and improve them.
Another of the fronts opened by Granja Royal was with the Maison Dorée restaurant, taking away a part of its clientele and maintaining a bitter confrontation. He promoted tea and coffee concerts in the early afternoon, which were very well received by the Barcelona aristocracy. They had great acceptance. They spent the afternoons having tea or coffee listening to trendy tunes.
Another advantage that the Granja Royal exploited was its location on a busy sidewalk on the Rambla to install an outdoor terrace at the entrance of the establishment, where customers who were not fond of music encouraged the gossip of high society and of the artists.
This, which at first was something that its owners liked, then turned against it, since the word spread and little by little a group of onlookers formed in front of the tables to observe them and that hindered the passage of pedestrians who were not familiar with them. the comments and onlookers.
This crowd of curious onlookers who hindered the passage of pedestrians began to bother the customers themselves, seeing themselves being watched. This forced those responsible for the premises to demand the presence of the police to avoid unpleasant altercations.
The fame achieved had had an impact on society, which had managed to bring together a heterogeneous clientele. At the beginning of the First World War, politicians, spies, figures from Spanish and European high society, businessmen and foreign luxury prostitution fraternized in its Imperial Hall, which established its headquarters in the Royal.
The Royal, at dusk, became a catwalk along which impressive beauties paraded in very expensive dresses and fur coats, looking for interested relationships.
Esteva Sala closed the Café Restaurante Royal at the end of 1933. A few months later it was replaced by the old Café Moka, a place that would write another page in the history of the cafés on the Rambla.
The fame of the Royal lasted throughout the decade of the 1920s and the spirit of innovation later gave rise to the appearance in the city of new establishments that adopted the name of Royal in the center of Barcelona, ??although they had no type of connection with the Royal Café Restaurant.
Examples are the Granja Royal installed on the ground floor of the Hotel Oriente and the Granja Royal, at Pelayo 58, property of Esteban Sala, a luxury establishment built by Antoni Utrillo that won the first prize for decoration in 1919 and whose main dedication was the bulk sale of milk and its derivatives. Utrillo had participated in the Barcelona Universal Exhibition in 1888.
