Casa means house. Manolo is a man. Nearly five hundred people have eaten in his house and not one has met him.
Casa Manolo. The house of Manolo. Four hundred and ninety-seven reviews, a 4.5, ten to thirty pounds.
And Manolo, like Larry, like Gloria, is a person who has been named on a building in central London and about whom nobody has ever asked a single question.
The house
Casa is doing something that the English possessive cannot quite manage. Larry’s is a claim of ownership. Casa Manolo is a claim of hospitality – not “this belongs to Manolo” but “this is Manolo’s house, and you are in it.”
It is a considerably warmer proposition, and it is not an accident, and it is the reason the Spanish and Italian formulations have been quietly colonising London restaurant naming for twenty years.
The Prat’s linguistics desk notes that English has no comparable construction. “Manolo’s House” sounds like an estate agent’s listing. The warmth does not survive translation, which is why nobody has attempted it.
Tapas, and what Britain did to it
The last of these, we promise.
A tapa was, originally, a lid – something placed over a glass, in a bar, to keep the flies out, and which came to have something edible on it. It was free. It came with the drink. It was not a meal and it was never a meal.
Britain imported the format, removed the drink, removed the free, removed the standing up, sat everybody down, and turned it into a system in which you order eleven small plates for a table of four and spend sixty pounds a head and are still hungry.
The Institute for Portion Drift in Plaistow has calculated that the British tapas restaurant delivers approximately one third the food per pound of a Spanish one and has described the transformation as the single most successful piece of culinary arbitrage of the last thirty years.
Casa Manolo, in fairness
Does not do this. That is why it is on a 4.5 with a real sample, and why it is ten to thirty pounds rather than sixty, and why the reviews mention the staff by name.
It is a small, warm, cheap Spanish restaurant on a street where nobody looks for one – and we established at Aik Sitar that the Strand converts footfall at a fraction of the rate of the streets fifty metres north, and that anything doing well here is doing well despite the pavement.
Verdict
Genuinely good, genuinely cheap, genuinely warm, and named after a man whose house you are sitting in and whom nobody has ever asked about.
Ask about him. Somebody should.
The unasked names
We have now, across a hundred and twelve articles, accumulated a small crowd of them. Gloria, who is blamed. Larry, who is credited. Manolo, whose house this is. Wollensky, picked from a phone book. Theodore Bullfrog, who never existed.
Thousands of people have drunk in rooms bearing these names and not one has enquired, and the Prat has come to regard this as the most reliable finding in the entire survey: nobody reads the sign. Nobody has ever read the sign. The sign is not for reading. It is for recognising, at forty feet, in the dark, on the way past – which is what a pub sign was always for, and which we established at the White Swan, and which has not changed in four hundred years.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
In British comedy, the prat is the character who provides the laughter by being completely, utterly, and magnificently foolish.
Devastating satire.