El Cable de Sitges: the brothers who set up shop to cook the best patatas bravas

SilosIt's seven o'clock in the evening on a spring Friday, and at the corner of Barcelona and Sant Damià streets, there's an orderly queue of people calmly waiting to enter Cable, the bar run by brothers Francesc and Manel Andreu. The bar's creative and very competitive prices. So much so that a hearty meal, well-washed with Garraf wines (yes, the menu features only wines from the Garraf massif) and beers (Damm), can cost twenty euros. A generous one costs €7.50.

As the queue has finally dissolved, everyone has managed to get inside and find a seat inside. There are two lounges and a small, cozy terrace. The two brothers tell me how it all began. In 1940, Josep Andreu and Rosa Almirall, Francesc and Manel's paternal grandparents, opened a winery just a few meters away, on Àngel Vidal Street. These were the tough times of the post-war period, and their grandfather had endured a tough time. He had been involved in the Republic; with his transport truck, he had helped smuggle Republicans from Catalonia to France, but in 1939, he was arrested and taken to a concentration camp. He lost the truck forever because Franco's regime set it on fire and threw it off a cliff.

He had to find a new way to make a living. Without a truck, he couldn't transport wine or grapes, and he thought that if he opened a winery, he could sell the wines he'd previously transported from one place to another. Back then, in 1940, the winery wasn't known as El Cable but as Can Consums, because great-grandfather Andreu (who had moved from Bràfim to Sitges) had been a city councilor and collected the consumption tax.

In 1956, great-grandfather and grandfather acquired a plot of land on the corner of Barcelona and Sant Damià Streets, where they built a building. They planned to move the bar to the ground floor and build a boarding house upstairs. A bricklayer uncle helped them with the work; their father, Siscu, who was fourteen years old, also worked there, Francesc and Manel tell me, and they show me the black and white photos they have on their cell phones. The boarding house lasted only a few years, but the bar was now in a larger location than the first one, on Àngel Vidal Street, and was no longer run by Josep and Rosa, but by Siscu, one of their five children. In the kitchen, Siscu's sister, Núria, prepared the dishes, and today she is the one who still tells her neat nephews, Francesc and Manel, why the winery began to be known as El Cable.

"We have two versions; one, from the father, says that a fisherman, Pocara, would ask for a wine as strong as a cable. Sometimes, he would come in and say, 'Throw me a cable,' in Spanish," they say; the name of the winery is still pronounced in Spanish. They didn't even get up on the third, and it seemed like they had been tied up with a cable.

And so El Cable was born. Siscu's two sons, Francesc and Manel, never dreamed of starting their father's winery as a family outing. First, they confess, because their father had a strong character, and everything had to be done his way. Second, because they both had careers, in economics (Francisco) and business (Manel), and worked in banking. And yet another reason: because the bar, as it was, provided enough for a family to earn a living, that is, for both their father and mother. "We would come here for a few hours while we were studying for our degrees, but in the last years that my father worked, he was doing everything on his own," they recall. There was a day when their father had to close El Cable to recover from knee surgery. It was 2002, and the winery was closed for six months, from the beginning of the year until summer. And it was then, when they realized that the main festival was approaching (August 23rd) and that El Cable would be closed for the first time in its history, that the two brothers proposed to their father that they be allowed to open it, but only for three days. "We worked Monday through Friday; we had our jobs and lives, but opening El Cable for three days during the main festival seemed like the right thing to do, for our father, for the family," the brothers say.

The day they hung up the habit

And that's where the change began. Those three days went very well. So much so that in February 2003, the two brothers took over running the business alone. "We told Dad that he should let us do it our way, that we'd done some research and seen what the kitchens and bars were like, and that we wanted to make changes." He agreed, but the arguments continued, and there were so many that his sons weren't considering leaving their jobs in banking. In 2006, with the father's retirement at 66, there was a turning point, because the father realized he didn't have the same strength, and the sons decided to change their professional lives: they hung up their banking habits and kept El Cable as their sole job. "In 2006, the father wanted to celebrate the building's fiftieth anniversary, and in front of all the local authorities, we heard for the first time that he told us we were doing very well; he never said it to us directly," comment Francesc and Andreu, who add that one of the first things they did as soon as they installed the building was to redo the windows (they removed the curtains). They remade everything. The dishes, too. And here begins a new chapter in the story.

Tapas are one of El Cable's current strengths. The first, the leader, is the patatas bravas. In a single weekend, they serve 150 kilos. In the early years, they peeled them by hand, but now they buy them peeled, always the Monalisa variety. They then break them up to give them their characteristic shape and cook them at a low temperature, 120 degrees. They let them rest. As soon as they open, at 7:00 p.m., and they order, they fry them in the fryer, one reserved only for patatas bravas, and serve them on a white plate along with mayonnaise and their signature brava sauce, which they prepare with almonds, vinegar, olive oil, paprika, and chili pepper. The almonds give the sauce its grainy appearance.

There are many more creative dishes. Like the "Buscant Nemo" tapa, a bluefin tuna tartar with spherifications, served in an edible filo pastry cup and which won the award for the best tapa in Catalonia in 2013. And now that it's still spring, the peas with squid legs. "It's a dish for reusing squid legs, and our Aunt Núria used to make it," they say. More dishes: duck confit, steak tartare, and the smoked tuna tile from El Greco with tomato tartar. And here we need to make a note, because, in Sitges, "El Greco" means it's purchased from a prestigious supplier, who used to have a restaurant of the same name in the town and now dedicates himself to producing gourmet products for the hospitality industry.

Finally, come 2025, the two brothers are tying their future to El Cable. "Let's see if you'll be a Siscu, Francisco, and never want to retire," Manolo tells his eldest brother, Francisco. "No, no, I haven't thought about it," he replies. Nor will they force their four daughters, two from each brother, to take over the business, because they want them to study. However, they're already doing what they did when they were their age: they lend a hand in the winery on weekends and in the summer. And sometimes, with their parents, they all have dinner together. "We also do it because we want to put ourselves in the shoes of customers, and also, we confess, because we have a good time." It's that joy and passion that keeps El Cable in top form for 85 years. And they tell me: "It's the second-oldest hospitality business in Sitges; the first is El Xiringuito, on the beach." And a final note: they're celebrating their 85th anniversary because they couldn't celebrate their 80th anniversary due to the pandemic. For many more.