From singularity to standardization

There was a time when you didn't have to book an appointment when you went to the hairdresser's. You would walk in, ask who was last, and wait patiently for your turn. It was the late eighties and I was a boy leafing through El Mundo Deportivo –the alternatives were a motoring magazine and Interviú, the communicative menu of the era in male establishments in the sector– while listening to the conversations between the regulars and the hairdresser, who was getting on with his work. Work that, according to one of the customers waiting for his turn, was going slowly, while the owner, working the scissors, maintained it was not. “You won't start cutting my hair at that time.” “Yes, I will!” The solution: betting a dinner... at Sol Ric.

At ten or eleven years old, Sol Ric, where I had never been, was automatically placed in the top tier of restaurants in Tarragona. If they were betting a dinner there, it had to be very good. That is why, when I now pass by the beginning of Via Augusta, a certain feeling of sadness runs through my body observing the speed with which a new McDonald's establishment is being built where until a few years ago there was one of the benchmark restaurants for calçotades and grilled meat in Tarragona, and which a few months ago was torn down.

And that is even though I had only been once to eat at Sol Ric, a calçotada of which I have a good memory. I also have many memories of another legendary restaurant from the second half of the last century, in this case in Torredembarra. The Morros restaurant. On the very front line of the sea, with impressive views of the Mediterranean from a dining room where I went to a string of family weddings, baptisms, and first communions. For over a decade now, it has housed an establishment of the Tagliatella pizza chain.

Two examples of how uniqueness is giving way to standardization in the landscape of Tarragona's restaurant scene. We will find others. And in commerce as well. One more symptom of where our society is heading, with streets that increasingly look more and more like one city to another. Mind you, there are more and more barbershops and hairdressers. We certainly do go well-groomed.