Bikini

Order a bikini in a Barcelona bar and what arrives is a flattened ham-and-cheese toastie: two slices of soft white pan de molde, cooked ham and melting cheese sealed inside, the whole thing pressed gold on a plancha and cut on the diagonal into two warm triangles. The crusts are usually trimmed. The cheese has gone to a thin elastic layer that pulls when the halves come apart. It is the most ordinary thing on the counter and the only Spanish sandwich whose name was handed to it by a discotheque, which is the part worth slowing down for.

The build is the French croque-monsieur with its formality sanded off. A croque is finished under a blanket of mornay and broiled; the bikini drops the sauce, keeps the buttered bread and the ham and cheese, and trades the oven for the flat griddle every Spanish bar already has running. Press is what defines it. The hot plate flattens the two slices into one thin slab, drives the butter into the crumb, and holds the bread against the cheese long enough for the melt to bind the layers rather than sit loose between them. Done right, the toastie is shatteringly thin at the edge and molten at the centre.

Each part is chosen for what the heat does to it. The bread has to be soft sliced pan de molde, because a crusty loaf will not flatten and will scorch in lines before the inside warms. The cheese has to actually melt, so Emmental or Gruyere works where a hard grating cheese would only go oily. The ham is jamon dulce, the cooked pink slicing ham, mild enough to disappear into the cheese instead of fighting it; a dry-cured mountain ham would seize and turn salty under the plancha. Too little butter and the bread sticks and tears off the plate; too much and it fries instead of toasting, greasy rather than crisp.

You smell it before it lands, toasting bread and warm butter off the griddle, the same smell as a grilled cheese anywhere. The first triangle is too hot to bite cleanly and the cheese stretches in a thread between the half on the plate and the half at your mouth. The outside gives a faint crackle, the inside is soft and warm, the ham a quiet salt underneath. It is a few minutes of work and gone in a few bites, eaten standing with a cana of beer or handed across a counter to a child who asked for one by name.

In Barcelona the bikini is daily furniture. It is on the board at the granja and the bar de tapas, the standby a parent orders for a kid, the quick thing between errands, priced as nothing special and treated that way. The word travels too: across Catalonia, where it is firmly the local name for the toastie, and into the rest of Spain, where bikini and the plainer mixto compete for the same pressed ham-and-cheese. In its home city the name is so settled that few people pause on the oddness of asking a waiter for a nightclub by way of lunch.

The variations are mostly upgrades and swaps the city argues about cheerfully. The serious tapas bars rebuild it with jamon iberico and a Spanish cheese in place of the French originals, the version Albert and Ferran Adria served at their bar Tickets as a luxe homage. Truffle turns up in the high-end ones, a thin layer or a few drops scenting the cheese. A frankfurt i formatge swaps the ham for a split sausage but keeps the press. What it is not is a flauta, the long thin baguette toastie sold alongside it; the bikini is square soft bread flattened on the plate, and the two live next to each other on the same menu without overlapping.

Named for the Sala Bikini

The sandwich is named for a place, not a person or a swimsuit, and the place is documented. The Sala Bikini, a music hall and nightclub, opened in Barcelona in 1953 and ran for decades as a fixture of the city's nightlife. Its founder is consistently described as a Belgian restaurateur with a fondness for the croque-monsieur he knew from France; the specific name attached to him in popular accounts is not firmly established in the record and is best left as that, a Belgian owner who put a French toastie on the menu of a Barcelona club.

The naming turns on language politics. Under Franco, menus were pushed toward Castilian Spanish and away from French and English, so a croque-monsieur could not be sold under its French name. The club served it as the bocadillo de la casa, the house sandwich, and customers who wanted the toastie they had eaten at the club began asking for the one from Bikini. The place name stuck to the food, shortened from bikini bocadillo to just bikini, and spread out of the club into the bars of Barcelona.

The swimsuit and the Pacific atoll it was named for sit one step further back and are not the source here; the sandwich took its name from the club, and the club took its name from the era's fashion for the word. The original venue, a sprawling spot on Avinguda Diagonal with a bowling alley and a minigolf, ran until a final night on 10 January 1990 and was then demolished to make way for the L'Illa Diagonal complex; the club reopened nearby in 1994 and trades on as a concert hall. The sandwich outlasted the original building entirely: a sauce-less croque-monsieur, renamed to satisfy a dictatorship's language rules, still ordered by the name of a dance hall that was knocked down in 1990.