Thurs 2 Sep
Lay-in then fruit salad and a slice of cheese & tomato toast
Did some washing and cleaned the dishes then hiked across the city to Pols. Recorded all the dripping noises and waited around for some pipe flushing that never happened then picked up Carles en route to La Mandrágora, a vegan, queer-led pay-what-you-can cafe in El Carmen.
We arrive at Asociación Cultural y Gastronómica Vegana La Mandrágora (La Mandrágora Gastronomic and Cultural Association) and sit outside on the rambunctious terrace with an icy drink until Antoni appears. Leggy climbing plants frame a large glass double-door and hand-drawn chalkboard with the daily menu, and I get whiff of toasted spices: cumin, peppercorns, paprika. The conception of the project came in 1996 from autonomous punk space Castel Flora, during the height of it’s national fame. A burgeoning scene for DIY culture, food justice and anarchist organising over the past 25 years, La Mandrágora kitchen has moved a few times and settled in their current home on the corner of Carrer de la Mare Vella in 2015, with a healthy relationship with their landlord and some future security.
Fitted with progressive ethics and inclusive organisation, Antoni tells us how it’s a worker co-operative model that relies on a board of seven directors responsible to a wider network of twenty collaborators, from chefs, to waiters, barstaff, cleaners and event organisers. The kitchen is currently shared by three collectives, all spearheaded by Latin American women, cooking a fusion of traditional Spanish and South American dishes from within an “immigrant context”, and supporting other pop-up events and young chefs-in-training. La Mandrágora’s vibrant food culture has always been driven and shaped by the Indigenous and peasant farmers of l’Horta. Since recovering from the Franco dictatorship in 1936, the network has been strengthened by the associations that tie areas of land together and provide a framework for solidarity: sharing resources, protecting crop prices, trading and lending crops, providing back-up labour and reinforcing each others voices in the resistance to urban expansion and capitalist market place.
Although most of the food used to be skipped, scavenged or donated, the kitchen has cultivated a tight relationship with a local organic farmer who grows all the vegetables needed for week-round service, and meets often with the directors and chefs to discuss the calendar of produce to help forward plan for events and meals. The Ecological Turn is especially present in the collaborative thinking the farmer and client put into selecting strains of crops for their taste, texture, reaction to heat, and resistance to oxidisation.
As we sit down inside at a worn wooden table with mismatching chairs, I order a house vermouth (brewed in the cellar), and look around at the decor: prints by local artists, traditional Valencian nick-nacks, Refugees Welcome merch, photos of famous visitors, handmade ceramic vessels with dried flowers poking out. It pretty much feels like I’m back at Brixton Pound – the vibe is easy-going but serious in that it’s whimsical but grounded. This is a space where all the layers of influence overlap, argue amongst themselves, tell conflicting stories. Through this flow of energies, materials and actions, a new, idiosyncratice visual language becomes the confluence of vision and aims unpacked by each pair of hands to contribute until this point.
The pay-what-you-can model ensures everyone can afford a meal regardless of income, and offers a suggested donation for 3 courses at €10, which is hugely competitive in the area. We have a chilled corn and chili soup, followed by warm squash and barley salad with an umami dressing, then share two cremas Catalanas, a local style of set custard flavoured with orange and vanilla. It’s simple and hearty food heightened with succulent ingredients and a deft touch, reminding me (not only in presentation, also service) of Bonnington Cafe in Vauxhall. In fact, the more I think about it, the operations are thematically linked by organisational structure, outspoken veganism and local hotspot fame.
I ask Antoni about the further political implications of an open donation system, having implemented one myself at Brixton Pound, and he explains that there has historically been a need to resist commodification of the menu, time and labour of those working at La Mandrágora, and to uphold the promise of inclusion despite frequent flippancy from visitors who maybe don’t fully understand the concept and are bargain-hunting for fun. There is a shared ethical framework of embedding non-judgemental customer service, of accepting that day-to-day everyone’s situation is different, and –like DIY Space For London used to put on their flyers– that NSBTAFLAOF (no-one should be turned away for lack of funds). I am fully in-line with this sentiment for a number of reasons, but primarily for the working model built not in opposition to capitalist reliance on money, but as a proposal for engaging with alternative modes of exchange within a city context to destabilise the monopoly.
For all their promise of employment utopia, most examples of “anti-capitalist” business that don’t rely on opaque top-down structure will expose their own inner workings of privilege and chaos, in what Jo Freeman called ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’. She writes,
“The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate structurelessness -- and that is not the nature of a human group.”
So we could see how working in this way is to conflate the solidified inequality with a liquidious promise of parity. There is something brave and vulnerable about organising horizontally inspite of the inescapable reality of power dynamics; to contradict each other, to deal with issues head on, to makes sure everyone’s voice is heard should they want it to be. Antoni remarks that on occasions there may well be more direct and (un)intentional exploitation without the scaffolding of middle management, however removing the protective barriers for this sort of behaviour means that there is an arena for discussion and taking responsibility for one’s actions. In this bosom of collectivity, there is joy in resistance. “Everyday is an opportunity to learn about each others’ needs”, Antoni tells me, smiling warmly. “This project is organising against efficiency and for understanding.”