©2006 The Chestnut Hill Local

Charming Café Barcelona New eatery a little bit of Spain in Chestnut Hill
by LEN LEAR

The salads at Café Barcelona are aesthetically presented, made with the freshest ingredients and taste as good as they look. This one has goat cheese, greens of the day, honey, thyme, pine nuts and black olive vinaigrette.

When Montserrat Galiano was growing up in the mountains outside Barcelona, Spain, you might say she was surrounded by a garden of eatin’.

“Both my father and mother were very good cooks, and their cooking was very health-oriented,” she said. “My father would pick mushrooms and snails in the mountains. In fact, five years after he died, we still had jars of mushrooms he had picked ... Because they were such good cooks, I also loved to cook, and I made some very complicated meals.”

Montserrat, 41, with a smile that explodes like a New Year’s Eve firecracker, came to the U.S. with her husband, Carlos, who puts together complex computer systems, in 1996. He was hired to work on the computer systems at the Summer Olympics in Atlanta.

Montserrat Galiano (center), owner of Café Barcelona, which opened in mid-April, is flanked by employees Constance Krebs and Ivan Witherspoon. “They are both great,” said Montserrat. “I wish I could find more workers like them.” (Photos by Jimmy J. Pack Jr.)

Carlos’ work was so impressive that he was offered a job by a major corporation with offices in many American cities. Carlos was free to choose which city he wanted to work in. “We wanted to be close to New York but not in New York,” explained Montserrat. “We visited Philadelphia and really liked it. I was used to walking a lot every day in Spain. I did not want a car, so we moved to center city, and I was able to get around without a car. Initially we thought we’d stay here for three years and then go back to Spain, but as you can see, things did not work out that way. We still hope to go back to Spain someday to live. I really miss it.”

Eight years ago the Galiano family moved to Radnor Township for one reason only — the quality of the public schools there. Montserrat and Carlos literally visited 12 elementary schools in the suburbs and talked to the principal in each case before deciding which one their children — Clara, 10, and Serge, 14 — would attend and, therefore, where they would live.

“Now that we live in Radnor Township,” said Montserrat, “I had no choice but to get a car. We don’t even have sidewalks, so we don’t do much walking.”

Montserrat, who was a secretary for a big company in Spain, worked for one year at the Mexican Consulate in downtown Philadelphia. Meanwhile, her home cooking was so impressive that friends would hire her to cater parties. That led Montserrat to begin teaching cooking classes four years ago at community-based schools on the Main Line and in West Chester.

Last October, Montserrat happened to be in Chestnut Hill to give a going-away present to a friend who was leaving this area. She immediately felt a kinship with the community because “it’s so charming, and it seems that you can walk almost everywhere.” While here the friend, who had sampled Galiano’s cooking, told her about a place that was vacant, which she said would make an ideal location for a small restaurant.

“I called just out of curiosity,” said Montserrat, “and I was told about another vacancy that would be an even better site for a restaurant. I went to take a look at it and fell in love with the place.”

The location in question was 6 Hartwell Lane, which previously housed Labrador Café and, before that, Garden Gate Café. With flinty determination, Montserrat put together a business plan with assistance from SCORE, an organization of retired business executives which offers free assistance to first-time business owners. She was thus able to obtain a new business bank loan.

Little by little, things fell into place, and Montserrat opened Café Barcelona in mid-April. The landlord, Bowman Properties, painted the place and made other improvements while Montserrat, who calls herself “crafty,” designed the logo, designed and painted the awning, picked out cutlery and did everything else required to open the café, which serves breakfast and lunch every day but Monday. (Even on Monday, though, Montserrat works from early in the morning until 7:30 p.m., preparing much of the food for the week to come.)

Café Barcelona, situated behind an antiques shop, is a charming, beautiful stress-free oasis chockablock with antiques and greenery. It offers outdoor dining as well, and Montserrat hopes to offer dinner service eventually.

Business has been reasonably good so far considering the fact that most people in the area do not know yet that Café Barcelona exists. The fact that it does not face onto Germantown Avenue has been problematic for Montserrat’s predecessors, and finding reliable employees is a problem for almost every restaurant owner, especially the new ones.

“I am really blessed that I have found two wonderful workers in Constance (Krebs) and Ivan (Witherspoon),” said Montserrat, “but I definitely need more.” Krebs, of Mt. Airy, attends the Philadelphia Restaurant School and also has two other part-time jobs, and Witherspoon, of Northeast Philadelphia, formerly worked for a limousine company for nine years.

Almost everything at Café Barcelona is homemade. Many of the recipes come from Montserrat’s native Catalan region of Spain. There are wonderful tapas like the garlic shrimp ($5) and fire-burned small Chorizo sausages ($4); sublime salads like the one with goat cheese, greens of the day, honey, thyme, pine nuts and black olive vinaigrette ($12.95); divine soups like the asparagus cream soup ($4); sandwiches like the traditional Catalan cooked sweet sausage, freshly sliced ($8.50); a pizza-like creation (“coca”) made of flat bread topped with red peppers from Spain and a subtle pesto spread ($7.50); and desserts like the zephyr-light pear flan ($3.50). There is also a children’s menu.

Three of us sampled all of the above items as well as others, and there wasn’t a joker in the deck. Montserrat has obviously put blood, sweat and cheers into Chestnut Hill’s newest restaurant.

As we were leaving Café Barcelona, we passed two women who were eating lunch outdoors, and I stopped to ask their opinion of Chestnut Hill’s newest dining establishment. “It’s a lovely little place, and the food is excellent,” exclaimed Jane Horstmann, who used to live in Wyndmoor but now resides in Fountainville, Bucks County.

“Everything is really fresh and really good,” echoed Lucy Rutherford, who said she lives part-time in Chestnut Hill and part-time in Connecticut and who has a daughter living in Flourtown. “I would certainly come back here again and again.”

For more information, call 215-242-1519.