Lhardy: Consommé Since 1839

Why is it significant?

Stop in front of the dark wooden shopfront, its gilded letters spelling out a name that does not sound Spanish at all: Lhardy. Through the glass you can see marble counters, old mirrors, pastries under glass bells, and a tall silver samovar that has nothing to do with tea.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stop in front of the dark wooden shopfront, its gilded letters spelling out a name that does not sound Spanish at all: Lhardy. Through the glass you can see marble counters, old mirrors, pastries under glass bells, and a tall silver samovar that has nothing to do with tea.

Lhardy opened in 1839, founded by Emilio Huguenin, a pastry cook from Switzerland. The name is said to have been borrowed from a fashionable café in Paris, because in nineteenth-century Madrid anything French sounded elegant. Downstairs, people came for pastries and savoury bites. Upstairs, behind discreet doors, private dining rooms opened for those who did not want to be seen eating, or seen eating with whom.

The story goes that Queen Isabella the Second herself slipped in to dine in one of those upstairs rooms. Politicians plotted over the famous cocido, the slow Madrid stew served in three courses, and more than one government was rumoured to have been sketched at these tables. Writers of the nineteenth century knew it well, and Lhardy turns up in the pages of novels about the Madrid of that era.

And the samovar? It holds consommé, a clear, hot meat broth, and for generations customers have filled their own cups from its tap, standing at the counter, especially on cold winter afternoons. It is one of the oldest rituals in central Madrid, nearly two centuries of people warming their hands on the same kind of cup in the same mirrored room.

Lhardy sits at the very edge of the writers' quarter: the Carrera de San Jerónimo was the old road to the monastery of San Jerónimo, and the streets that slope down from it to the south are full of names you will soon recognise. Walk east along the Carrera, then turn right down Calle de Ventura de la Vega, named after a nineteenth-century playwright, and follow it to Calle del Prado. Look for a doorway with the words Ateneo de Madrid.