🟧 Cool-tacky
The Spanish aesthetic of "cutre"
Kyle Chayka: Italy’s sprezzatura, for stylized messiness; Japan’s iki, for carefree worldliness; China’s suibian, for a slapdash, anything-goes attitude — there are words in some languages that represent a highly specific cultural ideal. These words are both aesthetic and sociological, and I love to collect them so that I can use them for myself. Last week, I was in Madrid for a few days for the launch of the Spanish translation of Filterworld, and I encountered another such term: cutre, slang in Spain that can just mean “stingy” or “cheap” but in an aesthetic context can be a compliment, a style to seek out. I would roughly translate it as “an authentic shittiness.”
I was hanging out at Rambal, a slightly hipsterified neighborhood restaurant, like the Spanish version of a gastropub, with a group of locals. (It’s in Lavapiés, my favorite neighborhood to stay in in Madrid and not coincidentally quickly gentrifying.) The style of the place was a little cutre, someone said: low-key, unpretentious, old-school, divey. He pointed to the food — pinchos de tortilla, traditional raciones — which was served on plain metal plates, like those you might associate with a cafeteria. The plates were cutre, he said: half authentic-shittiness and half an appropriation thereof. A sign that you didn’t have to take things too seriously, and the service might be lackadaisical, but everything was going to be chill and good.
Cutre captures something I love about Spain, which might be my favorite place to travel. It is unpretentious and unprecious, descriptions that cannot be applied to nearby France (duh) or Italy (too much gravitas in their dolce far niente).1 The Spanish understand that you might as well stop whatever you’re doing at 3 PM, it’s not that important, and have a vermouth and some olives. Several tiny beers over the course of hours are better than one big one. Low-keyness is its own value; the activity itself is more important than its perfection. Caring too much about the precise quality of where you are is not the point.
One journalist told me about an old Madrid cocktail bar that was very cutre. El Palentino in the Malasaña neighborhood (kind of the Williamsburg to Lavapiés’s Bushwick) had a shabby interior, wood paneling, and mirrored walls, tacky like an American beachfront burger stand. It was so dirty that there were cockroaches. But all the scene-y people hung out there. It was cutre cool. After it shut down, a new owner turned it into a fancy cocktail bar — not so cool any more.
The most cutre place in DC might be The Raven, a dive bar in Mount Pleasant. It is the opposite of fancy; most of the surfaces are laminate and the only drinks on offer are beer (canned or bottled) or straight liquor. But the atmosphere is vintage and perfect. You go there when you don’t want anything more than what it offers. It is only desirable (much less aspirational) if you have a taste for it, but then everyone I like tends to understand the appeal. Sometimes all you need are some friends and a cutre place to hang out; you bring the party, not the restaurant. In fact, those are my favorite going-out moments.
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Of course I’m generalizing; different regions behave differently and they all blend together at the edges anyway.
Very cutre 👌
Cutre will always sound tacky/ kitschy/vulgar in an Iberian sort of way to my Latina ears. Chimbo would be it's synonym. Never cool though... just cutre