Why Going to VIPS Is the Most Spanish Thing Ever

Somewhere in Spain, right now, it is half past midnight. Four eighteen-year-olds are sharing one plate of pancakes and arguing about something that will not matter by Tuesday. Two tables away, a couple in their sixties are drinking coffee and saying almost nothing to each other, comfortably. By the window, a man is eating a club sandwich alone with complete dignity. Nobody has been asked to leave. Nobody is going to be.

This is a VIPS. It is a diner. It was invented in Mexico. It serves American food under strip lighting, and no Spanish person has ever recommended it to a tourist. And yet I would argue it is one of the most authentically Spanish places you can possibly go.

The unlikeliest national institution

The origin story is not remotely Spanish. The Arango brothers opened the first Vips in Mexico City in 1964 — a restaurant with a shop attached, so that customers could eat before or after doing their shopping. In 1969 the youngest of them, Plácido Arango, brought the format to Madrid. Restaurant and shop under one roof, open when nothing else was, with a menu of sandwiches and cakes that owed more to a Los Angeles coffee shop than to anything in Castile.

What happened next is the interesting part. Spain took this imported American-Mexican object, kept the fluorescent lights and the club sandwich, and quietly reorganised it around Spanish habits. The building stayed foreign. The behaviour inside it became completely local.

1. It is open when Spain is actually awake

Every guidebook mentions that Spaniards eat late, and every guidebook undersells it. Dinner at ten. The second film of the evening starting at half eleven. A birthday drink that begins at the hour most of Europe is brushing its teeth. Spanish social life does not really warm up until the point at which other countries have switched the lights off.

Which creates a problem. Around midnight, restaurant kitchens shut. The bar is fine if you want a beer, less fine if what you actually want is a coffee, something sweet and a chair. VIPS was the answer to a question Spain kept asking: where do we go now?

Nowhere in Britain does this job. We have chicken shops and we have going home. The existence of a well-lit, respectable place where a sixteen-year-old and a pensioner can both turn up at one in the morning tells you a great deal about how Spain organises its hours.

2. Nobody is trying to get rid of you

Spanish has a word, sobremesa, for the stretch of time you spend at the table after the food is gone. Not a course. Not a digestif. Just the sitting, and the talking, and the not leaving. English has no equivalent because English-speaking cultures do not treat it as a distinct activity worth naming.

A VIPS honours the sobremesa absolutely. You can make a Coca-Cola last two hours. The bill will not arrive until you ask for it, because in Spain bringing the bill unrequested is very close to rude — it means go away now. You say la cuenta, cuando puedas, and until you do, the table is yours.

This is the single hardest thing for visitors to recalibrate, and the single best thing about eating in Spain.

3. Everybody goes, and nobody feels out of place

Look around a VIPS on a Sunday afternoon. There is a family with a pushchair. There are teenagers on a first date being visibly nervous. There is a grandmother who has ordered exactly one café con leche and intends to stay. There is someone marking a stack of papers because the flat is too small to work in.

Spanish social life is intergenerational in a way that startles a lot of northern Europeans. The same bar at the same hour holds a toddler and a great-grandmother, and neither is considered to be in the wrong place. VIPS is that principle with a laminated menu: no dress code, no tribe, no price barrier that quietly excludes anyone.

4. The shop — and the grief about the shop

For most of its life, the front of a VIPS was a shop. Books, magazines, newspapers, greetings cards, gift-shaped objects of no fixed purpose. Because it was open when everything else was closed, it became the place you bought a birthday present at eleven at night for a party you had forgotten about. An entire generation of Spaniards has this memory.

The shop format was shut down in 2017. The restaurants carried on, and the chain has since passed into the hands of the Mexican group Alsea, which bought Grupo Vips in 2018.

And here is the very Spanish part: people still talk about the shop. Not constantly, but reliably, the way you would mention a demolished cinema or a bar that changed owners. Spain has a fierce, specific loyalty to the version of a place that no longer exists. Ask anyone about their neighbourhood and you will get a list of what used to be there. The mourning is part of the belonging.

5. The order is a ritual, not a decision

Nobody goes to VIPS for the cuisine, and nobody pretends otherwise. People go for the tortitas con nata y chocolate. Or the Vips Club, the sandwich that somehow became a national reference point despite being three slices of toast in a coat.

The point is that you already know what you are having. This is enormously Spanish. It is the same instinct that sends someone to the same bar, at the same hour, to the same table, where the same camarero starts making the drink before the greeting is finished. Novelty is available. Repetition is preferred. There is nothing sad about it — it is a form of intimacy with a place.

6. “Quedamos en el VIPS”

Spanish plans are anchored to physical landmarks rather than to times. En el reloj de Sol. En el quiosco. En la puerta del cine. You name a place everybody already knows and the rest sorts itself out, give or take twenty minutes.

VIPS became one of those landmarks — a neutral, well-lit, universally understood coordinate. Not somewhere you were going, necessarily. Somewhere you met before deciding where you were going. Half of its social function had nothing to do with food at all.

7. It is a bit naff, and nobody is embarrassed

There are fewer VIPS than there once were, and no one under thirty would call it fashionable. But listen to how Spaniards actually talk about it and you will not hear much irony. They liked it. They still like it. They are not performing a knowing distance from the pancakes.

This may be the most Spanish quality of the lot: an unusual capacity for enjoying things sincerely. A chain diner, a plastic menu, a song everybody knows the words to, a village festival with terrible sound. Enthusiasm without apology. Britain could learn something from it.

What to say when you get there

If you want to sound like someone who has done this before rather than someone reading a phrasebook:

• ¿Me pones un café con leche? — literally “will you put me a coffee”. This is how ordering actually works. Quisiera is textbook Spanish; ¿me pones…? is real Spanish.
• Para mí, las tortitas. — “For me, the pancakes.” Short, normal, no verb gymnastics required.
• ¿Qué te apetece? — “What do you fancy?” Apetecer works backwards like gustar, and it is everywhere.
• La cuenta, cuando puedas. — “The bill, whenever you can.” The cuando puedas is the polite bit. Do not skip it.
• Quedamos a las diez. — “Let’s meet at ten.” Quedar is one of the most useful verbs in the language and almost never taught early enough.
• Nos quedamos un rato más. — “We’ll stay a bit longer.” The sobremesa, declared out loud.

Notice how little of this is complicated. The grammar is beginner-level. What makes it sound native is the rhythm, the hedging, the willingness to be brief. That is not something you get from a vocabulary list — it comes from hearing it, and then saying it back to somebody who will tell you when it lands wrong.

Go anyway

You will not find VIPS on a list of places to eat in Madrid, and quite right too. Go to the good places. Eat the good food.

But at some point, at some indefensible hour, go and sit in one. Order the pancakes. Do not ask for the bill for a very long time. You will be doing something more genuinely Spanish than most of what is on the itinerary — which is, in the end, simply staying at the table because the conversation has not finished yet.

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Want to be the person who orders without hesitating? Parlazo connects you with vetted Spanish tutors for one-to-one video lessons — pay for the lessons you take, nothing else. Practise the small, unglamorous phrases that make you sound like you belong at the table.

Photograph: VIPS on Calle de Alcalá, Madrid, by José María Mateos via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0. Parlazo is not affiliated with VIPS or Alsea.