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.