The menú del día is one of those cultural artifacts so embedded in daily life that almost nobody asks where it came from. Lakshmi Aguirre's book answers anyway: it was invented in the mid-1960s by Manuel Fraga, Franco's tourism minister, to convince foreign visitors that post-civil-war Spain had plenty of food. The regime mandated a soup starter, a choice of three mains, a dessert, bread, and a quarter-litre of wine with a minimum 12% alcohol content. The price was fixed between 50 and 250 pesetas. It was propaganda dressed as hospitality. The trick worked too well. Rebranded in the early 1970s to shed its tourist-trap origins, the set lunch became a fixture of Spanish working life — a midday anchor around which offices, construction sites, and family schedules organized themselves. Today 4 million menús are still served every weekday, averaging €14.70 each, a price that rose 3.5% in the past year. Aguirre's book argues this isn't just a meal format but a social infrastructure: a place where people who live alone find company, where families on tight budgets eat out, where regulars form a chorus. The threats are structural, not dramatic. Spaniards are more time-poor. Many eat microwaved ready meals in office canteens. Rising energy and food costs squeeze the small family restaurants that can least afford to rotate four mains daily. The response has been pragmatic: the "dish of the day" replaces the full spread, and Latin American staples appear on menus reflecting Spain's changing demographics. Purists grumble; Aguirre counters that the menú has always mirrored whoever sits down to eat it. Ferran Adrià declared the menú del día dead in 2009. Seventeen years later, Aguirre's diagnosis is more nuanced: it's in hot water but hasn't had its chips. The real loss she identifies isn't culinary but civic — a "centre of community gravity" disappearing not because people stopped wanting it but because the economic and temporal conditions that sustained it are eroding. A meal you can't afford the time for is a meal you can't have, regardless of price. Aguirre's own benchmarks for a good menú spot are wonderfully specific: no frozen chips, a chalkboard written by someone who's never heard of lettering, no trace of the words avocado or burrata, bonus points if the owner's kid is doing homework at a table in the back. These are markers of unselfconsciousness — the opposite of the €20-€30 bistro-style pretenders she and Adrià both despise. The book sits in a tradition of food writing that treats meals as social documents rather than recipes. It includes personal reminiscences and a selection of recipes, but the argument is historical and sociological: that a policy born from dictatorship became, through daily repetition and democratic adaptation, something genuinely communal. Most Spaniards don't know Fraga invented it. Aguirre thinks that forgetting says as much about Spain as the meal itself.
