Brunch & Cake, Eixample

My first impression of Barcelona was that there were so many cafes, delis, bars and restaurants that you would have to be a fool to consider entering the local food and beverage market. But now that the dust has settled on my move and (most of) the boxes have been unpacked, I am retracting that sentence.  The bars with neat rows of tapas are endless, the paellas, the plates of fideua are everywhere.  Good coffee?  Non-existent (seriously, I have identified 6 shops in Barcelona that use La Marzocco coffee machines (their official distributor for Spain is a company called Coffee People and they list all their clients).  Breakfast places? The ones that do an epic layout a la what I was used to in Berlin, not so much.So I am not at all surprised by the cluster of people I always see outside Brunch and Cake (who are one of the 6 to have a Marzocco).  Their breakfasts are American style and then some.  A perilous tower of pancakes.  A wedge of cake, thick as a dictionary.  The so-called bagel turns out to be the size of my (Smart car’s) steering wheel.  There is also a leaning towards the strange combinations that are widely accepted in the US.  My poached eggs on waffles for instance comes on sweet waffles, with hollandaise sauce – it’s really too weird for me.  And I have always struggled with overly large portions of food, finding myself feeling bloated and defeated before I have even started eating.