In July 1946, the year after the Second World War ended, the United States carried out a series of nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, known as "Operation Crossroads." On July 1 came the airburst "Able," and on the 25th the underwater blast "Baker." Photographs of the enormous column of water that Baker hurled up from the sea, swallowing a target fleet that included the former Imperial Japanese Navy battleship Nagato, ran on the front pages of newspapers around the world. "Bikini," the name of a small atoll said to come from the Marshallese "Pikinni," meaning "land of coconuts," became overnight one of the most famous words on Earth. Its 167 islanders were driven from their homeland "for the good of mankind," and the atoll went on to serve as a test site again and again. The memory of this injustice would later leave a deep wound in Japan as well, in the form of the 1954 Lucky Dragon No. 5 incident.
Around the same time in Paris, an entirely different kind of "explosion" was being prepared. In May 1946, the designer Jacques Heim unveiled a two-piece billed as "the world's smallest swimsuit" and named it the "Atome" (atom). It was an era when atomic power served as a metaphor for everything. The instinct to give the name "atom" to something tiny perfectly reflects the mood of the times.
Taking him on head-to-head was Louis Réard, a former automobile engineer who had taken over his mother's lingerie shop. He created a swimsuit even smaller than Heim's "Atome," using a mere seventy-six square centimeters or so of fabric. The day he chose to unveil it was July 5, just four days after the Able test. The name, plain and simple: "Bikini." If it was smaller than the atom, then it was the bomb that splits the atom! It was a play on words, and also a deliberate piggyback on the hottest news word of the moment, the one the whole world was watching.
Meanwhile, many Catholic countries banned it from their beaches, and the Vatican condemned it as "sinful." In Spain, Italy, and Portugal, too, the bikini swimsuit remained taboo for a long time. But in the 1950s, Brigitte Bardot wearing one in Saint-Tropez, and in 1962 the scene in "Dr. No" where Ursula Andress emerges from the sea, pushed this "bomb" toward becoming a global standard. And so the name of an atoll became the name of a swimsuit.
Today, the staple of Barcelona's cafés and bars, a ham-and-cheese toasted sandwich pressed thin and grilled in a fragrant coat of butter, is called a "bikini." Its origin is the croque monsieur, born in Paris around 1910: ham and Gruyère between slices of white bread, fried in butter and served warm. Its name combines "croquer" (to crunch) and "monsieur" (gentleman).
This warm French sandwich crossed the Pyrenees, arrived in Catalonia, and took on a local form: that is the "bikini," my absolute favorite. What sets it apart from the French version is that it uses no béchamel sauce and is pressed thin for a light finish. Its uncompromising makeup of nothing but cooked ham and cheese fit perfectly with the stand-up culture of the bars, and with Barcelona's distinctive milk-bar culture of the "granjas," which serve milk and hot chocolate. Next to a morning café con leche, as a late-afternoon snack, and between dances deep into the night. Warm, fast, and eaten with your hands. As a food for the city, no form could make more sense.
So why is a sandwich called a "bikini"? The answer lies in 1953, with a dance hall called "Sala Bikini" that opened on Barcelona's Avinguda Diagonal. Named after the buzzword of the day, the hall won a reputation for serving French-style toasted sandwiches. Customers would order "that thing from the Bikini," and before long the sandwich itself came to be called a "bikini." From atoll to swimsuit, from swimsuit to dance hall, and then to sandwich: a four-stage chain of naming.
Here another history overlaps. Spain at the time was under Franco's dictatorship. Having won the Civil War, the regime stripped Catalonia of its autonomy and thoroughly purged the Catalan language from public life. It was banned in schools and government offices, street names were rewritten, and publishing was restricted. And it was not only the language. Foreign names, especially stylish French-sounding ones, were frowned upon too, and the sandwich's "official name" became the Spanish "sándwich mixto" or "mixto caliente." While we are at it, the bikini swimsuit itself was long banned on the beaches of Catholic Spain. Both the name and the scrap of cloth were, for the regime, things to be policed.
Yet the nickname "bikini" survived in the mouths of the people of Barcelona. For a city that had endured daily life alongside a forbidden language, ordering by its own name rather than the official one was a small act of resistance, and a statement of identity. Even today, saying "bikini" in a bar in Madrid will not get you very far. Put the other way around, the area where the word "bikini" is understood traces the very outline of the cultural sphere called Catalonia. The name of a single sandwich follows the borders of a culture more precisely than the regional boundaries drawn on a map.
The turning point for the bikini, long a humble everyday snack, came in the 2000s. In the midst of Catalonia's gastronomic revolution, with Ferran Adrià of elBulli at its summit, the chef Carles Abellán, a protégé of that circle, served a bikini with black truffle at his own restaurant, "Comerç 24," and sparked the "gourmet bikini." I lived nearby at the time, and I went there often. A cook running at the very cutting edge of avant-garde cuisine deliberately putting a street-corner ham-and-cheese sandwich under scrutiny: that critical gesture, I think, is exactly what makes the Catalan culinary world so interesting. Since then it has become the signature dish of the city's tapas bars, and even Michelin-starred restaurants now reverently place this "ham-and-cheese sandwich" on their plates. A quick plate from a cheap tavern became an icon of the city's fine dining. A food whose official name was once taken away by a dictatorship now welcomes the world's foodies under its own nickname.
A Pacific atoll, the roar of the Cold War, a swimsuit scandal in Paris, Franco's suppression of language, and the reinvention of a gourmet city. Folded into a single toasted sandwich called a bikini are all the lights and shadows of the twentieth century.
That is why, every time we say this name, we are unknowingly pronouncing the history of the twentieth century. Names travel. From a place to a swimsuit, from a swimsuit to a venue, from a venue to a dish. And the dish, together with the memories of the people who eat it, continues its journey into the next era.
If you come to Barcelona, please try ordering a "bikini" at a bar counter. Because inside that thin, pressed bread, along with the melted cheese, all of these stories are sandwiched.
