‘The beauty of the useless’: Spain’s super-thin restaurant napkins are throwaway art treasures

Forever flimsy and ineffective at cleaning greasy fingers, the servilletas of the Iberian peninsula resist the relentless ‘optimisation’ of our age. A new photo book recognises them as cultural treasures in miniature If you have ever eaten a meal in a bar, cafe or restaurant in Spain and grabbed a napkin from the ubiquitous small metal dispensers, you will be familiar with the most intriguing feature of the wafer-thin servilletas: how utterly functionally useless they are. Don’t bother using ...

By Abbas Asaria