It is eaten in bites and with stained hands. The concept is simple: a brioche and bread sandwich filled with scrambled eggs and a variety of toppings. The recipe, simple, rich and cheap, is at the heart of a company started by two 22-year-old women named Revuelto, whose success is not surprising given how much Spaniards love eggs.
The store opened three months ago a few meters from Madrid’s Gran Vía with this unique dish, available as a set menu with fries and a soft drink for only 9.90 euros. We say “local” because it’s not a restaurant but a take-away service, although from time to time customers come looking for a table to eat their sandwich. They all end up trying not to throw the whole egg at themselves while sitting at a counter in the small eatery.
Naia Parra and Sandra Lauzurica met in the Basque Country while studying leadership, entrepreneurship and innovation at university. Precisely in those years, Erasmus went to South Korea, the country where they came up with the idea of bringing this type of sandwich to Spain. “We bought them to take away and they were perfect for our student budget,” says Lauzurica. “People are obsessed with saying that we make Korean-style sandwiches, but the reality is that it’s not a Korean recipe, it’s really much more American. We only met her there, but that could have happened to us in New York.”
In those years, they were not yet thinking of starting their own company: it was a variety of coincidences, she says, that gradually led her down the entrepreneurial path. They acknowledge that studying entrepreneurship at university helped them take the plunge. When they arrived in Madrid to do their university internships, they realized there could be room for a product like theirs and it didn’t take long for them to get down to business: “We really like the world of hospitality in Madrid a lot of innovation and you can always try new things,” they say.
As with any small business venture, they started by testing the product with friends and acquaintances, incorporating ingredients like spicy all i oli, goat cheese or truffle sauce to bring it closer to national tastes. Having achieved some success in their closest circles, they completed the residency search between the months of May and November. On December 3rd they opened their doors for the first time after a facelift. The beginnings were tough: “We worked in very long shifts to investigate when more people would enter the site,” Sandra recalls.
The sandwich consists of homemade brioche bread toasted in butter and two scrambled eggs: Before they were free-range, but after the case of salmonellosis in the Casa Dani tortillas – where the eggs were ultimately innocent – they decided not to take any chances and work with pasteurized . It can be ordered in five varieties: avocado, bacon with cheese, pulled pork or heura and also with truffle mayonnaise. They all cost 6.90 euros except the avocado which costs 7.50. House favorites are the bacon and cheese one – the All i Oli is really spicy and comes in generous quantities – and that comes with sliced mushrooms, parmesan cheese and sweet mayonnaise. After trying them, we understand the success of the combination: it’s tasty, successful and filling for little money.
Revuelto isn’t a bar where you go on a first date: it’s a place to devour, get your hands dirty and get covered in sauce and butter. It’s also an option for almost every meal of the day: breakfast with coffee, lunch if ordered from the menu, or even for a snack in the nearby Plaza de Pedro Zerolo.
It’s 12 noon, the store has just opened and people are coming in to order their breakfast. Francisco Martínez joins Revuelto for the first time. He got to know it on Instagram and wants to try it: “It’s very difficult to eat, but it tastes great,” he says after the first bite. He ordered the avocado with a latte. “It’s not very sexy when you meet someone you want to impress, but the taste is very good,” he continues as he devours the sandwich.
It took Parra and Lauzurica more than six months to find the perfect location for Revuelto in Madrid until they found the venue at Calle Víctor Hugo, 5. The beginning was difficult: “No one came through the door,” Lauzurica recalls. Things changed quickly when a Plan influencer in Madrid ran a reel about his sandwiches, which became trending: it has more than 480,000 views to date. When the Tiktokers arrived, this started to fill up. However, they do not relax: they know that success could have been like lightning. “There is a boom with Revuelto right now, but we don’t know how long it will last. A lot of people are repeating right now, and that’s good. We’ll have to see if this continues or if people start to get bored with the product and stop using it. Come. That’s why we want to take things slowly.
With the content creators came the long queues of more than 40 minutes that began to form at the doors of the premises. Lauzurica assures that they produce more than 100 scrambled eggs a day, doubling that at weekends: when they run out, they’d rather stop selling than compromise the quality of the product by wanting to make more. That’s why there’s a sign on the front door that says: Until sold out, so while stocks last.