Mercat La Boqueria
Located in El Raval, this massive open market is open from 8 am to 8:30 pm Monday through Saturday (closed Sundays). Vendors sell everything from spices to snacks, meats, vegetables, seafood, sandwiches, freshly squeezed juice, empanadas, candies, chocolate, and a huge selection of it all. Stop at the Market for breakfast, lunch, dinner, tapas or sangria. Grab a sandwich to take to Park Guell for a picnic later in the day. If you’ve got a kitchen available, do your shopping here! The seafood is live on ice, the Iberican ham (local, acorn-fed pigs) comes in a range of pre-packaged to sliced the way you like, right in front of you. Local Spanish cheeses could not be fresher. At the back of the market, you’ll find bar seating where you can stop and have tapas and sangria. Note: If you take photos, be subtle or be sure to ask permission. The vendors can be a bit prickly about being considered a tourist attraction. I found most of them to be fine with photos if I simply asked. Oh, and extra points if you speak to them in Spanish: “¿Puedo tomar una foto?”
Recommended to me by a friend, I also found this in the Lonely Planet guide book. Bar Del Pla is located in El Gotic. We didn’t make a reservation, but we made it early enough so that we had about 45 minutes to order a few things and have a couple glasses of wine before our table went to a reservation. If you go on the early side, you can likely get a seat, but if you want a full dinner experience, I would recommend a reservation (any time after about 8:30 pm). You MUST order the ham and chicken croquettes, arguably one of the best bites we had throughout our whole (heavily researched) trip. We also ordered the Squid in Ink Croquettes, Pan y Tomate, and some excellent Ceviche. We planned to go back by the end of the trip, but alas we had to eat our way through a pretty aggressive checklist for five days. A compelling reason to go back to Barcelona just for those Ham and Chicken Croquettes. Bite-sized comfort food.
On Saturday night, we signed up for a food tour of the city through Barcelona Food Tours. The tour was three destinations, beginning in El Gotic and winding through from El Gotic to El Born.
Walking Tour Destination 1: Cava, Cured Meat, Cheese
We started at a wine shop for Cava (the same thing as Champagne, but with the Spanish regional name), cheese, and cured meats along with an educational presentation of each bite. The Cava was Rimarts Cava, a dry and delicious sparkling white, which was perfect to cleanse the palate between bites. We tried five types of cheese including local goat milk cheese, sheep milk cheese, gruyere, smoked cheddar, and then for contrast, a British bleu cheese. We then sampled five Iberian cured meats. Iberian pigs are raised strictly on acorns in a specific region and cured with only salt for two years (which is why you will likely not see it for sale in the US due to the FDA standards of preserving meat. Iberica Bellota specifies the region and the diet of the pigs/boars. We tried loin, sausage, chorizo, fuet, and jamon. My favorites were the chorizo and the jamon, which we later purchased at Mercat de la Boqueria to bring home.
Our next stop featured white wine, rose, and four flatbreads, beginning with two that essentially were open-faced sandwiches. Ingredients served atop crusty slices of bread. One was Salted Cod Salad, and the other was Beef Carpaccio with Fois Gra. Salted cod originated from necessity. Preserving cod with salt made it last longer. The process of salting it, and then soaking and rinsing away the salt many times is now more of a labor of love, and thus salted cod is a coveted (and more expensive) version of cod in Catalonia. I was skeptical, but it really was delicious. Beef Carpaccio and Fois Gra: how could it be bad? The second course was a surprising combination of soppressata, cheese and a drizzle of honey. I liked the unexpected sweet element, as I bit in before learning what I was eating (the wine was potent, I suppose). Our third pairing was Escalibara, layered from bottom to top was flat, pita-like bread, mixed roasted vegetables (eggplant, red peppers, onion), a cod filet, and a drizzle of aioli. At this point, I was getting full. Thankfully we had a 10-15 minute walk to destination three.
After walking from El Gotic to El Born (the entire city is walkable, really), we settled into a cozy tapas restaurant called “Tapeo”. This is where we dove in to some real Spanish-style tapas (shared plates) and then had a couple of desserts. First up, a dish you could not pry from my cold dead hands, Papas Bravas, kind of like hash browns with aioli and a spicy sauce. I have never ever met a potato I didn’t like, and Papas Bravas is now a home-cooking achievement I must unlock. Next up we sampled eggplant with honey and lime. I don’t know the official name of the dish, but it was also a knock-out. The final savory dish of our tour was beef cheek in a brown gravy. At this point, you might be able to tell that my notes were becoming more cryptic, as I also cannot tell you the name of the dish. Tapeo should be able to help you if you ask for the beef cheek! We had a gorgeous red wine pairing with our final savory dishes.
Dessert was a fluffy leche with a torched top. It reminded me of flan, but if you whipped air into it so that it almost floated away. Very light, very simple. Our tour guide also brought along a pastry to share, which was a custard filled lemony sweet. Voila! Now to walk another mile or so, as we did. Notably, because this is a walking city, we ate voraciously, and yet both of us lost weight in the end! How can one not adore a city that provides such a lifestyle?!
Catalana
We stayed in a hotel near City Center. It just so happened that we walked towards La Rambla (a big long walking street that stretches the length of the city all the way to the beach area (Barceloneta). And on that walk, we kept seeing
M Delish Boutique 