
Making a selection of the best restaurants in a city as big as Barcelona is an arduous task. And although some, like Dua Lipa, are very clear about the best culinary tour of Barcelona, others of us need a top of restaurants to cross off the temples of good food that we have had the luxury of trying.
No matter your preferences. Whether you are looking for the latest trendy restaurant or you are a lover of traditional cuisine. Whether you go crazy looking for meat restaurants or you opt for vegetarian and vegan options. Sushi restaurants, Italian restaurants or even pizzerias. Even beautiful restaurants, if for you the food cannot be separated from the environment. In this list fit all kinds of places, but with only one condition, that they are worthy of being among the best restaurants in Barcelona.
As the ‘tengui’ and the ‘falti’ of the exchange of stickers in Sant Antoni, we invite you to keep this list so that you don’t miss a single restaurant that we insist you visit before you die.
Table Of Contents
- Imprevisto
- Bandinis
- Contracorrent
- La Textil Colective
- Âme Barcelona
- Via Granados
- Sartoria Panatieri
- Kitchen & Bar Theater
- Dinner with specialty punch in The Barcelona EDITION
- Fat Veggies
- Casa Maians
- La Plata
- Pizzeria Pummarola
- Tandoor (and its little brother, Mirch).
- Bar Verat
- Nou Can Martí
- Taverna La Parra
- Tasca i Vins
- Koh
- Koryo
- Els 4 Gats
- The Snails
- Restaurant La Estrella
- Enjoy
- Enigma
- ***Lasarte
- Alkimia
- Jardinet d'Aribau
- Teresa Carles
- Xavier Pellicer Restaurants
- Vacka
- Three social restaurants where more than just food is served : Sobres Mestres, La Pau and She Bistró.
- Cheap restaurants recommended by Michelin
- Mont Bar
- Masala House
- Feast
- Flying Monkey
- Brabo
- Windsor
- La Cabrera
- Martinez Terrace
- Fire, by W Barcelona
- Yuku Barcelona, first class quality in a secret bar.
- Virens, vegetarian haute cuisine
- Rías Kru
- Assalto, Wine bar
- Ultramarinos Marín
- Mae
- Yakumanka
- Batea
- Casa Xica, the house of Barcelona's first bao.
- Three Porquets
- Casa Güell
- Slow and Low
- La Palma de Bellafilla
- Louro
Imprevisto
Part of the team of the restaurant Caellis (with a Michelin Star, started this project last year. Its gastronomic proposal is defined as proximity cuisine and based on vegetables, with a certain Italian touch from its founders.
Imprevisto works with two tasting menus (El Previsto and Imprevisto) that change seasonally, in which a curious cuisine is elaborated: the flavors are homemade and recognizable, but the recipes are elaborated. The elaborations are announced complicated, but what enters the mouth does it as if it had already done it all his life. An example of how to cook well and without fanfare in a restaurant that seeks to grow.
💸 42€ per menu
📍 C/ de Bailèn, 104
Bandinis
In the old premises of Bandinis, where the famous bravas of Sant Antoni Gloriós were served, there is now a new restaurant that offers delicious dishes like this lemon fish tartar or its sweetbreads with artichokes, combining the best of Mediterranean cuisine with Italian touches. A different and surprising Italian in Sant Antoni.
💸 25€ average price per person.
📍 Carrer de Manso, 42.
Contracorrent
Contracorrent Bar is an ideal option to enjoy creative and accessible cuisine in Barcelona. Some of its most outstanding dishes are the ensaladilla rusa de pollo a l’ast, an original and tasty version of this classic, and the cap i pota with red shrimp tartar, a combination of textures and flavors that surprises the palate.
20-25€ average price per person.
📍 C. de Ribes, 35, local 14, Eixample.
La Textil Colective
Up to 22 craft beer taps at the bar entrance alone. If you go on, they have their share of restaurant (with separate, and exposed kitchen) and even their own nightclub. Its 1100 m2 even house their own craft beer brewery, where, in addition, they also make their own soft drinks, taking a step further in their zero waste philosophy.
The tasting menu varies depending on the pairing or if you prefer a lighter or less meaty meal. Either way, you won’t leave there without tasting dishes made using a strict food reuse circuit: the cookies in the appetizers, for example, are made with bagasse and oatmeal left over from brewing.
💸 Menu from 65€.
📍 Carrer de Casp, 33B
Âme Barcelona
Âme is the kind of restaurant that Barcelona always needs: an intimate place, with exquisite service, good wines (many of them natural) and a small but well-selected menu. Its cuisine is Mediterranean in style but with a French soul.
Most of the dishes on the menu are found in the tasting menu, which is certainly recommended to live the full experience. In it we find three bites: mushroom consommé with foie gras oil and eringiri, sea crêpe with pil-pil of Palamós red shrimp and deer tartar with kalamata and beet. To start, they offer a Montseny mushroom maitake with anchovies and foie (undoubtedly one of the best dishes), scallop from Japan with salsify cream and citrus air, and hamachi with vierge sauce.
As main courses, they offer a fish option (Pyrenean trout) and a meat option ( Pyrenean acorn-fed duck matured with duck juice). Also of note is the rice broth from the Ebro Delta with duck confit and velouté (off the menu, we recommend trying the rice broth with red shrimp tartare from Palamós). To finish, the selection of cheeses together with the foie bloc with cocoa. The pre-dessert is the Maresme strawberries with champagne foam and the dessert is a chocolate tart with caramel beurre salé and Tonka. This last one, brutal.
💸 Tasting menu 75€.
📍 Carrer Londres, 91
Via Granados
If someone wants to surprise with an exquisite Mediterranean cuisine in a charming restaurant, Via Granados “is the place to go”. With spectacular dishes thanks to local ingredients and delicious recipes, one cannot miss their starters, as well as the patatas bravas, the padrón peppers and the homemade ham and mushroom croquettes.
💸 Menu from 28€.
📍 C/ Enric Granados, 67
Sartoria Panatieri
Awarded as one of the 50 best pizzerias in the world according to Top 50 pizza last year, specifically in 21st place.
In addition, Sartoria Panatieri has achieved two other considerations. On the one hand, the recognition of the Pizza of the Year 2022 – Latteria Sorrentina Award for its creation based on Cantabrian anchovies, tomato, endive and Kalamata olive puree.
And a second award, in this case linked to sustainability: the Forno Verde – Green Oven 2022, which recognizes the pizzeria’s commitment to environmentally friendly practices and its attempt to avoid food waste as much as possible.
🍲 Their roasted cauliflower, gremolata sauce and parmesan.
💸 Average price between 20€ and 30€.
📍 Carrer de Provença, 330
Kitchen & Bar Theater
Teatro reopened last March in style where Tickets used to be, keeping its layout with open kitchens and its low bar, which was already a show in itself.
Eating with your hands and bites is welcome at the venue. The starters are based on snacks (such as the Iberian bacon airbaguette or the nori and tuna mille-feuille, brought from Elbulli) recovered from their old Tickets essence, but the main courses have a more novel air. They move away from fingerfood and are closer to the stews that your grandmother would cook, with dishes where the highest cuisine is hidden behind very delicate preparations.
📍 Av. del Paral-lel, 164
💸 Average price between 50 and 60 €.
Dinner with specialty punch in The Barcelona EDITION
The luxury 5* hotel The Barcelona EDITION, at the foot of the Mercat de Santa Caterina (Born), is a microcosm within Barcelona. Gastronomy, signature cocktails, entertainment and elegance. A lot of elegance. But also an impeccable dinner service. Its Bar Veraz is one of the most unique speakeasy restaurants in the city.
For its part, Punch Room brings creativity and sophistication to the plan. Accessed by an iconic spiral staircase, this speakeasy bar offers local distillates and ingredients in its carefully curated menu of signature cocktails and punches, served in vintage silver punch bowls.
📍 Avinguda de Francesc Cambó, 14
💸 60 €
Fat Veggies
Almost every time we recommend this place they twist the gesture. Fat Veggies is a brasserie where everything almost everything has contact with fire but the menu is all greens and vegetables. Not a single animal. The result is dishes with incredible textures, smoky flavors, fresh products and some ingredients you didn’t know. The star dish is their cauliflower in various textures.
💸 Average price between 20€ and 30€.
📍 C/ de París, 168
Casa Maians
Undoubtedly the best restaurant in La Barceloneta. Roger and Fuensanta are the couple behind this small restaurant where you’d better make a reservation. There they dispatch Catalan-Mediterranean food made with the care and attention that allows a restaurant for the people of the neighborhood that well deserves to be in every guide for the international public. I could not recommend a single thing, but the most fun is to order their off-menu.
💸 Average price between 30 and 40€.
📍 C/ de Sant Carles, 28
La Plata
It is curious that a place like this, small, neighborhood, humble and simple offer is crowded with the same tourism that makes it increasingly difficult to find places like this in Barcelona. It is also surprising that, being where it is, still its boquerones and homemade vermouth retains the same quality as always. Long live La Plata.
💸 Average price between 10 and 20€.
📍 C/ de la Mercè, 28
Pizzeria Pummarola
This pizzeria on the border between Raval and Sant Antoni is the best example that pizza is and can be an economical dish. Here the most expensive pizza is no more than 10 euros and you get a margarita for six. If it’s too crowded it’s always a good option to order it to go and sit and enjoy it on the benches across the street.
💸 Menu about 10-15€.
📍 Rda. de Sant Pau, 59
Tandoor (and its little brother, Mirch).
Ivan Surinder is the man in charge of Tandoor, one of the best Indian restaurants in the city. And, if not the best, at least the most referenced. To talk about Indian food you have to ask Surinder, or his mother, a woman with a splendid smile who used to run Tandoor and can now be seen one day lending a hand at Mirch, Tandoor’s little brother; Indian food but from a more street perspective. Few curries and a couple of vada pavs but pregnant with flavor.
💸 Average price about 30€.
📍 C/ d’Aragó, 8
Bar Verat
I just learned the meaning of a word and I really like the pedantry derived from using weird words. That word is bicoca. Bicoca is a “thing that is considered good and that is obtained for little money or with little effort”. Well, the Verat is the biggest bicoca in the whole city. Michelin Star chef food for less than 20€.
💸 Price for between 10-20€.
📍Av. Pallaresa, 104 (in Santa Coloma)
Nou Can Martí
On the outskirts of Barcelona, in the park of Collserola, with a simple dining room and spectacular views of the whole city. Nou Can Martí’s location allows access by public transport. Of all the places to eat calçots, it is one of the most interesting from an economic point of view: it has a menu for 23€.
💸 Menu for 23€.
📍 Passatge de la Font del Mont, 4
Taverna La Parra
A classic restaurant with a classic concept and a surprising reinterpretation. What’s surprising? A wasabi ice cream , for example. This place is also said to be expensive, but “the expense is worth it”. Another curiosity: the creature is almost 90 years old and, contrary to what is usually usual, it never stops reinventing itself.
💸 Menu over 30€.
📍C/ de Joanot Martorell, 3
Tasca i Vins
A classic like the top of a jacaranda. It has several restaurants scattered around Barcelona and all have one thing in common: a menu based on traditional cuisine and prices suitable for all budgets.
Its premises are characterized by offering fresh products, cooked over a slow fire, making “chup-chup”, in a family atmosphere, which encourages long after-dinner meals with friends.
💸 Average price between 20-30€.
📍 C/ de la Indústria, 118
Koh
We’ll start talking about Koh by saying that free will is bullshit. Ordering implies regret (not for making a wrong decision) and wanting to come back. A menu to salivate just by looking at it. Ramen, baos and different Asian products in a place that has been standing for four days counted.
💸 Average price about 40€.
📍C/ de Pujades, 133
Koryo
Koryo is in itself a favor for those of us who want to experiment with new cuisines but don’t have enough zeros to afford a flight to Seoul. And not only for that: Koryo is a favor because you can eat like a Russian oligarch or from the menu of the day (seriously, the menu is highly recommended and only costs 12€).
💸 Average price around 20-30€.
📍C/ Reus, 4
Els 4 Gats
It opened in 1884 with the cabaret atmosphere of Le Chat Noir in Paris as a reference. Its bohemian and inspiring spirit caught the attention of the artists of the time, so it was soon frequented by Picasso (who designed the cover of the menu), Dalí, Santiago Rusiñol or Hemingway.
It is one of the oldest and most active restaurants in Barcelona. A classic frequented by both locals and tourists.
💸 Average price around 40€.
📍C/ de Montsió, 3
The Snails
It doesn’t take a genius to guess that it specializes in snails in their sauce, although it also offers typical Catalan dishes. Robert de Niro, Joan Miró, Dalí and Gala or Giorgio Armani have passed through here. Today it is such a classic of Barcelona that you have to visit it at least once in your life, if only to see their chickens cooked over firewood on the same street.
💸 Average price 30€.
📍C/ dels Escudellers, 14
Restaurant La Estrella
La Estrella opened its doors in 1924 and, four generations later, Jordi, Pepi and Pau continue to offer their guests high quality Mediterranean food.
Right in the center, but, at the same time, away from the tourist hustle and bustle, this restaurant offers dishes cooked with seasonal products and km zero, which vary depending on the day and what is in the market. For this reason, we recommend not only looking at the menu, but also asking what they have off the menu (and save room for desserts!).
💸 Theaverage price is around 60€.
📍C/ Ocata, 6
Enjoy
The best restaurant in Barcelona, if we listen to the Michelin Guide, which places this restaurant as the third best restaurant in the world. The house of Oriol Castro, MateuCasanyas and Eduard Xatruch, advanced students of el Bulli, is a fantasy, an experience that is noticeable in the pocket but that, if you can, makes you understand why you pay what you pay what you pay in this kind of places.
💸 Menú Disfrutar Classic €255 (without food pairing)
📍 C/ Villarroel, 163
Enigma
Enigma concept is, as defined on its website, Albert Adrià’s new gastronomic proposal. The evolution of el Bulli according to Albert has revived after the pandemic, but it is still an enigmatic space where great things happen, and where diners enjoy different experiences depending on the spaces they pass through.
Tasting menu €220 (without food pairing)
📍C/ Sepúlveda, 38
***Lasarte
Martín Berasategui’s restaurant has three Michelin stars. In it, the Spanish chef who has accumulated more stars in his restaurants, offers Basque signature cuisine, being one of his most iconic gastronomic bets. His dishes are prepared with seasonal and local products, combining Catalan and Basque flavors in a unique symbiosis.
Lasarte is located in the luxurious Hotel Monument and its design offers diners an experience where textures and light are the protagonists, along with the food, creating an avant-garde and elegant atmosphere.
💸 Tasting menu 305€.
📍C/ Mallorca, 259
Alkimia
We already talked about Alkimia in its day: it received the award for best design restaurant SBID 2017. Or, in other words, to most beautiful restaurant in the world. It is understood, then, that there are few places more instagrammable than this one. But evidently, the thing does not stop here.
Alkimia has become the home of those who know how to cook in the city, a place where Catalan recipes and cuisine prevail, but prepared in a very elevated way. A place, so that we understand each other, for cooks.
💸 Alkimia menu for 184€.
📍Rda. de Sant Antoni, 41
Jardinet d’Aribau
A delicious menu and a unique gastronomic experience is what we find in Jardinet d’Aribau, one of the most charming restaurants in Barcelona. In a magical setting surrounded by nature in the center of the city, the menu offers the most exquisite dishes, from ratatouille, mushroom risotto and chef’s fish, to veal burger eco, Catalan octopus confit and their famous baos locos.
💸 Menu for one person for 25€.
📍 C/ d’Aribau, 133
Teresa Carles
A classic among vegetarians in Barcelona. A full menu costs 13€ (quite economical if we remember that it is a totally BIO option). Their products, some of which you can buy, such as oil, are VMASS: Vegetarian, Mediterranean, Artisan, Healthy and Tasty.
This is the ideal place if you want to eat healthy but without leaving a kidney.
💸 Menu from 13€.
📍 C/ Jovellanos, 2
Xavier Pellicer Restaurants
It is the best vegetable restaurant in the world. This was announced by the contest We’re Smart Think Vegetables! Think Fruit! after awarding this distinction to Xavier Pellicer. Xavier Pellicer, by the way, is the name of the chef, yes, but also of the restaurant. Pellicer, by the way, is one of the most reputable chefs in Spain.
💸 Tasting menu for 85€.
📍C/ Provença, 310
Vacka
Vacka, which means awakening, is one of the most worthwhile restaurants in Barcelona in terms of concept and novelty. And that is a big word. It is a totally vegan restaurant . Although if it is for particularity it stands out for offering a gluten-free and mostly raw product. A must among alternative food geeks.
💸 Average price about 10€.
📍C/ dels Almogávers, 138
Three social restaurants where more than just food is served : Sobres Mestres, La Pau and She Bistró.
Gastronomy is not just food, restaurants, recipes and chefs, and the better it is understood that a meal has unsuspected economic and social implications, the better it will be for everyone. These three restaurants have understood this, and explore ways to improve society through hospitality, and that is why we wanted to add them to this list of the best of 2022.
Sobres Mestres is a project of Café Lleialtat in the Sants neighborhood that cooks a menu every day prepared with fresh quality food that for commercial reasons are discarded from the food supply chain, giving a second chance to artisan bread, vegetables, greens and fresh fruits.
On the other hand, SHE Bistró is a restaurant in the upper area of Barcelona where the workers are survivors of male violence and people with functional diversity. Finally, La Pau is a place that the Fundació Llindar has opened in the Gothic quarter of Barcelona, in the center, to provide work for students from difficult backgrounds who are trained in gastronomy at the El Repartidor school in L’Hospitalet.
In short, three places that show that gastronomy goes far beyond the dish, and that the further we move away from the recipe, the better we understand food and everything that surrounds it.
💸 Various prices
📍C/ d’Olzinelles, 31 (Sobres Mestres)
📍C/ de Santaló 88 (SHE Bistró)
📍C/ Josep Anselm Clavé, 10 (La Pau)
Cheap restaurants recommended by Michelin
Luxury food doesn’t have to be expensive (or at least, not always), and that’s why Michelin has been launching the Bib Gourmand awards for years , which reward restaurants that offer haute cuisine for under 35 euros.
We already showed you the list, and you can choose yourself, but without a doubt, Cruix, Nairod or La Mundana are some of our favorites, places where we have enjoyed a bistronomic cuisine of category, with accessible tapas, Catalan cuisine reinvented and some dishes of very much at very affordable prices.
💸 Various prices
📍C/ d’Entença, 57 (Cruix)
📍 C/ d’Aribau, 141 (Nairod)
📍 C/ Vallespir, 93 (La Mundana)
Mont Bar
This restaurant tops our list of favorites of 2022. And this restaurant brought to the city one of the last Michelin stars. After its chef won the award at the Fòrum Gastronòmic al Cuiner 2022, the Michelin Guide recognized Mont with its first star.
Soul of gastrobar that works the fresh seasonal and proximity product, where the presentations are taken care of. This is what the Michelin Guide says about them. In short, a restaurant that has given much to talk about this 2022 and will probably be one of the stars of 2023.
💸 Menu desgutaciñon for 135€.
📍 C/ de la Diputació, 220
Masala House
Not everything in Barcelona are Michelin stars and great awards, and we are aware that gastronomy is the day to day, and often, as the saying goes, “al pot petit s’amaga la bona confitura”. It is good that there are great starred restaurants, but it is in the daily lunches where the great battle of the gastronomy of a city is fought.
For this reason, it is fortunate to have soldiers like Casa Masala for wars like these , an Indian restaurant where true haute cuisine is made at affordable prices, and where it is demonstrated, on the one hand, that Indian cuisine hides a complexity and refinement that is often hidden from us, and on the other hand, that great gastronomy does not have to be inaccessible.
In short, Casa Masala is one of our favorites this year, a great little restaurant where to discover that eating well can be eating Indian, cheap and fun.
💸 Price between 30-40€.
📍 C/ Muntaner, 152
Feast
And if we continue walking to escape from the Michelin Stars, we take the path of accessible gastronomy, until we reach a sandwich. It reminds us that food is humble, and that before the plate, the tupper and the fork, a bread was the primordial and efficient continent: the food’s wrapper is its edible carbohydrate. At a time when edible straws are made to save plastic, the bocata gives us a lesson in humility.
🍲 Your pitonisa burger, 100% vegan.
💸 Average price between 10€ and 20€.
📍 Carrer del Portal Nou, 19
Flying Monkey
Flying Monkey is a casual haute cuisine stroll along the Mediterranean. The new restaurant of Ronit Stern, the owner of another great restaurant, La Balabusta, elevates the food of Israeli and Middle Eastern roots to create a concept halfway between home cooking, the healthy dish for a midday (good midday menu) office worker or a light snack that stretches between natural wines, the other specialty of the place.
Also, by the way, watch out for their cakes and breads, since the restaurant shares the premises with Oz Bakery, which prepares its dough in the workshop that can be visited downstairs, rounding off the proposal of the space.
🍲 Their homemade bread sandwich with pastrami.
💸 Average price between 20€ and 40€.
📍 C/ d’Amigó, 37,
Brabo
What do the best pizza makers in Europe eat when they leave the dough aside and want to treat themselves? The answer is Brabo, the steakhouse opened by the people in charge of Sartoria Panatieri, recently named the best pizzeria in Europe. Brabo is a fine dining steakhouse where everything, even the bread and butter, is grilled, and where the highest quality meats are prepared to satisfy the carnivorous cravings of any food lover.
💸 40-60€
📍 C/ de Sèneca, 28,
Windsor
What dishes would you choose to sum up your own life, or to sum up your city? Those of us who are not yet lucky enough to have chroniclers who talk about what we have eaten throughout our lives, have to make do with reading those who talk about what is eaten in our environment, in our cities. Let them talk about dishes that we also eat and, therefore, also a little bit about ourselves.
The Windsor is an example of one of these restaurants, a place of traditional and classic Catalan cuisine, with tablecloths, heavy curtains and cheese trolley, where you can give yourself the homage you deserve. They have several menus (Tradition, Tribute to Néstor Luján…) or a seasonal menu where they work the elevated cuisine but always with an eye on our tradition.
💸 60-70€
📍 Còrsega 286, 08008
La Cabrera
Those in the know know that a barbecue is not the same as an Argentinean asado, and in Barcelona, a city where everyone knows that the Argentinean is one of the largest communities, there are several places where you can learn the difference between the two. Few, however, like La Cabrera, one of the best steakhouses in Buenos Aires, which has just opened a branch in Barcelona.
The restaurant, named best steakhouse in Buenos Aires in 2018 in one of the cities with the best steakhouses in the world, is owned by grill icon Gastón Riveiro, a chef who doesn’t do somersaults: traditional grill, the cuts that touch and exact elaborations. Because here you don’t come to experiment, but to learn the secrets of a way of cooking that has become the symbol of a country.
💸 50-60€
📍 C/ de la Diputació, 239
Martinez Terrace
There are few places that can be said to be all they have to be. And there are few because to be everything you need to be there are no standards or ideals. It is not a matter of fitting a model, but of responding exactly to the idea that one has built and sells of oneself. It is possible to be a frankfurter bar at three euros a sandwich, and be everything you have to be, and it is possible to be a tri-starred restaurant at 300 euros a plate, without reaching it.
La Terraza Martínez is one of the cases in Barcelona, a restaurant that is what it has to be, because you leave happy to have been there, having found what you were looking for. The place is now celebrating ten years as a reference restaurant in the city. A place that the city has to have, because the mountain of Barcelona has to have a restaurant for Barcelonians, where to eat great rice at reasonable prices and feel, as one rarely feels in this city owned by the cruise ships that can be glimpsed from the Martinez, that the Eixample at our feet is a little bit ours again.
Fire, by W Barcelona
In FIRE, one of the restaurants of W Barcelona where the ember and the sea are the protagonists, they release a menu each new season.
Therefore, the ingredients are ultra-seasonal, organic and foraged, and here they combine them with the unpredictable nature of fire to create a fusion of unexpected flavors.
Dishes are a mix of simple and complex, raw and braised, meat-based and plant-centric, juxtaposing rustic bites with flavor-defying sauces.
🍲 Lobster with grilled fennel and grape salad and citrus Beurre Blanc.
💸 Between 50 and 60€.
📍 W Barcelona, Plaça de la rosa dels vents. Pg. de Joan de Borbó, 1
Yuku Barcelona, first class quality in a secret bar.
What they do in Yuku is something that plays in another league. There the raw material is of excellent quality; so much so that it is hard to believe that something like this could exist. Their philosophy is summarized under the concept of omakase, which means trusting and leaving the menu in the chef’s hands. This is a type of menu that is normally served in Japanese sushiya, that is, in establishments that have a bar with 4 to 10 seats.
Yuku’s proposal is more than clear: to generate a magical atmosphere inspired by Japanese culture within a closed-door space. All this makes it one of the most unique Japanese restaurants in the city.
Secret location.
Virens, vegetarian haute cuisine
Rodrigo de la Calle’s proposal in Barcelona , Virens, is this year among the best vegetarian restaurants in the world, and after tasting its vegetable tasting menu one understands why.
The guide that awarded it explains that the chef’s enthusiasm “manages to ensure that dishes with vegetables as protagonists are always surprising, highly gastronomic and also silence non-vegetarians”, and we tell you that dishes like his beet gazpacho or his pickled carrot risotto become, directly, our most memorable dishes of the year.
🍲Pickled carrot risotto
💸 From 50€.
Gran via de les corts catalanes 619-621
Rías Kru
From the fusion of Rias de Galicia, mythical seafood restaurant in Barcelona and Espai Kru, the place upstairs that innovated Barcelona’s gastro scene by offering a menu where everything was raw, Rias Kru has been born, a single space where both concepts merge, offering a menu that is a mix between a traditional seafood restaurant of high flying and a delicate menu of raw dishes.
Tartares, nigiris, tiraditos and tatakis or the famous one-sided langoustine, cooked only on one side to achieve two textures, accompany the fresh seafood brought from Galicia or fished directly in the pool that the restaurant has at the entrance. The place in Barcelona to treat yourself.
💸 From 7o€.
Carrer Lleida 7, Barcelona
Assalto, Wine bar
The joke is on: Assalto takes the Raval’s gastro scene by storm and shakes it by the lapels asking it to wake up, that the big kitchen is coming. Assalto is the little brother (or big brother, we don’t know) of My Fucking Restaurant, a few meters away, a place dedicated to good food and sustainability (today they only cook with vegetables). With these two places the chef, Mateo Bertozzi, has created a Little Italy in Nou de la Rambla (former Conde de Asalto street, hence the name), where he manages from the shadows one of the great cuisines that are made in Barcelona.
In Assalto he has created a restaurant and wine bar with a somewhat indefinable cuisine, which navigates between Spanish tradition (the Granada adobo is, openly, one of the best dishes of 2024) or Asian, with eggplants in sweet and sour cachuete sauce or Galician octopus with (lots and lots of) Sichuan pepper and gnocchi. The common features are always very balanced dishes, a wide range of flavors and a lot of previous work (the bread with tomato, just for starters, is served with a sauce of three tomatoes reduced for 12 hours). Great place that is also accompanied by a cellar of 200 names where, outside the corsets of natural wine fashion, it seeks to have great wines that accompany as Mateo says the dishes that Mateo decides to prepare.
📍C/ Nou de la Rambla, 44, Ciutat Vella
💸30-40€
Ultramarinos Marín
An aspirational cook can get angry at Ultramarinos Marín because it’s hard to understand why serving such simple things is so darn good. That is the secret of the trendy restaurant in Barcelona, a narrow and noisy place with a seventies bar aesthetic that even Ferran Adrià has recommended and where the cuisine is served stripped down, focused on products that are treated with a lot of hand (and many hours of knowing how to cook before putting them on the fire).
This is the only way to explain why this bar-grill (80% of its products are grilled) serves a chicken breast, something so simple, turned into a delicacy, or why its sausages, homemade and cured at home, also come out nailed. Or that their allioli, a basic sauce, is the protagonist of videos of influencers. Just look at their menu with dishes that are words: “potato”, “mushroom”, “squid”, “chicharrón”… the assurance that their names, like their recipes, stand for themselves.
📍 C/ de Balmes, 187, Sarrià-Sant Gervasi
💸40-80€
Mae
There are restaurants where the cuisine is unappealable and Mae, recently opened in the upper area of Barcelona, is one of them. A gastronomic restaurant that proposes a syncretism of a round trip to Costa Rica, country of origin of two of the three founding partners. The local part is provided by Germán Espinosa, who comes from Martí Berasategui’s Fonda Espanya, making it clear that the school of the country’s most starred chef is also indisputable.
Thus, Mae (something like colleague in the Costa Rican country), offers a couple of tasting menus where to walk through starters that are virguerías and that summarize the purpose of the place, with dishes like fried egg yolk with steak tartar and marrow, bread with sourdough of 80 years with pejibaye butter (a Costa Rican fruit) or crunchy peus de porc with shrimp tartar and tomato tree. The starters alone are worth the visit but, as I said, the main courses (although sometimes they don’t quite fit into this syncretic journey), are absolutely undeniable.
📍C/ de Sant Elies, 22, Sarrià-Sant Gervase
💸60-80€
Yakumanka
Walking in front of a fishmonger’s counter can be an inspiring experience, evoking endless culinary possibilities. The sight of fresh fish ready to be consumed invites you to imagine exquisite dishes, such as a delicate ceviche, which captures the essence of marine meat in its purest form. This experience materializes in places like Yakumanka, a cevichería in Barcelona that, in its eight years of life, has prepared more than 100,000 ceviches.
But that is Yakumanka, a place that is more seafood restaurant than restaurant and more haute cuisine restaurant than Peruvian. Because here, as in few places in Barcelona, one comes to try different, contemporary and daring Peruvian food, to put one foot in the sea and imagine what a haute cuisine experience is like in Peru on the other side of the Atlantic.
📍C/ de València, 207, L’Eixample
💸 50-60€
Batea
What a pity that some of Barcelona’s great restaurants are hidden away in places that are not very Barcelonian. This is the case of Batea, probably one of the best seafood restaurants in Barcelona (without doubt, at least, the most contemporary), which is housed in a hotel on the corner of Gran Via and Rambla Catalunya, somewhat hidden from view, but hiding in turn that , a contemporary seafood restaurant with pleasant premises where it is achieved as in few places the meeting that makes the seafood restaurant (serving top quality product almost intact) and haute cuisine (creating dishes that make us forget the products that compose it to remember the final creation).
The place, which avoids the traditional baroque style of this type of business, does not warn of the quality of the elaborations. The molluscada is the example: clam in delicate green sauce, razor with codiem emulsion, carneiro with gilda dressing. The product almost only with a touch of mastery. The crayfish with lourdes water, tasty as few dishes, too. Everything on the menu is appetizing, and everything is ephemeral, because here they work with the catch of the day (the cook hooked to his cell phone talking to the fishmonger) to ensure fresh products that allow to adapt the elaborations to the available product. A great place to celebrate a seafood restaurant … fleeing from a seafood restaurant.
📍Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, 605, Pl. Baja, Eixample
💸 60 -80€
Casa Xica, celebrates its tenth anniversary knowing that it has left an indelible mark in the memory of its diners with its fusion cuisine that mixes Asian recipes and Catalan products. Among its most iconic dishes is tartar, which appears on the menu of 10 iconic dishes that the restaurant has prepared to celebrate this decade.
Its double-fermented bao with oxtail and its coconut and lime ajoblanco with shrimp tartar remind us why the bao and ajoblanco fashions began, while other dishes such as garrinet cruixent and butakimchi, while not bad, did not excite us as much, although we know that emotion and taste go in different directions.
The restaurant, located in Poble-Sec, is just that, a visit to a small house with excellent service and a terrace that invites to long evenings that we hope will last ten more years.
Three Porquets
In the age of networks, where any long message is boring and where there is only time to read a quick concept to highlight a restaurant, it is a pity not to be able to clearly express the value of restaurants like Tres Porquets, a classic that has been hidden for 15 years behind the Gran Via and at the end of the Rambla del Poblenou, where it loses its name, offering a meal that makes it impossible to arrive without a reservation no matter what day of the week it is.
Dishes and tapas as there are so many in Barcelona, but with a touch where the flavor is more important than the filigree. Our favorite: the eel fritter and tupinambur puree with meat mayonnaise. The umami of the eel, the creaminess of the tupinambur and the umami of the meat mayonnaise, the gigantic fritter and a wonderful frying: the summary of a restaurant that conquers with strong flavors. Double merit: to the task of finding strong flavors must be added the search for balance so as not to overwhelm.
They do it with the confidence of having been in the neighborhood for more than a lifetime. Marc is the son of Can Pineda (literally, this was his father’s and uncle’s), a historic bodega in the Clot, just across the Gran Via, almost visible from their respective doorways. So he’s not afraid to revisit the octopus with parmnetier, which here finally stops being boring when it’s fried, with mashed cassava and paprika oil. There is much more: the family stews of tripe or meatballs, the carpaccio with 15 years of history? In short, you should make reservations.
📍Rambla del Poblenou, 165, Sant Martí
Casa Güell
Casa Güell gets lost when you Google it because the name, so obvious, takes us to the iconic palaces in the center of Barcelona dedicated to tourists when we Barcelonans, who are fed up with them, are looking for more houses like this one: authentic restaurants in neighborhoods like Poblenou with local cuisine carefully prepared and designed for locals. More Casas Güell, less Palaus Güell.
Opened in front of the Beckett, Cada Güell also opens all its doors to create a restaurant that embraces the neighborhood and is filled with neighbors who took less than a week to discover its croquette of idiazabal and Iberian veil, one of the best, if you ask us. All the combinations of the chef Jordi, cook of the traveled ones, look for that, strong and powerful flavors. His interest in adding eggs or truffles to the dishes to increase their unctuousness proves it.
So, better to avoid the Asian tartar, which requires more delicacy, and look for the delicious forcefulness of his interpretations of Catalan and Castilian cuisine: Ceps with broken eggs, zucchini flowers stuffed with mató and romesco, squid with boletus and broken egg. All very tasty, all very satisfying, all with a clear line of argument.
For the before (which is what many come to fill this place where you breathe joy), vermouth and sausages level (eye the cured tongue) and dessert flan, along with croquette, the other star of the house. In short, all good.
📍Carrer de Castella, 1, Sant Martí
Slow and Low
There are few greater joys for a foodie than to feel that he was right when he thought that a restaurant had a future. For vanity, but also for love of restaurants and food, to see from the beginning how a project is born and grows to become a benchmark with its own voice is a luxury, and that is what happened to us with Slow and Low, which we visited years ago, just starting, and to which we have now returned after the award of its recent Michelin star.
On the premises, a renovation that pushes us to look at the open kitchen in front of us. On the menu, a longer menu (also more expensive) that allows for more chefs’ tricks and better products. Mexican-Spanish cuisine – eclectic they call it, electric for us – with great dishes such as tomato water as a Bloody Mary with mussels and Tajin (great dish) or tuna with pickled foam or the jewel: a box of seafood in a thousand techniques. A restaurant worth visiting to understand what a Michelin star is.
📍C/ del Comte Borrell, 119, L’Eixample, 08015 Barcelona
💸Short menu – 115€.
La Palma de Bellafilla
The Gothic Quarter is recovering to become again what it was, the gastronomic center of a Barcelona that once had, once, its physical and symbolic center, and therefore gastronomic, in this neighborhood. Tourism has taken away this position but places like La Sosenga a few months ago and now La Palma de Bellafilla, a place that is, right now, one of the best Catalan food restaurants in Barcelona.
It is because it does very well something that seems very simple but is very difficult: to recover the traditional Catalan recipes. But not the one that everyone recovers, the combo croquette, cap i pota and cannelloni, but the one that calls for research: from cervellets de xai a la romana, sardines with grapes that make us remember with nostalgia, stews like chickpeas with clams or the dessert Pijama, a historical Catalan dessert that unites five elements (cream, custard, peach, ice cream …) and that here are made by hand one by one, from ice cream to neula. Rarely is it worth visiting a restaurant just for a dessert, but here it is.
The whole menu is tempting, so going to the Gòtic district to get lost in its alleys and find La Palma is once again synonymous with eating well in the center. If there is no room, you can go to Bodega La Palma, a historic neighboring winery that also cooks very well and has been responsible for taking the place where the legendary Bar del Pla was to turn it into La Palma by the hand of Jordi Parramon, a historic chef in Catalonia who is, as I said, living history of food in our country. A luxury place.
📍C/ de Bellafila, 5, Ciutat Vella, 08002 Barcelona
💸30-50€
Louro
Louro is, perhaps, the only good surprise that Las Ramblas in Barcelona still holds for the locals. The old people of the city will remember that on a second floor of this street, away from the gaze of passers-by, is the Centro Galego, the embassy that the Galician immigrants had in the city and that historically kept a bar where to eat well and cheaply in the middle of the Rambla. That embassy has been losing functions but a few years ago its restaurant was remodeled by the Galician guys from Arume (and Batea, and Cera 23, Besta…), who gave the place a makeover to turn it into Louro, a great Galician again.
Its grace is as simple as its definition: “Galician restaurant in Barcelona”. Traditional Galician cuisine, cleanly presented, well priced. Quality seafood, some caldeiradas, rice dishes and their beef strokes. Everything simple, like that smoked sardine toast with Cebreiro cheese (perhaps the most successful dish), the octopus (very well cooked here, it could not fail), the clams with seafood or the sea bass stew. Everything without fail, everything tasty and everything, very important, with a taste of home and love.
Everything also, in a very nice place that was, attention the house of Joan Güell before he built the Palau Güell and that, therefore, connects with the old Palau, to the point that from the window you can see the back of this palace. A luxury surprise added to a restaurant that, we confirm, is the last great surprise of Las Ramblas.
📍Rambla de los Capuchinos, 37, Principal
💸30-50€