We ‘ve all gone out to eat traditional food around town at some point. Family outings to Catalan fondas where we have eaten calçots, escalivades, canelons and croquetes de carn d’olla. We have also celebrated with friends a birthday in a Galician or Andalusian bar sitting in front of a metal table where different tapas are constantly arriving and looking for their place among the mountains of beer bottles.
And there is no need to talk about the other meals. From going out for a pizza, to getting your fingers dirty with tacos or sharing endless plates of Chinese food, Barcelona has many ways of eating that are truly Barcelonian. But, in the face of so much variety and such disparate origins, a question arises: Is there such a thing as Barcelona food?
The rule in the kitchen says that when a dish or recipe is consumed for three generations it becomes traditional. Therefore, there is not much left for dishes like nachos, hummus or sushi to be considered traditional Barcelona recipes. But today we don’t want to talk about new traditional dishes, but about those that have been part of Barcelona’s gastronomy since long ago.
Therefore, today, coinciding with La Mercè, we make the effort to look for restaurants that are neither Catalan nor Spanish (or not only), but Barcelona, trying to draw an impossible and permeable border, but to help us to explore the most Barcelona’s gastronomic heritage to celebrate as it should the biggest festival of the city.
Windsor
We went to the Windsor restaurant to try its Barcelona menu, a tribute to the city from this fine restaurant of traditional Catalan food. Imitating Nestor Luján, the gastronome who dedicated his life to researching the city’s food, the Windsor has created dishes that are as Barcelona-like as possible by diving into history.
The menu, well achieved, navigates successfully through three usual ports of gastronomy: the popular cuisine of the houses, the bourgeois cuisine of the restaurants and the privileged cuisine of luxury. From the intersection of this three-pointed star is born the gastronomic corpus that defines us today. Take a look at the dishes in the article we wrote, and start salivating and planning a dinner in homage to La Mercè, and to yourself.
Terra d’Escudella
There are few gems in Barcelona like Terra d’Escudella, a place born with the explicit aim of preserving Barcelona’s cuisine. Roger Sanchez created this restaurant with the desire to give a home to those dishes properly local and therefore, also, in 2021, inaugurated in its premises the exhibition “Anem de fonda”, a tour of the popular inns of the Barcelona of the nineteenth century.
In this place, one of the great exponents of the D.O Sants, they have an unbeatable lunch menu (and a menu at night) where escudelles, coques and xup-xup stews abound . An ode to Catalan and Barcelona cuisine that alone is worth a visit to the restaurant.
Cova Fumada
Few restaurants in the world can say that they have created a dish. Fewer still, that they are still active. And even fewer that that dish, which they are still cooking, has become the icon of a city and has been reproduced ad nauseam. The bomba de la Barceloneta, that dish that you have tasted in a thousand places, was born here, in this small place anchored in another era where, for a moment, Barceloneta is once again the seafaring neighborhood it was, and not the tourist haven it is now.
The Snails
The food at Los Caracoles has lost some of its luster, but if you happen to be in Ciutat Vella during the holidays, a visit to the place is still worthwhile. Within its walls lie more than a hundred years of history of a place born in 1835. The fonda, actually Casa Bofarull (the name of the owner family) is now named after the success of its star dish, so if you go, you know what to order.
The Caracoles, are history by themselves, but apart, they are framed in the tradition of the Fondes de sisos, a type of very Barcelonian restaurant born in the mid-nineteenth century, popular inns where the workers of the growing city ate. The name comes from the six reals that it was worth then to stay one night in these fondas. Los Caracoles, one of these original fondas de sis, is practically the only one still standing in the city.
Bullanga
And from the old fonda to the current fonda. Bullanga receives the name of the altercations, les bullangues, that also took place in the middle of the 19th century in Barcelona, and that ended with the massive burning of churches. They also host the exhibition on the Fondas dels sisos that is also in Terra d’Escudella, so it’s all said and done.
Butifarras, capitripas (brother of capipota), cannelloni? Everything you ask for in a traditional Barcelona restaurant, you will find it here. A lunch menu of 14 euros, another to make esmorzars de forquilla with great dishes like tongue with capers, baked galta and sandwiches with sausages and homemade omelets. Res més a dir.
Set Portes
At Set Portes we already went to visit their famous Parellada rice, their version of the Senyoret rice. The restaurant is an icon of the city, and like the Cova Fumada, has the honor of having created not one, if not two dishes that are legends of the city: the aforementioned Parellada rice and pajama, a very famous dessert.
Here they also work the traditional Catalan recipe book with escalivadas, suquet with monkfish, cannelloni…. In fact they have created the menu “La Magdalena de Proust”, which seeks, in their words, to transport us to the different rooms of the Catalan cuisine. Living history of the city in a place with more than 100 years of history.
La Sosenga
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cy-cWhoIAAf/?img_index=1
New discovery and, we believe, one of the best restaurants in Barcelona. A small and homely restaurant in the rough part of the Gothic Quarter, run by a family born in the rough part of the Gothic Quarter and making the nicest and most delicate Catalan and Barcelona food we have tasted lately. 25 euros for a menu of almost 10 steps with simple but creative, intelligent and deeply linked to the territory. A wonderful place that works like clockwork and that, we suspect, will cost more (because it is worth much more) than it does right now in a very short time.
📍 C/ de n’Amargós, 1, Ciutat Vella
La Palma de Bellafilla
Near La Sosenga, also in this touristy Gothic quarter, a restaurant has been born that is a true ode to Catalan cuisine. La Palma de Bellafilla (an appendix of Bodega La Palma, another mythical restaurant), a restaurant run by Jordi Parramon (icon chef of Catalan cuisine) that serves everything from brains to stews such as chickpeas with clams that are wonderful, not to mention the sardines with grapes, the star dish.
A restaurantazo that vindicates the Catalan gastronomy to the bottom of its recipe book and where not a single dish fails and where you crown the end with, eye, a pajamas made all by hand, recovering the classic Catalan dessert in the best of ways.