In Barcelona the ticket you booked eight weeks ago decides the trip

Dishes to know

Pa amb tomàquet

Bread rubbed with ripe tomato and garlic, then salt and olive oil. The Catalan table default.

It should be assembled fresh, not arriving as a pre-smeared red paste. It accompanies almost everything and is charged for separately.

Escalivada

Peppers, aubergine and onion roasted whole over fire until they collapse, then peeled and dressed in olive oil, served warm or cold.

The name comes from the Catalan for ‘to cook in embers’. Often served with anchovies or salt cod on top.

Esqueixada de bacallà

Raw salt cod torn by hand and dressed cold with tomato, onion, black olives and a sliced pepper.

A summer dish, and ‘esqueixar’ means to tear. The cod is desalted and uncooked rather than cured or seared.

Fideuà

Short toasted noodles cooked like a paella in seafood stock, served with allioli.

The correct answer when someone wants ‘the rice thing’ in Catalonia. Like rice dishes it is a lunch item and takes time to cook.

Arròs negre

Rice cooked black in squid ink with cuttlefish, served with allioli.

Rice dishes here are ordered for the table, cooked to order and eaten at lunch. Anything served in fifteen minutes, or at dinner in a tourist strip, was reheated.

Botifarra amb mongetes

Grilled Catalan pork sausage with white beans fried in the sausage fat.

The most everyday Catalan main there is. Botifarra also comes as negra (blood), blanca and d’ou (egg, eaten at carnival).

Calçots amb salvitxada / romesco

Long charred spring onions grilled over vine cuttings, peeled by hand and dipped in a nut-and-pepper sauce.

Strictly seasonal, roughly late December to March/April, and traditionally eaten at a communal calçotada with a bib. Off-season versions are not the real thing.

Canelons

Pasta tubes stuffed with leftover roast meat under béchamel, baked.

Traditionally eaten on 26 December, Sant Esteve, made from the previous day’s roast. It is a home and festival dish more than a restaurant one.

Escudella i carn d'olla

A winter boiled dinner served in two goes, the broth with large pasta shells first, then the meats and vegetables.

Cold months only, and the galets version is a Christmas fixture. Not something to look for in August.

Cargols a la llauna

Snails roasted in a metal tray with garlic and a spicy sauce.

A spring dish, especially around May, and more of a Lleida/inland Catalan tradition that shows up in Barcelona bars.

Crema catalana

Citrus- and cinnamon-scented custard with a burnt sugar crust, set without cream and eaten cold.

Lighter and more perfumed than crème brûlée, and traditionally eaten on Sant Josep, 19 March.

Where to eat

Gràcia

A former separate village of small squares and narrow streets, full of neighbourhood bars, vermut spots and small kitchens that fill with residents rather than day-trippers.

Sant Antoni

Built around its restored market. The surrounding blocks do fork breakfasts and vermut and modern Catalan cooking, at prices set for the people who live in the Eixample around it.

Poble-sec

The classic tapas-and-vermut street eating of the city, over on the Montjuïc side. Small bars, standing room, cheap plates, and a crowd that arrives at Spanish hours.

Poblenou

Old industrial quarter turned residential, with a village high street, beach access and modern restaurants that are markedly cheaper and calmer than the equivalent in the old city.

Sants and Hostafrancs

Almost entirely local, built around a working market and a long commercial spine. The least visited of these five, and the place to watch ordinary weekday Barcelona eating.

What to walk past

La Rambla and everything with a terrace facing it, the seafront strip immediately behind the busiest stretch of Barceloneta beach, and the photograph-menu blocks of the Gothic Quarter around the cathedral and Plaça Reial. The signals are menus in five or more languages with large photos displayed outside, an English A-board promising ‘authentic tapas’, a three-course tourist menu with drinks included, staff standing at the door addressing you in English before you speak, and paella advertised at dinner. Paella that arrives in under fifteen minutes was reheated. Rice is cooked to order and it’s a lunch dish.

Markets

Mercat de Sant Antoni

Monday to Thursday roughly 07:00-14:30 and 17:00-20:30, Friday, Saturday and eves of holidays roughly 07:00-20:30, Sunday 08:30-14:30 for the secondhand book and collectors’ market

A restored modernista iron hall that is still a working neighbourhood food market, ringed by bars doing esmorzar de forquilla and vermut. The Sunday market for secondhand books and vinyl and stamps is a separate ritual, and an entirely local one.

Mercat de Santa Caterina

Monday to Saturday mornings, with extended hours on some afternoons (typically Tuesday, Thursday and Friday), closed Sunday. Confirm hours locally, they vary by season

Central, under the wavy tiled roof near the cathedral, but far less touristed than La Boqueria and still primarily a produce market for the surrounding Sant Pere neighbourhood.

Mercat de la Boqueria

Monday to Saturday, roughly 08:00 to 20:00, closed Sunday

Worth an early morning and not much else. The front third off La Rambla is fruit cups priced for visitors, but the back and side aisles are still serious fishmongers, offal butchers, salt cod specialists and mushroom stalls. Go before about 09:30 or skip it.

Mercat de l'Abaceria / the Gràcia neighbourhood market

Weekday mornings, roughly 07:00 to 14:00 or so, with some afternoon trading. The market has been operating from a temporary site during a long refurbishment, so confirm the current location before going

A Gràcia food market with no visitor trade at all, and the clearest picture of what an ordinary Barcelona household buys.

When people eat

Breakfast is small and early, and most people take a second coffee and something mid-morning. At weekends Catalonia adds the esmorzar de forquilla, a heavy fork breakfast of stews and sausage eaten late morning. Vermut is the drink-and-snack ritual before lunch, mostly a weekend thing, from about midday. Lunch is the main meal and it peaks between two and three. Dinner starts at nine and runs to eleven or later, with the kitchens opening around eight. Eat at seven and you’ll be in a room full of other visitors, because no local kitchen is aiming at that service.

Eating cheaply

The menú del día is the core move, a fixed weekday lunch of a starter and a main with bread and a drink and usually dessert or coffee, served roughly one until four by ordinary neighbourhood restaurants that charge far more for the same food at night. Around it sits the market bar, a counter inside or beside a municipal market doing breakfast and lunch to the traders’ schedule. There’s also the standing tapas and vermut bar, where you order a few small plates at the counter rather than at a table, and the forn, meaning the bakery counter, for coques and empanadas and bocadillos. Ordering at the bar rather than a terrace table is cheaper everywhere.

If you don't eat everything

Vegetarian

Easier than the reputation suggests, because a lot of the Catalan canon is vegetable-first. Escalivada, pa amb tomàquet, espinacs amb panses i pinyons, grilled vegetables, patates braves. The traps are ham and stock, so say ‘sóc vegetarià/vegetariana’ or ‘soy vegetariano/a, sin carne y sin pescado’ and check for jamón and tuna and anchovy, which often don’t get counted. Barcelona also has a large dedicated vegan and vegetarian restaurant scene, particularly in Gràcia and the Eixample.

Gluten free

One of the better European cities for it. ‘Sin gluten’ / ‘sense gluten’ is widely understood, the Catalan and Spanish coeliac associations certify venues, and a number of restaurants and bakeries are entirely gluten-free. Naturally safe ground includes rice dishes, escalivada, grilled fish and meat, plus tortilla and jamón. Check patates braves, which can carry flour in the sauce, along with croquetas and anything fried in shared oil.

Halal and other

Halal food is easy to find in Raval, around Sant Antoni’s edges, and in the Poble-sec and Sants directions, with substantial Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Moroccan communities and halal butchers. Catalan cooking itself is heavily pork-based, with botifarra and jamón and fuet, and lard in the beans, so a traditional Catalan menu is usually not the place. Kosher provision exists but is limited and concentrated in the Eixample, and specific establishments were not verified here.