[Note: correct name and address of charcuterie now added to original post.] Here it is at last, a bit long, but I thought it worth doing properly if at all: This trip, planned long ago, was first postponed, then savagely truncated by other commitments. What I did not do, to my great regret, was experience some of the new cutting edge cooking which is plainly happening in Barcelona, and even if I'd had a chance to research vdelaserna's recommendations, I would have had little time to try them. So all I have are some comments on places concerned with retrieving and serving good Catalan cuisine - a movement which has been afoot for a number of years now, and has, of course, vast local significance because of the clampdown on Catalonian language and culture in all the years under Franco. My suggestions here really only represent one kind of eating you should do in Barcelona. If you are there longer, you will want to try the newer restaurants, and, in summer especially, indulge in some seafood around Barceloneta. I started with Bux's recommendation, Ca d'Isidre, on my first night in town (it's on the short street C. Les Flors which runs north from C. de Sant Pau just before you reach the big main street, Paral.lel). I was staying at the Hotel Oriente on the Ramblas - very plain, but clean and tranquil ($77 a night) - and Ca d'Isidre was only a short walk away, through the so-called Barri Xines, or Chinatown, which we are now told should be called "El Raval" (a bit like you're supposed to call hell's Kitchen "Clinton"). I was planning only to case the joint, but I was hungry, there were tables... Isidre turned out to be Isidre Girones, the very pleasant proprietor. He had the courtesy to converse with me in Spanish, which must be a painful experience for any native Spanish speaker. The restaurant was very quiet, and he told me that American trade had fallen off dramatically since last September. There were some Brits in the place, and sure enough the locals started wandering in for dinner, in true Barcelona style, around 11.30. Girones showed me a copy of last November's "Saveur", which featured his restauarnt heavily, and I was pleased to identify in the photos, along with Griones, the bushy-bearded figure of Senor Nunez, proprietor of El Ateneu - more later. He was pleased with my wine order, a 1992 Hacienda Monasterio Riserva from the Ribera del Duero. I picked this without hesitation, as I had drunk the wine (from a later year) in New York; I hadn't realised, until Girones told me, that it comes from the same stable as Pingus, the Ribera's vastly expensive bid for superstardom. It was $38 the bottle. I ordered an appetizer of angulas, tiny, whole baby eels, served over a salad of frisee lettuce and the delicate local judias - small fava beans. The nest of eels looked like julienned celeriac, or maybe cold spaghetti. On close inspecton, they had tiny little faces. My first few mouthfuls made me think - ah, texture food. The flavor was slow in coming, but it did arrive - sweet, very mild, nothing like the strong flavour of full-size eels. Not an explosive dish, but I liked it. Next, a boned pig's foot stuffed with foie gras and a diverting mixture of wild mushrooms, topped with some big slices of black truffle, in its own, sticky, truffle-specked juice. No accompanying vegetables or extraneous garnish, and I didn't expect any. Rich, satisfying, and you could have put up wallpaper with the gravy. The cheeses were a slight disappointment. I had spotted a trayful, with little plastic flags, as soon as I'd walked in. Surprisingly, it turned out to be a selection of well-kept boutique French cheeses, some of which were new to me, and I wondered why he didn't serve regional cheeses from La Boqueria market. No fireworks, but a subtle, serious, grown-up restaurant. Three courses with the wine, around $95 (obviously cheaper for two people sharing the wine) - and this was with luxury ingredients at a high end restaurant. Next thing I knew, I was enjoying a couple of glasses of cognac (Magno) in a new-looking bar full of people younger and arguably sexier than myself. Simple but stylish bars are everywhere around the old city: this one was just a bare room on the ground floor of a nineteenth century building. A big, steel bar. A few nice artworks on the wall. A dj playing pleasant and relatively quiet music. And beautiful people. The night moved on to Bar Pastis, an absinthe-ridden dive on a side street which was once patrolled by transvestite hookers who looked like they'd retired from the WWF. Just a word on safety. Bux mentioned that he'd been warned about the area around Ca d'Isidre after dark. As so often, I think one key thing is whether you look like a lost, well-off tourist or not. There is no real obstacle to patronising Ca d'Isidre after dark, because you can either approach it from the well-lit, busy (Paral.lel) end, or you can arrive and leave by taxi - they'll find one for you. I have no problem with the busier streets of the Barri Xines after dark, but then I do (usually) know where I'm going. You certainly do not want to get lost in the side streets - they are a creepy maze. I was amazed to see that some of the grotesque bar/brothels, relics of a distant, sad past, still exist. They will eventually be swept away by the re-building and modernisation going on in the area. Everywhere in Barcelona is plagued by petty, non-violent thievery now (and London is going the same way), so always keep your valuables hidden. Breakfast the next morning inside Barcelona's central food market, La Boqueria. There are about half a dozen full scale tapa bars dotted around the market floor, and most of them have had something of a refurb since I was last here. Artichoke tortilla and a glass of rose. Morning drinking is encouraged; the two old guys next to me were polishing off a bottle of cava for breakfast. One thing I've noticed in Barcelona over the last three or four years are new food stores/delicatessens which make the regional produce of Catalonia easily accessible. No longer do you have to know which bodega serves a particularly tasty sausage - you can go to stores which serve a whole range, along with cheeses and local wines. I pause now to kick myself, because I have lost the cards I picked up. Anyway, there is a huge craft shop on C. dels Escudellers, on the block after the old Los Caracoles restaurant as you head towards Las Ramblas. Hard to miss it, as the ground floor is a vast repository of regional Spanish ceramics - pots, tiles and so on. Look down through the windows in the floor, and you will see an equally vast cellar where they are aging hams, slicing all kinds of cold cuts and cheeses, and serving local wines by the glass or bottle. I took lunch on my second day at a newer charcuterie called Xaloc, only six months old, where a library of aging hams covers one wall. I watched the staff climbing ladders and dipping long prongs into the hams to check the aroma, and thus presumably their progress. You can order meats or cheeses individually, or eat a selection (and, of course, buy them to take away). I ate the assortment of Catalonian sausage, a big plate of hard salamis, soft slicing sausages, and sweet cooked hams; about $9 with a glass of cold beer. Xaloc is on one of the upmarket shopping streets in the upper part of the Barri Gotic, near the old Sant Pi church - C. de la Palla, 17. While eating, I flicked through a local magazine, managing to understand a little Catalan. Like another good omen, there was an article about Senor Nunez and his Ateneu restaurant. This revealed, as far as I could make out, that Nunez is an old-time anarchist radical, who was a publisher/bookseller before creating his restaurant. One of his interests was re-discovering the historical cuisine of Barcelona. A new dish on his menu, "Bacallo del Alquemista del Call" was an old moorish-accented dish which he had restored in order to celebrate the arrival of Islamic Bosnian immigrants in the city over the last few years. I took mental note. The evening began with cold beer at El Portalon, a dingy bar on Carrer dels Banys Nous in the Barri Gotic. El Portalon has a curved, ribbed brick ceiling, and you feel a little like you are drinking inside a barrel. I ate a light tapa of snails, stewed with salt pork, onion and garlic, and served in the resulting broth. Then it was dinner in the restaurant (as opposed to wine bar) at El Ateneu Gastronomic (http://www.ateneu.com/). I have been eating here since shortly after it opened, seven or eight years ago. It is a labor of love. The restaurant is quite Spartan; bare floor, hard chairs (take a sweater in winter), but with table cloths and uniformed staff. The menu used to be a lovely affair of deckled parchment, but is now plainer and plastic covered (it's in Catalan, Castilian and English). The menu is divided into plates para picar - essentially for picking at and sharing - cold and hot appetizers, and so on. I mention this because the prices are such that you would be crazy not to order a sharing plate followed by an appetizer and entree. You can pick at selections of sausage and cheese, or big slices of toasted country bread with various toppings. I chose a mixed foie gras plate. The ample portions of local foie gras came in two styles: the usual mi cuit, but with a firm, interesting texture and deep flavor which suggested home-made rather than mass produced; or a terrine with dashes of prunes and other dried fruit, soaked in a good sweet wine. The latter nearly made me cry. My appetizer was a rustic sort of dish I've ordered before: the sweet local fava beans, cooked to tenderness, then quickly sauteed with chunks of terrific dried ham, lightly dressed with olive oil and sprinkled with fresh mint. And it's a big plateful. I usually eat a meat dish next, with a red from the local producer Raimat, but mindful of my earlier history lesson, I ate the Alchemist's salt cod. Ungarnished, as is customary, the fish needed more vigorous flavoring; the mild crust of spices didn't really kick it out of blandness. It was topped with some bitter olives, which did add some drama. I drank a rose, Mas Comtal Rosat de Penedes, 2000 (I drink a lot of rose in Barcelona, where it is taken quite seriously, and is not a "pink confection"). For dessert, slices of fresh goat's cheese with a sweet tomato marmalade. I chose a mysterious dessert wine called "Hydromiel", which turned out to be a kind of honey eau-de-vie with some frightening sediment which eventually settled. I recommend the moscatels. The check? Embarrassing. Four courses, drinks, tip: about forty bucks. If I'd eaten meat, I would have drunk a more expensive wine, but it would really be hard to push the price much higher here. I don't know what it is about Barcelona, but after a stroll, I found myself refreshing my taste buds with a cool beer. Before I knew it was four in the morning in Bar Pastis again. Distinctly fragile as my last day began, I drank large quantities of coffee with skimmed milk in the sunshine. Eventually made it to the Bar del Pi, in the square outside the Sant Pi church, for a couple of heart starters. I breakfasted on montaditos, little slices of baguette with various toppings: smoked salmon and quail's egg, catalan (a pale, soft slicing sausage), ham and anchovy. After some more healing sleep, I planned a traditional tapas bar crawl for the evening, with a more modest alcohol intake. I started at El Portalon, eating bunuelos de bacalao - salt cod balls - and deep fried artichokes. I took an obvious tapas route down C. d'Avinyo: breaded crab claws in the Galician bar on C. Ample. Disappointingly vinegary empanadas in Bar Jarra opposite (where the speciality is a cooked Canaries ham, cut fresh from the bone and served with a few potatoes for a about $1.50 a plate). It was very quiet for a Saturday night. Then I realised there was a soccer game on TV. I watched the end of the match, drinking Guinness in Bar Thales on C. de Regomir. I was about to get an early night, but my walk back to the hotel took me past El Ateneu again. I stopped to read the menu. Then, as if possessed by higher powers, I found myself seated in the wine bar section, saying to myself "Only an entree." I ordered their tartaro de caballo, one of my favorite dishes. Yes, horse tartare, dark and rich. This one was a little underseasoned, but I corrected that myself. I thought a desset in order after all. Something was described as "Plum Cake" on the Catalan and Castilian, as well as the English, menus. When it arrived, there was no sign of plums. It was a light, lemony sponge with a few caraway seeds. "Flummery?" I asked myself, in the grips of another Nero Wolfe flashback. Then I realised with a shiver that, if I queried the dish, I would be told that the kitchen had run out of plum cake and had substituted authentic clouty dumpling flown in that morning from Scotland. For once, I decided to shut up and eat it, and the accompanying scoop of fresh yoghurt and home-made bitter orange marmalade were fine. In the interests of full disclosure, if someone told me I had to move to Barcelona tomorrow and live there the rest of my life, I would fall to my knees sobbing with gratitude. If you haven't been, this year is the 150th anniversary of their famous architect Gaudi, and as I write the Euro is still plummeting against the dollar (and doubtless the pound too). I may have to go back shortly.
