No matter where you go here, however, people seem to be eating and drinking something good all the time. Considering that dinner is often not taken until most of the restaurants of Europe are closing their shutters, it's not surprising that people need something to tide them over -- usually tapas.
To keep up with Spaniards' irregular eating hours, many tapas bars open at 6 a.m. for breakfast and don't close until 1:30 the following morning. This suited our plan for a carefree, no-reservations-required weekend -- walking everywhere and eating as the urge struck.
Juan Bayen welcomes customers at Bar Pinotxo.
(Robert V. Camuto)
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Saturday afternoon, we made a lunch of seafood at Cerveseria Catalana, where we marveled at clams so fresh they were actually moving with some agility in the display case on the counter.
That night at Estrella de Plata, what may be Barcelona's fanciest tapas bar, we lingered over a full-bodied red wine from Ribera del Duero accompanied by tapas of Cod Cheek Esqueixada (a small round cake of cold fish, diced tomatoes and onions) and toasts of warm duck liver in port sauce.When we arrived at 8 p.m. the place was deserted; at 10:30 it was packed.
Fighting for a Place
Our globetrotting friend who considers Barcelona one of the three most exciting cities on Earth gave us one piece of sound advice -- which we didn't listen to: "Be sure to take a siesta in the afternoon or you'll never make it through the dinner hour which is, like, 11 o'clock."
Our first night in town -- siesta be damned -- we planned our own tapas bar crawl in the medieval district of La Ribera. It's a common way of enjoying tapas: sampling the food and drink in one bar after another.
First stop was El Xampanyet, a family-run bar that opened here in 1929. We squeezed up to the bar and stood -- heck, it was only 8 p.m. and all the stools were taken. We ordered wine accompanied by El Xampanyet's specialty: anchovies that were piled into sort of a large bundt cake on the bar.
These anchovies were nothing like the salt-encrusted pieces of shoelace you buy in cans or find on top of your delivery pizza. These were five-inch, delicate filets in good olive oil. They were served with a staple of Catalan cuisine, pan con tomate (bread with tomato), made by simply rubbing a ripe tomato -- seeds and all -- on toasted bread, which is then drizzled with olive oil. When done well, the result is one of the simplest, tastiest dishes anywhere.
Our next stop was just up the street at Euskal Etxea, which refers to itself as a Basque restaurant and "centre cultural." Here, laid out on the polished wood bar, were platters of Basque pinxtos -- small portions ranging from cured hams and cheese to octopus and red pepper, all skewered with either a toothpick or miniature plastic sword. You serve yourself and later the barman tallies the toothpicks (about $1.75) and the swords on your plate (about $2.90) to figure your tab.
Again, we stood at the bar, which was filled with what seemed an international gathering of yuppies -- all drinking and aging fast from chain smoking. We drank wine in large Basque tumblers and began to figure out an important law of tapas tourism: After about four hours of walking followed by two drinks in a standing position, your calves ache and your knees want to buckle.
