Preliminary thoughts and updates on Barcelona these days. Short reviews on hotels, restaurants, wine bars and cocktail bars. Many of these spots will be written up more fully in upcoming blog posts.
Despite being the big city in the heart of Catalunya, a major wine-producing region itself with 12 separate DOs, Barcelona has traditionally reserved the good wines for restaurants and boutique wine stores. The scene is changing, slowly.
Restaurants
The two most important things when visiting wine country are good wine and good food. In Rioja the confluence of local and regional ingredients and refined cooking techniques trickling in from the nearby Basque Country has created a culinary landscape that matches the depth of the local wine culture.
Barcelona’s casual ethos and market cuisine have birthed a new version of haute cuisine. For years, some of Catalonia’s best chefs have been serving diners at the bar, no tablecloth, and by now names like Gresca and Dos Palillos are legendary in Spain. It’s now the most exciting time to eat in the Ciudad Condal (City of the Counts) in years.
Restaurants
With so much variety to choose from, navigating Madrid’s restaurant scene can seem like a daunting task. Before you even set sail, it’s worth taking stock of the city’s idiosyncratic dining customs. Most notoriously, the timetable. Madrid eats late: lunch is commonly taken between 2pm and 4pm while dinner is not much earlier than 9pm and often (especially in summer) as late as 11pm.
