Eating in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter

People have eaten in the Gothic Quarter for a great deal longer than Barcelona has had tourists. This is where travellers entered the city: our street had a gate at either end, and they stopped here to eat before going further in. Tables have been laid here without a break since the eighteenth century.

It is also the most walked part of Barcelona, and both things are true at once: families who have kept the same house for generations, and places nobody ever goes back to. From the pavement they look the same.

We have been at number 8 since 1929, thirty metres from La Rambla, six minutes from Plaça Catalunya and nine from Barcelona Cathedral.

Every restaurant in the quarter serves tapas. The lists look alike from one door to the next, and nothing on the front of a building tells you what is actually coming out of its kitchen.

The difference is on the plate. In some restaurants in Barcelona the bravas arrive lukewarm and the croquettes soft, which is the sign they were not cooked on the spot.

Here the montaditos are laid out along the counter and chosen by eye; everything else comes out of the kitchen. The bread with tomato arrives before the rest, the croquettes crisp, the patatas bravas under homemade tomato sauce and allioli. That is what puts ours among the best tapas near Plaça Catalunya.

It is on almost every menu in the quarter, and it is worth saying plainly: paella is not Catalan. It comes from Valencia.

We have it on ours like everyone else, but every one of ours is homemade, cooked here one pan at a time. Alongside it we serve real Catalan dishes such as black rice, black with squid ink, and the fideuà, which swaps paella’s rice for short noodles.

The stoves go on when the order reaches the kitchen, and it takes a good half hour. If you have ever been served a paella ten minutes after ordering it somewhere else in Barcelona, it had been cooked before you walked in.

A menú del día is not a tourist menu, and the difference is in who eats it. It lives on the same people coming back three times a week, which leaves very little room for a weak plate or a price that is out of line. Across Catalonia it averages €15.40.

The top of this street runs into Plaça Catalunya, where El Triangle holds 12,400 m² of offices over five floors.

Parts of it are, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. The quarter sees a great many people who will eat in it once and never come back, and a restaurant that never sees the same customer twice has little reason to cook carefully or price fairly.

You don’t need to know anything about cooking to tell the difference. Rice that arrives bright yellow never saw saffron. And anyone standing outside stopping people on the pavement is not filling the room on the strength of the food: that trade runs on commission, at four to seven euros a head for a taxi driver, and three to six hundred a month for a concierge.

The sign worth looking for is the opposite one: a room with people in it at two in the afternoon on a Tuesday, eating the set lunch, who work nearby and could have gone anywhere.