Tapas in Barcelona
18 tapas on the menu, meant for the middle of the table.
What to order first
Six to start with, and they are shared: the plates go to the middle and everyone helps themselves.
The one that has not changed
Santa Anna opened in 1929 as a charcuterie with a bar, selling cold cuts, cured meats, cheeses, butter from the Pyrenees and pastry. What brought people in were the cold cuts Josep Vila made himself.
The grill and the restaurant came later, and today’s menu looks nothing like that first one. What is still on it is a plate of cured meat: Iberian ham, in the same house that started out selling it.
Like the other traditional restaurants in Barcelona that are still open, we have changed along with the city. What has not moved is the respect for good ingredients and for how they are cooked.
Tapas in the Gothic Quarter
Santa Anna is at Carrer de Santa Anna 8, thirty metres from La Rambla and six minutes from Plaça de Catalunya, where the Catalunya metro, lines 1 and 3, comes out. It is a pedestrian street, so you eat sitting down with no traffic beside you.
Looking for authentic tapas in Barcelona nearly always means ending up in the Gothic Quarter: locals and visitors ate well here long before modern tourism, and time has turned a handful of tapas into fixtures you’ll now find on almost every menu. What actually changes is how they’re cooked.
We open at eleven in the morning and do not close until half past eleven at night, every day, and until midnight on Friday and Saturday. That makes it somewhere to sit in the middle of the afternoon, when you are hungry and it is neither lunch nor dinner, between the Boqueria six minutes away, the cathedral at nine and Plaça Reial at ten.
So if you are working out where the best authentic tapas in Barcelona are, come and see for yourself: we are at number 8, and our family has been serving locals and visitors here since 1929.
Why people have eaten in this quarter for eight hundred years: The Gothic Quarter
Tapas are ordered as you go, but it is worth booking a table.
Book a table Or call us 933 18 63 36 See the whole menu