Editorial
In-depth guides, local perspectives, and editorial stories on Barcelona's food, culture, and neighborhoods.
Long before dinner, Barcelona slows down for vermut — a sweet-bitter red poured over ice with a soda splash, an olive, a tin of something good. This is the city's most unselfconscious ritual, and the bars that keep it are nothing like the cocktail rooms tourists are sold.
Read storyThe distance between the menus along La Rambla and the way Barcelona eats at home is enormous. The real city eats at the market the morning it cooks, queues for a midday menú, and treats the neighbourhood table as a weekly habit, not an occasion.
Read storyWhen elBulli closed, its alumni did not scatter — they stayed and rebuilt the way Barcelona cooks at the top. The result is a city of avant-garde rooms that prize ideas and looseness over white tablecloths, from the world's most coveted booking to a two-star tasting menu served at a bar.
Read storyBarceloneta is a triangle of narrow streets built for fishermen, and behind the beachfront paella mills sit the houses that have cooked rice and seafood for generations. Skip the boardwalk; the real catch is one block inland.
Read storyBarcelona drinks wine the way it eats — without ceremony, by the glass, over good cheese and tinned fish. A generation of low-intervention bars has made the city a natural-wine reference, but the deeper pleasure is the candlelit taberna where the bottle is just one part of the room.
Read storyBarcelona learned to take coffee seriously twice — first at the century-old marble counters where a cortado is a daily rite, then again when a wave of roasters made the city a third-wave reference. The pleasure is knowing which room suits the hour.
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