AT a glance, Barcelona's Inopia doesn't look like a place where you'd want to spend much time. More a bar than a restaurant, it's impossibly bright, with white walls and bare fluorescent fixtures. The room is small, irregularly shaped, and — save for one table that's reserved for large groups — there is barely any seating. Almost everyone manages with stools, or leans or stands — some outside, having ordered through the window.
Sounds like a recipe for disaster, doesn't it?
Well, let me tell you about the food: Inopia (Tamarit, 104; 34-93-424-52-31) offers the classic stuff of Spain — especially, but not exclusively, Catalonia. That means superb, even precious ingredients, prepared and served simply. The anchovy fillets are insanely good, and an aficionado could polish off a couple dozen. (So what if they're 1.7 euros each? So are oysters.) There are tomato salad with fresh salt cod; Jabugo ham; sliced confited tuna belly; and an extraordinarily creamy cheese (torta Cañarejal) that will destroy any notion of Spain being anything less than the equal of France.
There is nothing at Inopia — which opened last April — that is not at least intriguing. The plates of olives include the tiny, strikingly complex malagueñas. You can order ham croquettes in any tapas bar, but here they are made with jamón Ibérico, and they are vastly superior. In fact all the fried food — artichokes, sardines, potatoes (served with aioli and a lovely little house-made hot sauce) — is just incredible. The frying is done in olive oil, as it is throughout the best places in Spain, and it makes you wonder why — except for expense — this isn't always the case.
The menu is huge (in the style of many tapas bars, a percentage of the menu is devoted to pricey canned goods; more on this in a minute), and getting through it in one visit is hopeless. Actually, if you manage to get the reserved table, you have a shot, because for the 35-euro prix fixe menu, about $48 at $1.37 to the euro, you will be served until you beg the kitchen to stop. Without the prix fixe you will have trouble spending that much money, especially since there is good wine at 2 euros a glass.
The crowd is drawn not only by the food but by the fame: Inopia is run by Alberto Adrià, the younger brother and partner of Ferran Adrià, at this point perhaps the best-known chef in the world. In the summer, Alberto is the pastry chef at El Bulli, about 100 miles northeast of Barcelona, where Ferran is head chef, and his work there remains brilliant. But in Barcelona, in the increasingly hip neighborhood of Sant Antoni, he seems freer, happier and more at home, and he and his partners have created a restaurant that draws locals, friends, chefs and people from all over town (and increasingly the world). Lines form outside the door, but you can eat early, perfect for norteamericanos who don't want to wait until 9 p.m. for their first bite.
La Clara
La Clara (Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, 442; 34-93-289-34-60) is a different story entirely. You can sit in absolute comfort, at a table set with white linens, with attentive servers changing your plates and silverware, and for about 40 euros a person, eat far beyond your fill of raciones — essentially bigger portions of tapas — of very high quality and flavor. The upstairs is sleek, bright and pleasant, not unlike trendy American bistros circa 1995. Since this is also the nonsmoking section and, to me, more attractive than the lovely but cavernous downstairs, it's perfect.
I have eaten at La Clara only once (I've had at least two visits to the other restaurants), but if it was not superb, it was very, very good. Like the ham croquettes at Inopia, the fritters of bacalao were perfectly crisp, greaseless and flavorful, an absolute joy; the tortilla (in Spain, this means omelet) with spring onion and bacalao was fresh and moist; tomatoes — with onions and tuna — were better in March than most of ours are in August. A shipment of fresh baby lamb had just arrived, so we sampled brains, kidneys and liver; the last was slightly overcooked by my standards, but the first two were as good as they can be. Some baby goat ribs rounded things out nicely.
The above list only hints at what La Clara has to offer; the menu is enormous, with probably 60 to 70 offerings, and a kitchen that seems to execute them all quite well.
In a way, both Inopia and La Clara serve tapas, but in quite modern settings. Tapas, loosely translated as “snacks,” but far more serious than that these days, probably originated when a bartender offered a few nuts or olives with the drinks he was serving, and went on from there. (Some insist their beginnings were even humbler: that bartenders covered your wine or sherry glass with a plate to keep out the flies, and then began to fill the plate with little free offerings.)
You can see this tradition, from its simple beginnings to its most elaborate current form, at Quimet y Quimet, perhaps the quirkiest restaurant I know (Poeta Cabanyes, 25; 34-93-442-31-42). A representative of the fourth generation of the Quim family works behind the counter in a space about the size of a standard living room. The walls are lined to the ceiling with bottles and cans, the bottles mostly of wine — some quite inexpensive, some unknown, some famous — the cans, of vegetables, seafood and meat.
(Spain produces what is probably the highest quality and most expensive canned food in the world, and many tapas bars rely on it. Though much of it is good and interesting, for the most part I don't get it, since Spain also produces among the highest quality fresh food in the world. This is as true in Barcelona — which has farms within its city limits — as it is elsewhere in the country.)
Standing in a crowd around the stainless-steel counter, glass of wine or beer in hand, you may get a piece of good bread with some garlicky beans on it, or little assemblies of ham and tuna; mushrooms, butter and tuna; pressed beef with a mix of tomato jam (this, very sweet, is fantastic) and tapenade; bacalao in a few forms; an odd, sort of New Yorkish combination of cream cheese, smoked salmon and honey; a piece of toasted bread with a mussel, that tomato jam again and a spoonful of caviar.
Mr. Quim improvises as many as a hundred types of these montaditos a night, on the spot, from the ingredients spread in front of him. There are also classic tapas like potato croquettes, fried empanadas or cheese with sweet grilled peppers, well executed. The whole meal here — you can spend as little as 10 euros, or as much as 35 (about $15 to $50), even more if you start asking for the canned goods — will take you a half hour and, though tapas are not, in theory, lunch or dinner, it's unlikely you'll go out for a “real” meal after this.
If you wanted such a meal, however, a likely candidate would be the most classic formal Catalonian restaurant in town, Ca L'Isidre (Les Flors, 12; 34-93-441-11-39). I have shopped at La Boqueria, Barcelona's reigning market, with Isidre Gironés, the owner of Ca L'Isidre, so I can not pretend to anonymity. But I've eaten at the restaurant several times over the years, and I know what's superb and what is less so. The advice, in sum, is this: Order the classics, don't allow the white-jacketed staff to steer you to the French stuff, and you will be bowled over.
For example: the sausages, the head cheese (from bull's meat) and the salamis are terrific. The cigales — large shrimp, served cold — are sensational. Please try the gianchette, fried tiny fish; I arrived in Barcelona after eating these babies in France, Italy, Britain and the United States, and those at Ca L'Isidre were the best. Gaspacho is creamy, with a little fresh fish and a touch of vinegar. Baby octopus in onion sauce, which sounds like nothing, is astonishing: tiny octopi in an intense, dark sauce with a little tomato, white wine, garlic, bay and not much else. A stew of bull meat — marinated for four days, cooked for one, and served on the sixth — contains a variety of meat, some tender, some chewy, some fatty, some lean, all good, in a dark, glossy sauce. Tripe with chorizo and chickpeas, spicy with pimenton, is a common dish throughout Spain; here it's the paradigm.
If this sounds like peasant food, it is, and that's where L'Isidre excels. But the appearance is of a fine dining palace, with beige walls, dark stained wood studded with sconces (they're too bright, but this is often the case in Spain), original and impressive art on the walls, a marble tile floor. It's not creative, but it's lovely and comfortable, and perhaps the best place in town for a lunch that will kill your afternoon or a dinner that will last well past midnight.
Ca L'Isidre is pricey — perhaps 70 euros or more person including wine — but it's not overpriced by any means.
Rias de Galicia
There's another place, where the atmosphere is even more grand, the food even simpler, and the bill even larger: Rias de Galicia, Barcelona's seafood palace (Calle Lerida, 7; 34-93-423-45-70). It's not for everyone. It's almost all seafood, and what's best is the odd seafood; secondly, some dishes cost 50 euros or more, just because what's on them is so rare. But if you want to try berberechos, percebes, espardenyas, teeny tiny squid, and so on, this is the place. Just be ready for a bill way upward of 70 euros a person.
Rias de Galicia's looks are old fashioned and far from stunning, though everything is of high quality, from the table linen to the service. In typical Catalonian fashion, it begins to fill up for lunch around 3 p.m., and for dinner around 10 p.m. (I wonder when Americans are going to start filling these places at 4:30 p.m., pretending they're having a late lunch but secretly craving an early dinner. Not that there's anything wrong with that; I've done it myself.)
Berberechos are small clams, rather stinky — sorry, there's no better word — and once cheap. Now, seasoned with pimenton and oil, they're pricey. Percebes are sea barnacles, simply steamed. You suck the delicious, mussel-like meat out of the shell; they cost a small fortune but everyone who can afford them takes the plunge. Espardenyas — fresh sea cucumbers — are really not all that special, except they're seasonal and rare, and much different from the rubbery stuff you've probably had in Chinese stir-fries. They're served with oil and garlic, no more.
It's not all weird. I ate turbot with fried potatoes, as simple and delicious as it would be in Galicia. A suquet — fish stew — featuring monkfish, shrimp and clams, was intensely flavorful, masterfully done.
There's more in Barcelona, literally dozens of restaurants old and new that are of a quality associated with the best-eating cities in the world. But these five should keep you happy for a short trip, anyway.
