Food and Hot Chocolate in Barcelona

So, sightseeing is important, but once again I'd be remiss in leaving out some commentary on the food. We didn't get as deep an experience of Barcelona's food as we did in Seville, mostly because a lot of it was out of our price range; upscale city restaurants are not really on a backpacker's budget. There were tapas bars, but they didn't seem to have quite the same atmosphere and low prices as in Seville. We did find one place, Meson David, tucked down a back street with pretty big servings of meat and starches for a couple of euros. When Katy, Carey, and I went there the first time we had a great meal, and we figured that it would be a great place for a team dinner because of the huge tables and noisy atmosphere. But when we brought everyone there, things didn't turn out quite as well (the vegetarians were pretty optionless, and one girl got a can label in her soup). Ah well.

The good news was that, despite our experience at Meson David, fruits and vegetables were actually in much higher supply than Sevilla when eating out. A lot of us frequented a chain called Maoz, where you could get a pita with falafel and an all-you-can-eat buffet of other vegetable toppings for about 3 euros. There was also the huge Mercado de San Jose near our hostel with fresh produce (and meat, seafood, and all sorts of other merchandise), although we didn't take advantage of it nearly as much as we could have.


[Seafood and fruit at the Mercado de San Jose]

But the aspect of food culture in Barcelona that we really indugled in was their taste for coffees and hot chocolates. In one cafe, Xocolateria la Xicre, the hot chocolate was so thick that we had to eat it with a spoon and get something to actually drink. Granja Viader was a 100-year-old little cafe down a back alley in the El Raval district that actually had drinkable hot chocolate, although it was still superbly rich (especially with all of the whipped cream). Cafe de l'Opera was across the street from the Liceu Opera House, and had a drink they called the "Opera," with a mix of coffee and chocolate mousse - the first time I resisted the temptation to eat all of the mousse off the top, but the second time I wasn't so strong.


[The hot chocolate at Xocolateria la Xicre was thick enough to be pudding. We couldn't drink it, but it made a great pastry topping.]

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