From traditional Cal Pep to cutting edge Monvinic, the food's the thing in Barcelona

Walk under the main arch at Barcelona's Boqueria Market, and you're confronted with serried rows of colourful vegetables of a perfection worthy of a Chelsea Flower Show display.  They're overhung by rows of dried peppers of bewildering variety.  Baskets of exotic mushroom types just harvested from the forest floor sit beside piles of their carefully dried cousins.  Nearby, a fruit vendor's rainbow display offers 15 types of freshly-pressed juice for a euro a glass.

Push on to the meat, where all things porcine take centre stage and vendors smiling out at you from between ranks of cured legs can advise on varieties of ham like a good wine merchant knows his grapes.  Not to be outdone, fat chickens sit next to hanging game birds still in their autumn plumage, just down from a counter selling a dozen different varieties of foie gras.  Prime slabs of beef glisten with a red so healthy you know you could mince any of into a tartare and eat in on the spot.  At the centre of the market, aisles converge in a round circus of fish vendors.  Whole tunas crown the stands, so fresh they're practically flapping their tails.  Name your thickness and the machete-wielding old woman will send you home happy.  Swimming down the mountains of ice below are shoals of every fish you know, and plenty you don't, eyes still gleaming with the memory of life.

Now on to seasoning.  Best quality Spanish saffron glinting like gold from its little plastic boxes.  Whole nutmeg.  Cinammon sticks.  A whole stand devoted to different flavours of sea salt.  Then there's the freshly baked bread, the pastries, the chocolate vendors, the olive oil merchants.  And if it's all too exhausting you can rest and revive at tapas bars sprinkled throughout.

Any gastronaut dropped into this heavenly larder will have one overriding thought:  I want to cook!  And if you don't have access to a kitchen, then it's:  I want to eat!  It's no wonder that people who know Barcelona best say the culture is fine, but it's the food that puts the place on the map.  Start with raw ingredients of this quality, add the creativity and exuberance we felt throughout the city, and magic will happen.

We didn't have a bad meal.  Nor did we have a truly expensive one.  Even at our most prolific, indulging in pre-nosh cava, multiple courses and unrestrained choices from the wine list, our average bill was £50 per person.  (Which, for us, is saying a lot.)

For value for money and a truly local tapas experience, the winner was Cal Pep, at which I got to double dip thanks to both a work dinner and Saturday lunch with the girls.  There's a bar out front serving drinks and little plates, then a low door in the back you'd never know was there opens into a stone-walled, cave-like den with just six to 10 tables, depending on their configuration, below a wine selection on a balcony accessed by ladder.  There are no menus.  Most people are speaking Spanish.  Sit down and eat what you're given, coming in a procession until you beg for mercy or reach dessert.

Here's a typical run.  Start with fried anchovies.  And the bottle of crianza that keeps getting replaced with a fresh one by nuestro amigo Juan.  (Who recognised me from earlier in the week and gave us a table on Saturday, even though we hadn't booked and sailed blithely by all those other folks who were waiting in the bar.)  Then some tuna tartare and croquettes de pollo just out of the fryer.  Back to more fish with a plate of clams, both traditionally shaped and razor, in butter, lemon juice and chopped herbs.  A bit of veg on the side?  A heaping plate of green pimientos, lightly battered and deep fried lest you start feeling healthy.  Next the fried calamari and prawns.  Ready for some beef?  Succulent cubes, browned, crisped and studded with sea salt on the outside but still rare within, surrounded by more pimientos and grilled mushrooms.  Just to clear the palate, some creme caramel before Juan brings big snifters of Spanish brandy to help everything settle.  Lunches don't get much more memorable than that.

Although, oddly, our other top meal was also a mid-day extravaganza.  If Cal Pep is the local's old favourite, Monvinic takes that idea and mixes it up with the hip sensibilities of today's Barcelona.  If Cal Pep is the in place passed along by the locals, Monvinic is the one tipped by international  style magazines.

You pick up the fashionable vibe as soon as you walk in and are greeted by a long gallery: brown cow-hide panelled banquettes with small tables down one side, glass enclosed wine library with funky decanting-bottle light fixtures on the other.  Up a few stairs to a clean, modern space with wooden floors, glass walls and long, communal tables, looking out onto a modern garden of architectural plants, gravel and sculpture.  It's so damned hip all three of us missed the bathrooms the first time past, as they lie behind a flashing band of light I took for modern art, not realising it pointed me to the place I was supposed to wave my hand to make the apparently seamless wooden wall slide back.  The modernity continues at the table, where the wine list comes not as the usual leather-bound tome but as a custom-programmed tablet with search capabilities by varieties, regions and growers, maps, pictures of the makers and wine labels.

All this, of course, would just be so much gimmick if the food and wine weren't up to snuff.  The plates were indeed delicious; tapas, but taken up a gourmet notch.  Pata negra, that finest of jamon iberico made from spoiled pigs who've never tasted anything but naturally foraged black acorns.  Exquisite salt cod.  Venison pate.  Spinach croquetas.  (Quoth Hillary:  It's deep fried creamed spinach.  What's not to like?)  Poached figs with a gorgeous little dollop of something half way between ice and clotted cream.  But, to be honest, my note taking on the food paled in comparison to the attention we paid to the wines.

There's an enormous by-the-glass menu here and the servers know their stuff.  We used the wine list to select round one, got advice on round two and from the third (of six) let our waiter ... whose excellent English came from years in Houston between leaving his native Mexico and ending here ... prescribe the right matches for our food and our individual taste buds.  Thus our tasting list, helpfully printed and presented to each diner with your receipt when you leave, ran to 10 different labels.

We discovered that the Catalans make their sparkling wine with both chardonnay and a local cousin called xarel-lo, which gives the wine a more rounded, biscuity and champagne-like feel than the usual cava.  Hillary loved the mouth-puckering dryness of a white Rioja made with the malvasia grape from Bodegas Abel Mendoza.  I was happier with more xerel-lo, this time still, from Can Rafols dels Caus.  We were all pretty keen on the Crianza from R. Lopez de Heredia.  And, really, we should have taken more notes.  Because I can't tell you much about the rest of the list other than that we loved it all, and it was all so damned local we'll never see it again.

When I go back to Barcelona, I will each lunches out, and cruise the Boqueria for light dinner options to have back at a rented apartment.  With wine picks from Monvinic.  But not this trip.  Operating on the "so many restaurants, so little time" philosophy, and armed with file folders of pre-trip research by Hillary and Lisa, there were dinner picks to be made as well.  So we kept eating.  And drinking.  Carpe diem and all that.

Next entry ... the rest of the restaurant hit parade.