While even glass-half-full types are calling Spain’s economic forecast gray, the food climate in the Catalan capital couldn’t be sunnier. With packed tables, new venues such as Tickets and 41˚, and Spain’s hottest restaurant, Can Roca (recently voted #2 in the world) just a stone’s throw away in Girona, Barcelona’s restaurant scene provides an elixir guaranteed to cure the eurozone’s worst economic hangovers. Interviewed recently on Spanish national television, legendary chef Ferran Adrià was asked by radio journalist Luis del Olmo, ¿Cómo se cocina la crisis? (How does one cook the crisis?) Adrià answered, “With innovation and taking risks.”

Editor’s note: This is the penultimate installment of “Best Bites of 2012,” a roundup of our top culinary experiences over the last year. Stay tuned for our final “Best Bites” dispatch, from Istanbul, tomorrow. Restaurant Roma We hadn’t planned on bringing in La Nochevieja at Restaurant Roma, but it was nearby and we didn’t feel up for public-transport adventures on New Year’s Eve. Situated on a quiet street in the upscale but untouristy Barcelona neighborhood of Sant Gervasi, Roma is thoroughly nondescript – a neighborhood joint frequented by neighborhood people of a certain age. The wood-paneled walls, racks of Maxim magazines and TV mounted in the corner kept our expectations pretty low.

A hidden culinary sanctuary, El Passadís del Pep may be located in one of the most visited quarters of Barcelona, but it’s out of sight of anyone who isn’t looking for it. Once you go down the long corridor that leads to the restaurant, you don’t need to do anything, and that includes choosing what to eat. From the moment you sit down, the “house” offers you your first bottle of cava, and the celebration of food and life begins. There is no menu and there are no “daily specials,” just whatever Joan Manubens and his team decide to cook that day. The restaurant, whose name means “Pep’s Corridor,” specializes in cocina de mercado, or market cuisine, prepared in a simple, traditional Mediterranean style. As if in a ballet, the show begins when the waiters start to dance around you and the food arrives at the table in a continuous flow of abundance: Iberian cured ham, anchovies, typical Catalan bread rubbed with tomato; sautéed baby squid with rice and garlic; choice shellfish such as cañaíllas (a kind of sea snail) prepared in such a delicate way that all the natural flavor is retained; velvet crabs or spider crabs cooked without any ingredient that could detract from their natural essence.