On a beautiful corner of L’Eixample sits Norte, a small yet warm, inviting and light-filled bar with a constellation of shining lights spelling out its name inside and a few tables with fresh flowers. The restaurant was started by three partners, Lara Zaballa, María González and Fernando Martínez-Conde (who left the project last year). They met while working at Barcelona’s acclaimed Moo restaurant and had come to cooking from studying philosophy, art history and journalism at university. They were each looking for something more hands-on, work that gave them direct physical contact with matter, and that shared motivation connected them from the beginning. All three also came to Barcelona from other cities in northern Spain. After their experience at Moo and other projects (Zaballa and Martínez-Conde wrote for the prestigious cooking magazine Apicius), they looked for a more enjoyable and less stressful way to do what they loved, starting with basically nothing but their enthusiasm and their solid ideas to convince the banks to give them a loan to start their own restaurant in 2011.

Marc Cuenca was the kind of kid who was interested in what other people were eating, and this curiosity was the seed of his own restaurant, Els Tres Porquets ("Three Little Pigs"). A small enoteca and tapas bar with just a few tables, it sits in Poble Nou-El Clot, an area that brings to the restaurant a combination of locals, office workers and Spaniards and foreigners employed by startups and other businesses in the 22@ innovation district. While these days the city – and indeed many cities around the world – is teeming with restaurants specializing in an ambitious menu of small plates intended for sharing, in 2009, the concept was still quite new when the "three little pigs" arrived in the city.

As we wrote in part one, specialty coffee has really taken off in Barcelona, after a long period of limited options and mediocre to bad beans and roasts. Here are a few more of our favorites among the new generation of coffee shops: True Artisan Café Elisabet Sereno, a Barcelonan nutritionist, coffee specialist, a founder of the Specialty Coffee Association of Europe (SCAE) and a judge in the World Barista Championship, opened this coffee shop in 2014. It was created as a showroom and also serves an educational role in improving specialty coffee culture in Barcelona and Spain by organizing events, demos and tastings. True Artisan is an official La Marzocco espresso coffee machine distributor showroom, an SCAE-certified training center and a comfortable bar to while away an afternoon diving into Arabica aromas, latte art, cups, gadgets and machines.

In Spain, as in the U.S. and elsewhere – even as we hit coffee pod peak – a new multicultural generation of specialty coffee shops are discovering and sharing with their customers the best ways to experience all the special characteristics of truly great coffee. Spain’s cities share the urban Mediterranean tradition of strong short coffee, very much influenced by Italian espresso and served in small cups or glasses, with tons of sugar and perhaps also liquors (orujo or aguardiente, anís, coñac). Much of the time, the quality of this coffee could really hurt your body and soul. It’s made from cheap, low-quality Robusta beans that undergo torrefacto (toasted at 200 degrees C with sugar) – once a technique to keep flavor and increase weight but now widely regarded as a way to hide terrible qualities or to ruin any coffee. At the same time, in the countryside and in small villages, café de puchero, coffee made in a pot and filtered with a cloth, much lighter and more diluted than espresso, was always the brewing method of choice before the rise of the stovetop moka pot.

Oriol’s face lights up whenever a customer selects his favorite pintxo from one of the 49 different trays, beautifully displayed at Euskal Etxea, the bar where he works and the first bar in Barcelona to serve traditional Basque pintxos. One wonders how a small slice of bread topped with a chickpea fritter, jamón serrano and romesco sauce spiked with a toothpick that costs just €1.95 can make someone so happy. We try one and we immediately see why.

As in many other rural parts of Europe, the Catalonian countryside is dotted with large, old farmhouses, legacies of feudalism that have since been converted into hotels, bed-and-breakfasts and restaurants. The origins of these masías, as they’re known in Catalan, go back to the 11th century, but it was not until the end of feudalism in the 16th century that the former serfs turned masías into their own self-run farm holdings and homes. The buildings that survive today may be of a more recent vintage, built perhaps a century ago, sometimes older. Masías were usually named after the family who owned them; “Can Josep,” for example, means “house of Josep.”

Els Encants is the kind of magical, exciting market where we arrive having in mind exactly what we need, but after a few hours immersed among objects and voices, we emerge with a bag full of items we never knew we needed or that we could even find.

As you might expect from a city whose weather forecast tends to be sunny, Barcelona has plenty of excellent ice cream options, even as summer fades into fall. And, sure, like most of the world’s food-loving metropolises, this town has its share of internationally loved, Italian-style gelaterias – many even run by real, live Italians.

El Mercat del Ninot opened way back in 1894, but recent renovations have breathed new life into this L’Eixample market. From time to time, the local government has updated noucentistes (19th-century) municipal markets in Barcelona, keeping the essence of the buildings but bringing them up to speed with current needs and trends. The Mercat de la Llibertat in Gràcia and Mercat de Santa Caterina in Born have received their facelifts, and the amazing Mercat de Sant Antoni is expected to open in 2016 after more than six years of construction.

Upon the hot and dry plains of Les Garrigues, two irrigation canals cut through an agricultural expanse, diverging first from the ample Segre River, which runs through the center of the city of Lleida, before subdividing again, their meandering channels reaching farther and farther into an otherwise parched plateau. These life-giving tributaries are collectively known as the Canal d’Urgell. Les Garrigues, a region of the Catalan province of Lleida, is a fertile green splotch on an otherwise arid landscape 150 kilometers inland from Barcelona. The irrigation of this region, first conceptualized by the Moors in the 13th century but carried out on a grand scale in the late 1700s, has enabled the cultivation and nurturing of farmland, where a crop of prized arbequina olives and fragrant almond trees now stretches toward the horizon.

Why are you seeing colorful, 1960s-era carbonated water siphons everywhere in Barcelona? Because they’re the symbol of our beloved vermut ritual. The phrase hacer el vermut (literally “to do the vermouth”) in Spain has for decades described not only that delicious beverage, but also any kind of pre-lunch aperitif. But since the end of the 19th century in Barcelona, the vermut ritual – a fresh drink accompanied by tapas composed usually of preserved food, cold cuts, cured or marinated fish or seafood – has been a way to bring people together before meals. Perhaps no one is more responsible for vermouth’s popularity here than Flaminio Mezzalama, the Italian Martini & Rossi representative in Spain, who in the first decade of the 20th century opened two beautiful Art Nouveau vermouth bars, which became hugely popular. Mezzalama died in Torino in 1911, but the fame of vermouth in Catalonia only grew, with local investors putting their money into production of Catalan vermut.

Each year at the end of May, more than 12,000 penyistes and 200,000 hungry visitors devour 12 tons of snails in one mere weekend in the city of Lleida, the capital of Catalonia’s interior. The Aplec del Caragol (“Snail Gathering”) is now an internationally known gastronomic event of impressive magnitude. Just under two hours inland from Barcelona by car and an hour by high-speed train, Lleida is an easy trip worth taking, especially in late spring, when friends and families gather to eat and drink with abandon. Typical foods prepared by the colles (gangs) of penyistes (participants) who register together and participate in the Aplec every year (sometimes for decades without fail) include paella, fideuà (a typical pasta preparation), grilled meats and sausages, stews and salads. However, the tender, tasty land snail is the main attraction.

Spain – and of course Barcelona – has always been a breeding ground for creative types in the kitchen. There’s an ever-increasing number of restaurants that take as inspiration first traditional preparations and update them with ingredients from a global pantry, yet keep their local soul intact. It’s a common thread among many young chefs in this town, and it has created a culinary scene that feels modern, unexpected – and personal. Let’s throw in an additional twist: a chef who’s not Spanish.

Some restaurants are enjoyable because they continually offer surprising, innovative creations, while others we like for the opposite reason: because they are reliable in their simplicity and homey traditional preparations.

Coca is a word used in Catalonia and neighboring regions for many kinds of baked doughs and pastries, both sweet and savory. The Catalan and Occitan word has the same root as “cake” and comes from the Dutch word kok, which entered the local lexicon during the reign of the Carolingians in Catalonia (759-809)