Editor’s note: We regret to report that El Kaiku has closed. “We have paper tablecloths and napkins on the tables for two reasons: to not forget our roots as a workers’ canteen and because we prefer to spend the money on good product for our customers.” That was how Rafa Alberdi explained to us one of the keys to his restaurant, El Kaiku. Located in Barceloneta in front of what was once shipyards, the working man’s bar was transformed into an excellent neighborhood restaurant, where diners can enjoy cooking with traditional roots and modern leanings made from locally harvested seafood and other ingredients. The lovely terrace, one of our favorites in this city, is a boon as the weather warms up.

Update: Poncelet is sadly no longer open. Cheese has a very long, storied past in Catalonia, as we wrote in the previousparts of this series. But what do the present and future look like? Cheesemaking in the 21st century has flourished dramatically, thanks to increasing interest in and appreciation of culinary traditions and trends worldwide, not to mention the financial crisis of 2008, which led many people to make career changes or to take up a more DIY ethos. All of this, combined with that old Catalan inclination toward modern design and creativity, has made for a heady mix.

Update: Poncelet Cheese Bar is sadly no longer open.  In the first part of our series on Catalan cheeses, we wrote about very old traditions – going as far back as the Middle Ages and perhaps even further – including the practice of transhumance by shepherds in the Pyrenees. As cheese expert Eva Vila explained to us, up until the 1980s, many artisanal cheeses were hard to come by; they could only be found in the small, often remote villages or farms where they were made.

Bars and literature are like bees and flowers: two separate worlds linked to each other through a symbiotic relationship that benefits both. Writers and characters have been the natural inhabitants of taverns and pubs in Dublin and London, bohemian cafés in France, Vienna and Madrid, and, of course, the old neighborhood restaurants and bodegas of Barcelona.

Update: Poncelet Cheese Bar is sadly no longer open. Many gastronauts come to Barcelona in search of tapas or cutting-edge cooking, but rarely cheese. We think that should change. Catalonia, after all, produces the greatest variety of artisan cheeses of all the regions in Spain, with more than 150 kinds at last count, many of them made by small producers or in milk cooperatives in the mountains using both pasteurized and raw milk from cows, sheep or goats. While in the past, in order to taste these cheeses, one had to travel to the often-tiny village where a specific cheese was made, nowadays it’s much easier to find them at markets, specialized shops, restaurants and bars in Barcelona.

In Spain, preserving the rituals of Lent – historically a period of 40 days of prayer, penance and pious abstinence from eating meat that leads up to Easter – was up until the second half of the 20th century mostly the responsibility of priests. Nowadays, however, it is more often the country’s chefs who are shaping the observance of Lent, by both maintaining and updating its delicious culinary traditions, which are still very much a part of Spain’s contemporary food culture.

In the windy coastal region south of Barcelona, surrounded by the wide vineyards of Baix Penedès, entire families are decked out in winter gear and ready to eat … some salad! In the late 19th century, the word xató (pronounced “sha-TOH”) first appeared in writing in the Catalan press. Just as the name for the dish paella is borrowed from the name of the pan that is used to prepare it, xató originally referred to a sauce, but is now the name for a specific salad preparation. Practically unavoidable in the towns of Baix Penedès, Alt Penedès and Garraf (sub-regions that lie between the provinces of Barcelona and Tarragona), xató is surprisingly rare on restaurant menus in Barcelona proper, just under an hour away.

Pere Valls Isart is passionate about his restaurant, Bilbao, which his family bought, with the name already in place, in 1954. “This is the thing that I most love in the world,” he told us. “This is my life!” Bilbao is an old-school neighborhood restaurant of the first degree, with two comfortable rooms appointed with mismatched vintage – yet impeccably maintained – marble tables, colorful paintings, photos, drawings and infinite memories.

Salt cod has been a staple on the Iberian Peninsula for centuries, but in the last few decades overfishing and changes in eating habits have resulted in a significant drop in bacallà consumption. Only recently has the fish begun returning in greater numbers to our tables, and it has also become the focal point for an annual gastronomic celebration: La Ruta del Bacallà. There’s a popular saying on the Iberian Peninsula that there is one cod recipe for every day of the year, but in truth, the number is upwards of 500. In Spain, there are hundreds of cod recipes dating from the Middle Ages, with a multitude of regional variations. The most notable and sophisticated ones come from Basque country and Catalonia.

Here we are in the Bishop’s Belly, La Panxa del Bisbe, which is not the midsection of a Catalan priest, but both a restaurant and a mountain. The latter is one of the peaks of the sacred Catalan mountain of Montserrat, so-called because its shape evokes a small head over a rotund, pronounced belly. It’s frequented by numerous mountain lovers, like Xavi Codina, chef and owner of a restaurant that he named in honor of the peak. The restaurant La Panxa del Bisbe sits not in Montserrat, but in upper Gràcia, in Barcelona, very close to Codina’s home.

Editor’s note: We regret to report that Can Manel has closed. We don’t mind winter in Catalonia because it means the return of calçots, our beloved spring onions, and calçotadas, the wonderful celebrations that bring people together to eat them. While tradition usually calls for calçot eating to take place in the countryside, there are plenty of places to enjoy them in Barcelona as well. Since 2012, when Can Manel was reopened by the new owners Joel Balagué and Ana Roig, this homey eatery near the Sants train station has become a point of reference for the urban calçotada.

The story begins around 1975, when the bar La Barretina – then a hot spot, now long gone – began serving leche de pantera (“Panther Milk”). This milk-and-liquor concoction, with roots that can be traced to the Spanish Foreign Legion, was so strong that the hordes of students who flocked to this port-area alley along Barcelona’s Carrer de la Mercè would literally spill their guts nearly every night across the wide flagstones that separated the bar from its neighbors.

Known in Catalan as mongetes – “little nuns,” as Catalonia’s oldest kind of beans resemble the pale face of a nun in her black habit – or fesols, from the Latin phaseolus, beans are an integral part of the region’s culinary traditions. If Catalan home cooking could be represented by a single dish, it would be butifarra amb mongetes, peppery pork sausage which is either grilled or fried and served with a little mountain of delicious beans: simple, filling and soul-warming. But in Catalonia the number of dishes made with legumes is infinite. In fact, many local restaurants offer a choice of beans or potatoes to go with all manner of seafood or meat preparations, from chicken to pork or veal, or from cod to squid or sardines.

The name of this appealing Gràcia eatery is a play on words, an amalgam of la taberna, or “tavern,” and lata, or “tin.” Owner and head chef Juanjo Martínez has dedicated his restaurant to the culture of canned food and other uncanned treasures that are linked to traditional Spanish tapeo and rituals like vermut hour, which always include preserved foods.