Vegetables often get short shrift at restaurants – greens, legumes and tubers are relegated to the same tired side dishes, or just one component of many in a generic main, subsumed by the dish’s other ingredients. Not so at GatBlau (literally BlueCat in Catalan), located in the Left Eixample. This restaurant is a shrine to vegetables, showing them anew in all their complexity. Here, the personality of a parsnip, a kohlrabi or any other delicious weirdo from the garden is taken to the next level, refashioned into carpaccio, cake or even rillettes.

We humans can cry for many reasons – out of happiness, sadness, anger and frustration. But for someone who hails from the northwestern Spanish region of Galicia, there’s something else that can easily bring tears: morriña, which basically means homesickness, similar to the Portuguese concept of saudade. So it’s no surprise that Galician bars and restaurants abroad often have names related to this pining for home. Bar Bágoa (“bágoa” means tear) in Barcelona is no exception. This humble Galician bar has made something of its homesickness, continuing to thrive among the fancy restaurants and gastro-pubs on Carrer d’Enric Granados in the Left Eixample neighborhood.

With almost 6,000 kilometers of coast (5,978 to be exact), Spain is the world’s second largest consumer of fish and seafood per resident (the first being, no surprise, Japan). Bathed by the cold Atlantic on one side and the warmer Mediterranean on the other, the country harbors a wide variety of habitats that have made it easy to source many different species of marisco (seafood) and fish. While these fruits of the sea are available at all kinds of Spanish restaurants and bars, the best way to guarantee a magnificent seafood feast is to go to a proper marisquería. A perfect example is La Barca del Pescador.