He Ate Well

More Barcelona

Nancy Rossi, who contributed an incredible guide to Barcelona (see directly below), followed up with these notes about the Catalan capital:

1. Sam Lardner is an American musician who has lived in Barcelona with his wife Katharine and their four children for over ten years. He will be doing his annual October 2006 USA tour, and I really encourage your readers to experience his wonderful music. The tour schedule is here. Sam fuses his blue grass roots with a Catalan flavor on his newest CD, Barcelona. It is the "reflection of 4 years of hard work, experimentation and, most of all, joy, a musical celebration of life and love in the Mediterranean. The ballads are poignantly crafted works of storytelling and emotion. The rumbas and tangos are solid sunshine and light. It is a rare melodic journey through love in all its colors that anyone who is serious about the topic will want to listen to many, many times over.Click here to see Sam's great photographs of Barcelona.

2. Need to add the Carreterra de les Aigues, the old Roman water road that runs above the city, literally cut into the side of the hills. It's now a jogging and biking and walking trail, and on Saturday mornings a bunch of old guys fly their remote planes from up there. Grandchildren abound watching this display.

3. The Golden Retriever Club of Barcelona (I am not making this up) meets at Parc Oreneta for great fun. Watch out for the wild boars at Christmas time, who come down from the hills and drive the dogs nuts.

Nancy Rossi's Barcelona Guide

Forget every guide you've read about Barcelona. A reader named Nancy Rossi recently sent me something that beats the pulpo out of anything you'll find in a bookstore. Nancy wrote me after reading about my Vista piece on Barcelona a few months ago. She told me that she lived in Barcelona. She told me that she loved Barcelona. She also told me that she put together a very personal guide to the city that she emails to friends. I asked her if she'd consider sharing it with you, my readers, and she very graciously agreed. Moltes gracies, Nancy!

To download Nancy's guide, please click here.

Extremadura, Spain

I visited unforgettable Extremadura, Spain, last summer to meet artisanal cheese makers. I ended up writing the following story, but about the remarkable place instead of the remarkable cheese:

It was going to be my first trip to Spain and I didn't want to pack in the sights. Double-decker tourist buses, dumbed-down tapas bars, Continentals "on holiday?" No thanks. I wanted to experience the authentic country. I wasn't sure what that meant, exactly, but I was sure I wanted to sit with my elbows on a Spanish table in a Spanish bar and sip some unheard-of Spanish beer. I wanted to be the only non-Spaniard in the place. I wanted to drill down and hit Spanish bedrock, even if I couldn't understand it.

I checked my map and the region of Extremadura caught my eye. Hey, I liked the name, which comes from the Spanish word for "extreme" or "furthest out." I booked my ticket.

I asked a few old Spain hands what they thought. They tried to talk me out of it. They said it was asphalt-melting hot in the summer. They were right. They said it was stuck in time like Appalachia. They were right. They said I'd meet more sheep than people. They were right.

My Stories: Barcelona

Here's a short piece I wrote for the April, 2006, issue of Vista Magazine about Barcelona: Gaudi, Catalan cooking, medieval shipyards and more. Please click on this link.

Barcelona: Catalan Cookin'

I just visited Barcelona to write a piece about taking a family vacation there. I traveled solo, but imagining my reader - spouse and cheerful kids in tow - I filled my trip with touristy to-dos: bus tours, walking tours of both the Gothic and Modernist quarters and visits to Gaudi's magnificent buildings, cathedral and gardens. I had a blast.

I could, however, stomach just one museum, the old royal shipyards, where Aragon kings built galleys to conquer the Mediterranean. My audio tour said slaves on these boats were chained to their oars for months; it was so bad, the narrator noted, "you could smell a galley two miles away, even before you could see it." Okay, let's talk about the food.

Like other oft-visited cities, like New York, I knew Barcelona existed in parallel worlds: tourist city and real city. And like New York I knew there were "real" neighborhoods outside of the traveler's orbit, and areas where both shared the same physical space. I found authentic, wonderful restaurants and shops across the city, tourist area and not. Here are a trio of favorites:

Barcelona: La Seu Cheese Shop

On a narrow lane in Barcelona's Gothic Quarter, a neighborhood that dates two thousand years to the Romans, I stepped into a tiny storefront to find a Scots woman cutting a wheel of pale yellow cheese. Katherine McLaughlin settled here twenty years ago. I heard about her shop - the only one of its kind in Spain - and her devotion to traditional, artisanal Spanish cheeses. So I dropped by.

Barcelona: Casa Leopoldo

Warning lights flickered bright red on my inner "eats meter" the moment my host, the owner of Casa Leopoldo, a Barcelona institution since the twenties, offered me filet of Turbot for lunch. Grilled fish, very Catalan - but also very any other culture along the Mediterranean coast.

Nope, I came here for the real goods, the cooking you can only find in Catalonia - utterly surprising surf and turf dishes that paired, say, lobster with rabbit; rabo de buay, Catalan-style oxtail stew; esqueixada - the "x" pronounced "shh" like Portuguese - flavorful salt cod and fresh tomato salad.

Barcelona: Bar Tomas

Barcelona was once a walled city with villages within a horse ride's distance. But the city swallowed up these hamlets after it tore down the old walls a hundred-plus years ago and expanded outward. Serria, once a village, now a neighborhood, is a clutch of narrow streets and a square, once the village's, anchored by an old church. On one of these lanes, a car width-wide, but closed to cars, sits Bar Tomas.