In August the locals of Barcelona take off. They close their businesses and leave town for cooler climes.
For tourists visiting in August, this can cause problems. Many of the popular restaurants are closed. When my husband I recently visited, I was particularly frustrated when I learned Inopia was closed. The tapas restaurant run by Alberto Adria, brother of the famed chef Ferran, may be the city's hottest spot, but not in August.
Never fear...many restaurants do remain open, and we easily found a great place to eat for all of the seven nights we were there.
The best resource for finding restaurants is BCNRestaurants.com, which allows you to specifically search for places that are open in August. Go to bcnrestaurantes.com, and click on "Open in August" in the Other Searches column on the right side of the page. Also, keep in mind that many of the restaurants open in August have limited hours and might only be open for dinner while they're open for lunch and dinner throughout the rest of the year.
Maribel's Guide to Barcelona is another great resource. It features a rundown of the city's best restaurants, from divey tapas joints to high-end establishments serving traditional Catalan cuisine, and specifies which ones are closed in August. The 75-page guide is available for free as a pdf.
So where did we eat? Here are four places that we loved and that are open in August:
Commerç 24--We weren't able to dine at the restaurant owned by the brother of Ferran Adria but we did try this place opened by one of his disciples. Carles Abellán worked at Adria's famed restaurant El Bulli two hours north and he brought what he learned back to Barcelona. We opted for the Festival Tasting menu, which features seven tapas courses. But these tapas aren't what you'll find in a tpyical Spanish restaurant. Traditional dishes are deconstructed to the essential ingredients and then frothed up into foams or consolidated into custards. The food is artful and each course is a materpiece. A filo dough straw is filled with creamy cheese, basil, and lime; a mushroom thinly cut into a long ribbon garnishes a vichissoise soup; mussels float in a broth that smells like a rose garden; poached cuttle fish rests on a bed of black rice.
Tapaç 24--Salty, fried fish, the size of paperclips; grilled sweet and buttery squid; spiced, creamy lentils with chorizo; french fries with aioli and hot sauce--traditional Spanish tapas are the stars of the show here and everything is delicious and made with the freshest local ingredients. The atmosphere is casual, and you can easily get by in shorts and a T-shirt. This is the more casual, less-expensive restaurant of Carles Abellán who is also the head chef at Commerç 24 (above).
Bar Mut—This is a locals' spot (i.e., no sangria) where you go to enjoy a leisurely lunch of cañas (small beers) and steamed mussels served in a fragrant broth of herbs, wine, and olive oil, perfect for slopping up with crusty bread. We spent two hours at the bar, drinking, eating, and chatting with our server who spoke perfect English and looked like Orlando Bloom.
Boqueria—On the south end of the Ramblas, this glorious turn-of-the-century food market, officially called the Mercat de Sant Josep, is a feast of the senses with some 330 stalls. We visited nearly every day for lunch. We could grab a crepe (pictured above), a slice of pizza, a skewer of grilled squid, or a sandwich made with Iberian ham and spend only $10 for two people. In August, about 75 percent of the stalls are open.
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