One of the great benefits of staying in one place for an extended time is that you are not compelled to rush around seeing all the major attractions, especially if this is not your first visit. Since this is our third time in Barcelona and we have been here nearly a week, we began to live up to that standard.
On Friday, our first need was to visit the market up the street, Mercat Santa Cristina. Lynn wanted some chicken and vegetables to prepare dinner Saturday night. When you stay in the same place for an extended period of time and live in an apartment, you get to enjoy home cooking too.
Santa Cristina is an old market with a new roof. Originally constructed in 1848, the colorful, undulating tiled roof was added when it was renovated in 2005.
Inside, the market stalls sell whatever you need to eat, including one devoted to horsemeat. And there in one of the seafood stalls, we saw a most welcome and familiar offering–boiled crawfish. Sure enough. There must be some coonasses in Spain?
Lynn, though, just wanted some chicken thighs, which are not sold separately in European markets. She settled for three fat leg quarters, cheerily hacked apart by the butcheress staffing the stall. I have to say I take a true visceral delight in watching European butchers whack away at meat.
After depositing our vittles back home, we took the Metro to visit our old neighborhood Eixample (pronounced in Catalan as “Eshomplay”), where we had stayed in June 2015. We were curious to see the newly restored Sant Antoni Market. It was projected to be open in July 2015, and we were eager to see it in all its restored glory. Unfortunately, the project must be run by the New Orleans Department of Public Works, because Sant Antoni is very definitely not finished. The sign now says October 2017.
The roof has been replaced, and the exterior walls seem to be freshly painted. But the stalls for food and merchandise vendors are still located outside, lining the streets extending from the market building. Sant Antoni is most definitely not ready for prime time.
But we did locate Bohemic, our favorite restaurant from last year, and we made plans to go back. And we noted how much different our old ‘hood in Eixample is from our current location along Passeig de Colom. There are virtually no tourists in Eixample; it is just a local Barcelona neighborhood, about the equivalent of Uptown New Orleans. Residents sit at tiny tables having coffee outside the cervecerias, and the grocery next door to our former apartment building has now built in a sushi bar at the entrance and moved the fresh produce toward the back a bit.
We walked around window shopping, then jumped on the Metro, rode back to our more bustling neighborhood and decided to explore the old quarter a bit more than we have before. The Bari Gotic is truly a wonderful place with narrow streets winding through and around a pie-shaped area generally bound by La Rambla on the left and Via Laeitana on the right. Along the narrow streets and alleys, clothing and souvenir shops by the hundreds squeeze between large and small restaurants in nearly the same quantity.
We found a little spot named La Galeria on Caller Regomir for lunch. It offered a tapas de dia consisting of a plate of tiny empenadas and a glass of wine for 2.90. Who can refuse that?
I ordered the tapas de dia, and Lynn ordered the goat cheese salad, which was served with an entire four-inch round of warm chevré on top of the greens. Just to make sure I didn’t go hungry, I also ordered a plate of calamari. They came out thickly battered, but at least I could taste calamari and not just thick batter. I think I have finally learned my lesson after unanimously disappointing calamari dishes here in Spain: leave fried squid to Italians and Portuguese.
Including our two glasses of wine, the bill came to 17.70 plus a tip for the very pleasant waitress. Something else I am learning about Barcelona–lunch is going to cost about 10 euros a person, more or less, no matter where we eat. So make it good.
We wandered our way home through the tourist-packed streets for a quick nap and cocktails before heading out to Sensi Bistro, the third of the Sensi restaurants, all of which are located within a few blocks of our apartment. Gourmet Sensi had been a five-star blow-out for us a couple of nights ago, and we had thoroughly enjoyed the original Sensi at least twice before. So we carried high expectations to the French-style Sensi Bistro.
Sadly, Sensi Bistro did not live up to our lofty expectations. Four stars definitely but not five. The decor is very French, music very American, and the wait staff is as usual most friendly, sensitively attentive and very fluent in American English. Of the five tapas we ordered, one was mind-blowing (truffle oil will do that); two were excellent but the last two were judged a bit disappointing. The duck timbale had more timbale than duck, and the flank steak was over-salted to one diner’s opinion. The other diner in our group thought it wonderful.
We will go back a other time to see if we can give it a fifth star in our book.