Barcelona: Pinotxo Bar

We took last Friday off for a long weekend trip to Barcelona, just an hour's flight away from Milan. It was only 3 days but there were so much to see and do there. This post is for our friend Sergio, who's also headed to Barcelona next week with his girlfriend.

One of our most memorable experiences in Barcelona was lunch at Bar Pinotxo, located smack dab in the middle of the La Boqueria market, just off the Ramblas. We headed there on Saturday around 1pm, and already there was a line of people waiting to grab one of the few seats. (Supposedly anytime before 2pm is considered 'early' for lunch in Spain).


Luckily we only had to wait about 15 minutes before two stools freed up. Our tummies were hungry looking at the other diners eating.

We noticed there were no menus, and we looked at each other a little worried. How are we going to know what to order? Turns out we didn't have anything to worry about. The cooks/servers there were extremely friendly and helpful, pointing out and explaining the different offerings of the day.

To start off, we had this tasty dish of chickpeas with pine nuts, raisins and not sure what else. It looked simple but tasted so good.


I was washing everything down with a glass of sparkling cava wine. Next came a dish of lightly breaded and deep fried lamb ribs. Yummy!


All this time we were enjoying the show in front of us, and the busy bustling market all around us. All the ingredients used were so fresh. Anytime they ran out of ingredients, they would just go across the aisle for that bunch of parsley or lemons.


Stef couldn't take his eyes off the fresh seafood they had. The fish sellers at the market had such great looking seafood. But I'll leave that for another post. So he ordered the clams, which were cooked perfectly. They were so sweet and tasted of the sea.


We ended up chatting with another server/cook who ended up sitting on my right on his lunch break. He spoke Italian better than English, so Italian it was. He told us they'd been open since 6am that morning, and closing time was 4pm when the market starts shutting down for the day. Well, even with the hard work, you could tell they enjoyed their job, cheerfully preparing and serving delicious meals for their customers.

Our cook gave us these fried balls of yam? potato? to taste, and they were soooo good.

Finally we decided to splurge and get the red prawns. We had seen them in at the fish stalls and this was our chance to taste them. Our cook carefully picked the biggest ones for us, and then threw them on the cooktop. See the ones on cooking on the right?


With just a sprinkle of salt and a drizzle of oil... these babies were just great. Again, sweet and with the texture that you can only get with fresh seafood.


What a great meal. Our bill came up to 40 euro, but that was only because we splurged on the red shrimp (only four), which was 40% of the bill. We were so sad that we couldn't come back the next day for another meal before leaving as Sunday was their day off.