Food was a major focus of my preparation for our trip to Spain. As usual I got a lot of my information from eGullet. I visited the sites of individual restaurants and consulted this Spanish Food Dictionary when necessary. I made some use of CitySearch-type sites and general travel sites, but I find those are best utilized when you already know what you are looking for.

For me it's pretty intimidating to call a restaurant in another country from the US and try to make a reservation. Not being face to face, the person on the other end has no way of knowing what language I might speak, and we can't use gestures to get by. Someday I'll get the hang of it, but right now I really appreciate it when restaurants offer online reservations.

The other challenge was that our trip, from August 5th - 19th, was forcibly timed with the European peak vacation season, and in Spain at least, restaurants and other businesses close for anywhere from a day to the whole month of August. This seemed to reach a defined peak on the 15th, when Valencia became a ghost town and I had to confront my fears by calling at least a dozen restaurants to ask if they were open. (Usually if they picked up the phone at all the question was already answered, so there wasn't as much pressure on the conversation.)

I ended up making two online reservations for dinner in Barcelona before we left, one for Cinc Sentits and one for Comerç24. Some of the eGullet people make reservations for nearly every lunch and dinner on their trip, which I think is insane. I wanted to keep our schedule open in case we had jet lag troubles, and there were budgetary limits of course. Cinc Sentits ("Five Senses" in Catalan) is widely regarded as one of the best restaurants in town, with a fairly international style. Comerç24 is a more experimental place that flirts quite a bit with molecular gastronomy. Many eGullet reviewers say they are inconsistent but can be very good. We had fantastic meals at both, but I will have to save full descriptions for their own entries to keep this to a reasonable length.

My friend Ed warned me before the trip that although there is good food to be had in Spain, it isn't "in your face" the way it is in many other places. Boy was he right. One reason Maya usually won the argument about whether we should sit down in a restaurant to get breakfast or lunch was that there was simply no other way to get food. There are no street food vendors. The closest thing would probably be ice cream shops, and ice cream makes an odd breakfast to say the least. There are a few food chains similar to Au Bon Pain, but even at these, you will usually get your food on ceramic dishware. "To go" is either not an option or just not seen as the thing to do. Even in Paris, the land that takeout forgot, you can at least walk around with a baguette under your arm.

I also saw exactly one of what we would call a supermarket. Even discounting size, there were very very few retail food shops. I really have no idea how the people that live in these cities get their provisions, unless they always go to the central market (shamefully, we never made it there). The only convenience store chain we saw was Opencor, owned by the equally ubiquitous department store El Corte Ingles. I was thankful for its late hours; their idea of 24/7 is 18/7, but that's still pretty revolutionary for Spain. We made several trips there for Fanta and gummi bears and bottled water, among other things.

I would like to bring attention to what I shall call the chocolate and churros fallacy. Many web sites and travel books propagate the notion that after a night of clubbing, Barcelonans like to go to cafes around 6am and have hot chocolate with churros, which are rod-shaped sugared pieces of fried dough--they sell them from street carts in my neighborhood at home. The churros are to be dipped in the thick hot chocolate. Gridskipper provided an extensive list of Xocolaterias. We didn't do any all-night clubbing, but I assumed that if they were open at 6am they would also be open about 11pm. Not the case! The latest closing time I could find was 10pm, and most restaurants didn't even open for dinner until 8pm, so we were never done eating before 9:30, and nothing was ever in walking distance. Of course now I can't even dig up any links that make the claim about late-night churros, so perhaps the myth has died.

The hours kept by restaurants in general were troublesome to us. Most of them close between the lunch and dinner hour, roughly between 4pm and 8pm. We often didn't get up until noon or later, and we always ended up ready for lunch at right around 4. One day we were desperately walking along a row of restaurants on the beach in Valencia, getting these comical "Nooo...."s and "X" arm gestures from each place, until finally one agreed to feed us. The most ridiculous instance was the day we spent at the amazing Oceanografic aquarium. This place had 3 genuinely good looking restaurants and cafes, rare for an amusement park, and they all closed as soon as we were ready to eat. We're a captive audience here! Who's going to leave the aquarium for a siesta in the middle of the afternoon? The only nourishment left to us was the concession stand at the Dolphinarium. Fortunately it turned out to be not all that bad.

I intended to include capsule reviews of the restaurants we visited here, but this is already too long, so that also will get its own entry.