Barça! Oh Barça, my Barça. To be honest, Spain has never been high on my countries I want to visit list. In fact it hasn’t really been on my list at all. Over a year ago my cousin Natalie, who has been living in Barcelona on and off for 5 years, bought 6 tickets for a Bad Bunny concert and told me she would hold one for me. I was in Hawai’i at the time with little to no plans of traveling to Europe, but I had to admit the offer piqued my interest. I told her “we’ll see” with an extremely slim likelihood that I would ever actually make it for that show.
On May 11, 2026 my discount economy red-eye flight with the little known LEVEL airline touched down on Spanish ground. This is my first time back in Europe since March 2020, when I ignored all of the LEVEL 5 DO NOT TRAVEL advisories from the US Embassy and stubbornly decided I was going to Italy anyway. I never made it to Italy. Before I even arrived in Europe all of the Italian borders were closed, but I figured this thing would blow over in 3 to 4 weeks so I would just wait it out at my friend’s place in London for a while. I spent 12 total days in Europe before I had to take the very last available flight out of Dublin back to San Francisco as all of the world entered lockdown.
I came to Spain with very few expectations. I was mostly just looking forward to seeing Bad Bunny, visiting Costa Brava and spending time with my cousin at her place. I am also a terrible planner. I almost never buy round trip flights or make any accommodation plans more than 2-3 days in advance and I hate researching “10 best things to do in XYZ city”. Reading travel blogs is extremely overwhelming and confusing to me and I hate being locked into plans because who knows where the wind will take me! It’s equal parts laziness, free-spiritedness and overstimulation. That being said I usually stick to the Anthony Bourdain style travel where I just ask the locals and figure it out as I go.
I love to eat but I am by no means a foodie. What even is a foodie? Google defines it as a person with a person with “an ardent, refined interest in food… [that] actively seeks out new culinary experiences, unique flavor profiles, and the culture surrounding what they eat”. I don’t enjoy researching restaurants and I’m very suspicious of places highly recommended by tourist Google reviews because a lot people, to be honest, have pretty lame taste in my opinion. I also have terrible decision fatigue and find it really hard to just pick a damn place. But I know good food when I have it and I trust my palate implicitly.
When I got to Barcelona I watched a bunch of TikTok videos of people documenting “everything I ate in Barcelona in 24 hrs” and jotted down several places in my notes app hoping I’d make it to a few of them. Influencer culture has created extremely high expectations for food while traveling. It feels like there’s this pressure to always find the best spot and make sure that every meal you have is one of the best meals of your life. In my experience this is just simply never the case. If I have one or two meals that really blow my socks off in a few weeks of traveling, I call it a success, and if not, that’s fine too! Sometimes we just have to eat food because we’re hungry.
I’ve traveled quite a bit, but mostly in Latin America where I usually just stick to street markets and road-side food places filled with locals. I’ve always found the best food that way, but Europe is a whole different world. There’s no street food in Barcelona and the one market that I went to was so overstimulating that I got 4 oysters and got the heck out of there. I quickly found out that Spain is the land of bread, cheese and jamón which is mostly what I ate for the first few days. I had so much fun shopping in the local supermarket and getting all sorts of pre-packaged foods that I haven’t seen in US grocery stores. Boquerones, individually packed smoked salmon, tinned fish, 1/2 liter bottles of gazpacho, premade beef tartare, jamón iberico, 1 liter of kefir for €2 and all the little chocolate cookies that I love.
I went to tapas bars and enjoyed €4 glasses of white wine with Spain’s favorite pan con tomate and garlic shrimp. I ate many papas bravas most of which were just ok and one that was really good because it had extra garlic. I had numerous pints of clara, a local drink that my cousins introduced me to which is just Estrella beer mixed with Lemon Fanta, which on a hot Spanish day is god-tier. Everyday I had a Magnum ice cream bar from the local supermercat which is one of my favorite things to do while traveling.
One evening I finally made it to one of the restaurants in my notes app that was so highly recommended by the TikTok girls called Bar Pimentel. I sat at the bar and had so much fun meeting a group of people from El Salvador, one of whom is a surfboard shaper and owns a café in their local surf town. I ordered 4 small plates and none of them were really all that great, but the experience was still awesome because of the environment and the people that I met there. I talked to 2 British guys about American fast food and we all agreed that Panda Express is the best. I got a crema catalana, which is crème brûlée’s Spanish cousin and it was grainy and bland. The white wine I had that was recommended by the bartender was fantastic.
The next day I had a panini at a place called Seranata and it was one of the best paninis I’ve ever had. The restaurant was closing so I took it to go looking for a bench on the street where I could eat. I was so hungry that I opened it up and took my first bites while walking, when mid-bite the realization hit me- Spanish people don’t walk and eat, that’s an American thing. Americans will eat anything, anywhere, at anytime- walking, driving, sitting in the metro station, while Europeans actually sit down to eat their food. I quickly assimilated to the local way and found a park bench.
Barcelona is an unbelievably beautiful city. I’ve spent days walking through the streets and I still can’t believe how clean, aesthetic and architecturally interesting this city is. It feels like it was built by artists, and in many ways it was. The wide streets are lined with trees and all of the buildings are so beautifully and artfully crafted that it makes sense why Gaudi was born of this place. Gaudi’s influence makes Barcelona feel magical, whimsical and unique, and his elaborate and towering masterpieces crown all corners of the city making the whole place feel equal parts European gothic and imagination funhouse toon-town world. His magnum opus, Sagrada Familia, literally took my breath away. Standing in front of it I felt the same way that I felt when I saw the Grand Canyon for the first time- absolutely awestruck.
Of the nearly three weeks I’ve spent in Barcelona, two meals really stand out to me. One was at a Chinese restaurant called Little Foodie in the Universitat neighborhood that Natalie and her boyfriend Alvaro have been raving about for weeks. We finally made it there on Monday evening and I can confirm, it lived up to their hype. With less than 1k reviews, I didn’t see Little Foodie on any of the local travel recommendation lists. It’s a small place near the corner of a side street right next to where Natalie and Alvaro used to live, and they frequented the restaurant so often that the owners knew their order. Little Foodie is owned and operated by a Chinese family and during the day you can find the grandma folding dumplings in the corner by hand. Every single dish we ordered was fantastic. It is so blaringly obvious when food is made fresh from scratch vs premade. Everything they make at Little Foodie comes straight from their hands and you can taste it. We got sweet & sour pork, beef noodle soup, rice noodles with pork, the most amazing eggplant dish and the pork & shrimp xianglong bao. All of which cost €47, which is less than any meal we’ve had. FIVE STARS!!!
My most favorite meal that I’ve had in Spain was at a Spanish restaurant called La Oca in the beach town Sitges, about 40 minutes south of Barcelona. Sitges looks a little bit like Miami, beachside streets lined with fancy hotels and tourists. A few streets back from the beach, we walked into La Oca and I already knew it would be good. At the entrance to the restaurant there’s dozens of chickens roasting on a fiery rotiserrie which really sets the vibe. The place is less than half full with locals only, which also sets the vibe. Another great sign is that the menu is all in Catalan with no pictures and little to no explanation of what the dishes are. We order several things, first of course, the pan con tomate. I cannot describe my delight when the server brought us a plate with 3 pieces of toasted bread, 3 whole tomatoes, and 3 whole cloves of garlic still in the skin. It’s a DIY experience and I loved that. I cracked the garlic out of its skin and rubbed it all over the bread followed by tomato, followed by the olive oil on the table.
Then all of our dishes came out and holy smokes, dare I say this was the best roast chicken I’ve ever had. The skin was so perfectly fried and crispy, seasoned to perfection at last (I’ve found a lot of Spanish food to be under-seasoned for my taste) and the most tender, juicy, fall off the bone meat - words can’t describe how good this was. We also had the pollo al cava which was a 1/4 chicken in a mushroom, cava, cream sauce with pancetta, which was so unbelievably delicious, and again perfectly seasoned!!! The croquetas were the best we’d all ever had and the roasted tomatoes were charred to perfection. Chef’s kiss. I told our server to please tell the chef how amazing everything was, which I don’t think I’ve ever done at a restaurant before in my life. I left a 5 star google review while sitting at the table.
I’m leaving Spain with a really good taste in my mouth. Not only from La Oca’s chicken, but from the city itself. The art, architecture, people, basilicas, weather and all around buenas vibras! Barcelona, I will be back!!!
