Vegan in Barcelona

Sorry for the posting slump, I was in Spain and now I'm in pain. Both states of being have kept me off the computer, and while Spain was a wonderful diversion, the pain is an unwelcome distraction.

I put pictures of Barcelona on Flickr if anyone would like to see more of the beautiful city than just the food I ate there!

As the photo above reveals, I got to spend the last week in Barcelona, where, as I craned my neck around to scope out the sites in the gorgeous and dynamic city, I cracked my wrist hard into a flourish on a stone wall (Barcelona is full of flourish). Upon returning home I went to work in the kitchen making a cake (what else?) and since I was babying the one wrist, I fumbled on a shelf and ended up dropping a waffle iron, which crashed down from several feet above me onto my already sore wrist. As an aside, this is the waffle iron which came in a box that proclaimed "waffles are a healthy choice for today's lifestyle." It's always struck me as a funny thing to say, so we make a lot of jokes about waffles and healthy choice, but suffice to say, waffles were NOT a healthy choice for Sunday, October 6th's lifestyle.

In the Emergency Room the intake nurse scrawled something about my sad tale and the attack issued upon me by the waffle iron. Her penmanship was such that the Physician's Assistant, upon reading my paperwork, asked me what I wanted with Dr. Cool Waffle. Huh? I was afraid I'd ended up in the psych ward for a moment, but then it came to me: Dr. Cool Waffle = dropped a cool waffle [iron]. Cool, since it was not hot and I had no burns, which was the medical team's first fear. We waited around for a while and then finally consulted with Dr. Cool Waffle. Now I'm wrapped in a cast up to my elbow and am unhappy, but hoping for good news when I actually see the wrist and hand surgeon tomorrow.



Ok, grumbles aside, let's talk food. I was really mixed on my expectations for eating vegan in Barcelona. On one hand I was excited by the excellent listing of vegetarian and health food stores in Barcelona featured on Sin Carne (Without Meat), but I'd also heard from people who've visited that even vegetarian eating can be a challenge there. There's this thing with jamón (ham) that finds its way into everything and squid ink and so on. Overall, I'd say it takes a little planning and a little bit of proficiency with Spanish, but that you can do just fine as a vegan in Barcelona.



We rented an short term apartment in the city, which I've found to be a great way to go as a vegan, as a budget conscious traveler, and as someone who likes to eat a "real" breakfast (which more often than not in Barcelona involved the thick hot drinking chocolate pictured above). Having the apartment means that there's a kitchen to store and prepare food in and no waiting around in the morning to get breakfast out. Upon arriving we scoped out a health food store and a market for produce to get stocked up with ingredients for making breakfasts in the apartment and some dinners and easily transported lunches to throw in a bag. This plan of attack has worked out really well in Budapest, where I can also highly recommend Zsofi and her BudaVeg apartment, and in Prague. In Barcelona having the apartment was a bit of a life-saver since meals out were so very expensive. I'm talking $7 tapas-sized hummus plates.



Sin Carne lists all the vegetarian and health food shops in the city, so our first stop was Vegetalia to get food at the restaurant and supplies from the small health food store that shares space with the restaurant. From the store we grabbed unsweetened soy yogurt, organic wine, tofu, seitan, chocolate, you know, essentials. At the restaurant, which had the feel of a cozy neighborhood stop in and say "hi" kind of place, with an open kitchen and lots of magazines and books to read, we ordered a lot of seitan to try to replenish our starved bodies after the terrible airplane food.



It was good and filling, the kabobs above particularly so, but not notably flavorful or interesting. It was also all covered in sprouts. Maybe it's the sprouts, but this meal had me thinking about the cuisine as kind of "second-wave" vegetarian fare. I don't think this is a classification that anybody actually uses, and it's somewhat imprecise and Western-centric, since it collapses hundreds of years of vegetarianism into a first wave, identifes the 1970s health-food movement in the US as the start of the second wave and puts a third wave somewhere in the past 10-15 years with the beginning of both more "gourmet" vegetarian and vegan restaurants and the DIY vegan cookzines that started de-emphasizing "healthiness" while veganizing comfort foods. Whether or not this classification is useful, it points at the sort of dated quality I felt the veg food in Barcelona had overall.



This was supposed to be seitan carpaccio, which is a sort of generous way of making reference to the dried out seitan slices they served. Again, it certainly wasn't bad, it just wasn't exciting. However, Vegetalia is a great place to hang out and drink sangria, look over books and chat. I'd certainly go again, if it weren't half way around the world and all.



I was extremely excited by the Mercat de la Boqueria, a bustling covered market that was overflowing with beautiful produce. It was ordered such that the fruits, vegetables, nuts and dried goods were upfront and the dead things were toward the back, so it was just a sea of beautiful produce as we wandered the mercat picking things out to bring back the apartment. There were gorgeous stalls overflowing with tons of in season mushrooms and local tomatoes. Now, I know this is more a function of how lousy the dollar is that how expensive Barcelona is, but I did have to draw the line when two beautiful tomatoes came to 8 Euros, about $15. I did splurge with great joy though at a stand that featured an array of tropical fruits, some of which I haven't had since I was a kid in Malaysia.



The big white sphere on the right is a rambutan, we used to have a rambutan tree at our house in Malaysia. The flavor is indescribable, though it is similar in texture to the lychee, which has gotten much more popular in the US than the rambutan. I got some great lychees too, and a brilliantly bright passion fruit. In the middle of the plate is a mangosteen, which was my favorite find. I have never seen it for sale in the US. The mangosteen is sometimes called the queen of fruits in Southeast Asia. Queen to the durian's king. I much prefer the queen--durian is stinkier than I can handle. A couple gorgeous figs and slices of ripe pear completed the perfect fruit plate for breakfast.



We ate it with hot chocolate and fresh bread from the bakery downstairs. Throw the door open to the porch just to the left of the dining table, let the sun and breeze of a Spanish morning drift in, and all of a sudden eating in to save money is absolutely no sacrifice. Rather, it's a privilege.



Other mornings we made quick tofu or seitan scrambles with roasted red peppers (a local favorite) and tons of great olives and tomatoes. In the evening, similarly quick food featuring local ingredients made it part of the fun of traveling somewhere new, even while we stayed in for dinner. Olives, olives, olives and great roasted red peppers made it into everything--quick pastas with white beans and sundried tomatoes, bean patties and salads, fresh local greens with walnuts and beets and a bottle of local wine, especially cava--we ate well and at a fraction of the price. Which is not to say that we never ate out.



The best place we went though, without a doubt, was Sesamo. We went against our provincial leanings and snacked at 7pm to tide over until a more fashionable 10:30pm for dinner. The restaurant didn't even start serving until 9:30pm. After all of our other experiences with veggie restaurants in Barcelona, I wasn't sure what to expect, but I was instantly in love with it. The space is intimate with an open kitchen and bright colors and candle light. And the food--wow. Creative, flavorful, beautiful, satisfying, intriguing, local, seasonal, organic and very vegan friendly. It's comida sin bestias, but they still do make use of lots of dairy on the menu. I had the "jade pillars" pictured above and they are one of the best things I've eaten in a while. The thin slices of cucumber were rolled around a smoky tofu cheese and settled in a salty-sweet sauce. I tried not to moan too much while eating them.



The salad was also excellent, a bed of local rocket topped with a perfect pear and surrounded by a very generous sprinkling of candied nuts. The server also brought out a dish of olives, a whole wonderful assortment of about 7 different kinds. A basket of fresh baked bread along with the olives made wonderful snacking until the entrees came.



The main course was the only vegan dish they had that night, but the menu is never static at Sesamo and the server said they often have more vegan dishes on the menu. They can veganize dishes too, but our server said that the one dish we asked about wouldn't "be fun" as a vegan dish and recommended this instead. I appreciate honesty and I appreciated this dish which was made up of pumpkin and potatoes and topped with lightly steamed veggies and lots of fresh black pepper.



For dessert they had two different vegan options. One was a plate of vegan truffles with a large plain chocolate truffle in the center, accompanied by mint chocolate truffles and two mocha truffles on either side. The other was a vegan black forest cake with tofu cream between the layers. The truffles were excellent and right up my alley. Plate of chocolate, yes, thank you, no need to leave a fork…I’ll just go ahead and eat these with my face. They were dark and creamy smooth with subtle flavorings that were nicely balanced by the chocolate. The cake was good, but the cream was super tofuy. I love tofu and do use it in baking, but a pastry cream that is tofu-based needs a little dressing up and some quality time in a food processor.

Juicy Jones is the vegan restaurant in Barcelona. It’s just recently opened up a second branch in a very hip area of town and maintains its original location in the basement of a Barri Gótic neighborhood. We went to both locations, once for lunch and once for dinner. They are pretty much exactly the same, offering the same kind of daily specials menu and the same hyper-fluorescent fruit and veg décor. I’d suggest visiting the Juicy Jones in Barri Gótic where the dining room is separate from the juice bar for a more pleasant dinning experience since Juicy Jones is known for its fresh juices and shakes which means the juicer and blender maintain a pretty constant auditory presence.

The menú del día at Juicy Jones is definitely the way to go. For about 9 Euros you get a large mixed salad or a soup of the day, an entree and a dessert. The salad loses points for lettuce that had to be attacked with the butter knife in order to transform it into something that had hope of actually fitting in a person's mouth. And of course, it was topped with handfuls of sprouts, but was big and had great olives and peppers. The soup was good both times. We had a great gazpacho that was cool and loaded with garlic and olive oil and a miso that was rich and warming.

The main course changes daily and could be pizza with vegan cheese, lasagna, gnocchi, etc. or you can opt for a thali and receive an assortment of Indian-style curries. I say Indian-style because its certainly Indian by way of Barcelona, the curries are mild and differently spiced. My thali had two curries that contained under-cooked potatoes, but their twist on dal was delicious. The pizza and lasagna were both pretty good, but bland. There are four choices for dessert—a despairingly sweet kolfi (an Indian pudding with fruit and nuts), a cookie that should be ashamed of itself, a mango lassi that is too sweet but probably the best way to go, and a postre which seems hit or miss. We had “banana cake” which was exactly the kind of beast people who disparage vegan baking are thinking of as they disparage and a chocolate cake that was good taste-wise but exploded in a dry mess of crumbs when we cut into it.

Tapioca soup at Arco Iris

The menú del día at Arco Iris is a little risky for vegans, but the lunch-time only vegetarian café is located very near a mandatory site in Barcelona, La Sagrada Familia, so it’s worth trying. It’s an airy and sunny place with a very friendly staff. There are three choices for each of four courses—salads, boiled veggies, veggie burgers, soups, and for dessert, fruit. We had boiled potatoes and cabbage, bread and olives, great melon, and the strangest soup ever, a tapioca soup. The server and I had to go back and forth on it for a while at first since I was sure I was misunderstanding her when she said “tapioca soup.” “It’s sweet?” I asked her. “No,” she said. “But…?” After confirming that it was vegan we agreed to try it. It was really tapioca, the gelatinous stuff that sweet puddings and bubble drinks are made from, but in a savory, salty soup. It was thick as a gel, but the texture wasn’t as disturbing as I might have guesses and the soup was filling and tasty.



Though tapas are not originally a Catalan specialty, they are immensely popular in Barcelona and there are some vegan things on traditional tapas menus, but not many. My favorite spot that we stopped at to enjoy some small plates of food was the beautiful medieval stone courtyard at the Museu Texil I d’Indumentaria, which is also just across the street from the Picasso Museum. They have a range of nice tea infusions like fresh mint with light green tea and plates of hummus, guacamole, escalivada (eggplant, red peppers and onion) and marinated mushrooms served with warm bread and fresh corn chips.

One thing that I thought a lot about in Barcelona, and especially on the plane where we were served some truly bad food, was how some people who are not vegetarian or vegan tend to think about eating veg in terms of deprivation. It's all about what someone is not eating. The food made in this deprivation mindset then is food that feels like it is missing something. It’s not much fun to eat because it’s maimed and hobbled, it is deprived because its conceived of as being deprived.

The joy and bounty of vegan options and the excitement about the delicious possibilities of ethical eating seem to me a vital part of veg advocacy, and indeed, this seems like a core motivating principal of contemporary veganism. As I ate some food in Barcelona that seemed like a product of the "bad old days" of vegetarian cookery, I thought a lot about how great it is that soon the "but it doesn't taste vegan" comment will be a thing of the past because it just won't make sense--most vegan products taste just as good or better than anything else. But I hope that good food is not the end of the story for veganism. I don't think that is the case at all, but I was thinking that I might be willing to go back to politically-informed sprouts and bland tofu if the trade-off were to be completely apolitical gourmet veganism. I have faith though in a future that includes delicious vegan truffles and right-on politics. The revolution will be delicious. Right? Right.