LA XARXA
The marisquería is one of Barcelona’s endangered institutions — too formal for the young, too expensive for the casual — so credit where it’s due: La Xarxa reopened its original Plaça Molina corner a few years back and figured out how to keep the product and drop the starch. The Varela family has been at this since 1969, and the fish still arrives with the seriousness that implies: grilled Galician cockles, roast coastal langoustines, a spider crab dressed with Perrins that tastes like somebody’s grandmother’s idea of luxury. The signature move is a deliberately ugly cod omelette finished at the table over pa amb tomàquet, and it is the whole restaurant in one dish — technically unremarkable, emotionally undeniable. Around it, chef Carlos Allué has built a menu of shared plates that lets a table graze rather than commit, and the terrace on Via Augusta is among the most pleasant in the zona alta on a warm night. It is not cheap and it does not pretend to be cooking at the frontier. What it offers is increasingly rare: proper seafood, in a proper room, without the ceremony that used to come attached. Old money, new manners.
