PACO MERALGO
There is a particular kind of Barcelona restaurant that survives every wave of fashion by declining to notice it, and Paco Meralgo has been doing that on Muntaner for the better part of two decades. Two marble counters, a kitchen that starts with what the market surrendered that morning, and a menu that does not stray from its brief: seafood-forward tapas cooked with better product than the format usually justifies. Palamós prawns off the plancha. A bomba done properly. Montaditos that treat bread as an ingredient rather than a delivery mechanism — the steak tartare version is the one people cross town for. Rice at lunch only, which is the correct amount of rice. What makes the place work isn’t invention; it’s the refusal to cut corners on the raw material while charging tapas-bar prices for it, and a room that runs at the volume and velocity of a city that likes to eat standing up. It is not cheap for the genre, and on a Friday you will not get in without calling. Neither of those is a criticism. In a city exporting its tapas culture to tourists by the busload, this is the version the locals kept for themselves.
