On a beautiful corner of L’Eixample sits Norte, a small yet warm, inviting and light-filled bar with a constellation of shining lights spelling out its name inside and a few tables with fresh flowers. The restaurant was started by three partners, Lara Zaballa, María González and Fernando Martínez-Conde (who left the project last year). They met while working at Barcelona’s acclaimed Moo restaurant and had come to cooking from studying philosophy, art history and journalism at university. They were each looking for something more hands-on, work that gave them direct physical contact with matter, and that shared motivation connected them from the beginning. All three also came to Barcelona from other cities in northern Spain. After their experience at Moo and other projects (Zaballa and Martínez-Conde wrote for the prestigious cooking magazine Apicius), they looked for a more enjoyable and less stressful way to do what they loved, starting with basically nothing but their enthusiasm and their solid ideas to convince the banks to give them a loan to start their own restaurant in 2011.

Marc Cuenca was the kind of kid who was interested in what other people were eating, and this curiosity was the seed of his own restaurant, Els Tres Porquets ("Three Little Pigs"). A small enoteca and tapas bar with just a few tables, it sits in Poble Nou-El Clot, an area that brings to the restaurant a combination of locals, office workers and Spaniards and foreigners employed by startups and other businesses in the 22@ innovation district. While these days the city – and indeed many cities around the world – is teeming with restaurants specializing in an ambitious menu of small plates intended for sharing, in 2009, the concept was still quite new when the "three little pigs" arrived in the city.

As we wrote in part one, specialty coffee has really taken off in Barcelona, after a long period of limited options and mediocre to bad beans and roasts. Here are a few more of our favorites among the new generation of coffee shops: True Artisan Café Elisabet Sereno, a Barcelonan nutritionist, coffee specialist, a founder of the Specialty Coffee Association of Europe (SCAE) and a judge in the World Barista Championship, opened this coffee shop in 2014. It was created as a showroom and also serves an educational role in improving specialty coffee culture in Barcelona and Spain by organizing events, demos and tastings. True Artisan is an official La Marzocco espresso coffee machine distributor showroom, an SCAE-certified training center and a comfortable bar to while away an afternoon diving into Arabica aromas, latte art, cups, gadgets and machines.

Oriol’s face lights up whenever a customer selects his favorite pintxo from one of the 49 different trays, beautifully displayed at Euskal Etxea, the bar where he works and the first bar in Barcelona to serve traditional Basque pintxos. One wonders how a small slice of bread topped with a chickpea fritter, jamón serrano and romesco sauce spiked with a toothpick that costs just €1.95 can make someone so happy. We try one and we immediately see why.

As in many other rural parts of Europe, the Catalonian countryside is dotted with large, old farmhouses, legacies of feudalism that have since been converted into hotels, bed-and-breakfasts and restaurants. The origins of these masías, as they’re known in Catalan, go back to the 11th century, but it was not until the end of feudalism in the 16th century that the former serfs turned masías into their own self-run farm holdings and homes. The buildings that survive today may be of a more recent vintage, built perhaps a century ago, sometimes older. Masías were usually named after the family who owned them; “Can Josep,” for example, means “house of Josep.”

Salt cod has been a staple on the Iberian Peninsula for centuries, but in the last few decades overfishing and changes in eating habits have resulted in a significant drop in bacallà consumption. Only recently has the fish begun returning in greater numbers to our tables, and it has also become the focal point for an annual gastronomic celebration: La Ruta del Bacallà. There’s a popular saying on the Iberian Peninsula that there is one cod recipe for every day of the year, but in truth, the number is upwards of 500. In Spain, there are hundreds of cod recipes dating from the Middle Ages, with a multitude of regional variations. The most notable and sophisticated ones come from Basque country and Catalonia.

On November 9, Catalonia conducted a straw poll on independence, with more than 80 percent voting in favor of secession, and more than 10 percent voting for statehood without independence. In spite of a ruling from Spain’s Constitutional Court to suspend the vote, the regional government, under the leadership of Catalan president Artur Mas, was able to proceed with this more symbolic poll thanks to support from 40,930 volunteers. The general atmosphere was civil and calm, but the prevailing mood was clear from the numerous flags, pro-independence T-shirts and yellow signs everywhere proclaiming, “We want a new country!”

La Boquería is undoubtedly one of the most famous markets in the world, but there are 43 markets spread across Barcelona, each with its own unique charms. Once a year, they can be experienced all at the same time, in the same place. From October 17 to 19, 265,000 visitors thronged the square in front of Barcelona Cathedral for the fifth edition of the Mercat de Mercats (Market of Markets) festival, which gathered 40 stalls, 30 local artisan producers, 40 chefs with 17 Michelin stars between them and 14 of the city’s best restaurants. The festival offers an amazing opportunity for locals and tourists to taste the dazzling array of Catalan flavors and to get to know the city’s neighborhood markets.

Horn of plenty, yellow foot, ox tongue, gray knight: the bewitching names are like something out of a fairy tale. But at Casa Lucio, in Sant Antoni, these are all mushrooms you might find on your plate, especially in autumn.

[Editor's note: we're sorry to report that Butifarring is now closed.] Gourmet fast food has swept through Spain at full speed. It comes in multiregional styles and with strong creative inspiration behind it – and, most importantly, the food itself can be exceptional.Eric Camp, Albert Gómez and their three partners are a good example of this, with their sausage-centric project, Butifarring, and their first small venue in Barrio Gòtico, which is much more than a Catalan hot dog or sandwich place.

In Catalonia around the summer solstice, we make one of our most traditional liqueurs, ratafía, for which the herbs, fruit and flowers that are macerated in alcohol must be collected on Saint John’s Eve, or June 23. This highly aromatic digestif has long been believed to have medicinal properties. There’s even an old Catalan rhyme along those lines: Ratafía, tres o cuatro al día (“Ratafía, three or four per day”). Different versions of the liqueur have been made for centuries in eastern Spain and some regions of France and Italy but, like the other herb liqueurs throughout Europe, they originated from the Ancient Roman and Greek custom of macerating fruit and herbs in wine, from Arabian perfume distillation and from the sophisticated medieval distillations in monasteries and convents that created the first aguardientes, or grape-based, medicinal liqueurs.

You are what you eat, as the saying goes. Is it any surprise, then, that food figures so largely in popular culture all over the world? In Spain, we have a veritable cornucopia of food-related expressions. Here’s a taste: Dar una torta, “to give a cake.” To slap someone. But darse una torta, “give a cake to yourself,” means you hit something else. It’s a mild, lighthearted expression, even with tortazo, which is a bigger biff, and comes from the funny old circus setup where a clown throws a cake into the face of another clown.

For so long, bulk wine has been synonymous with plonk – even in a country like Spain, where buying wine straight from the barrel was standard practice up until the 1980s, when it was largely replaced by bottles with certified designations of origin. We are well acquainted with the bad stuff, which we call vino peleón, literally “scrappy” wine, but thankfully, the era of its ubiquity is mostly over and done with. It’s much easier these days to find good wine at low prices (€1 to €5 per liter) that’s suitable for everyday drinking. And another upside to this practice is the environmentally friendly packaging: your own jug.

Churros, the long, skinny, crenellated, sweet fried crullers made from just flour, water and salt, have been enjoyed for centuries in Spain, with hot chocolate and without. However, in Barcelona, xurros, as they are called in Catalan, are becoming an endangered species. In recent years, more than half of the xurrerias in the city have disappeared. Many of the old-timer xurreros who still survive have the odds stacked against them: permit renewal for a street stall is near impossible; rent has become prohibitively expensive and continues to increase; or required updates to old infrastructure might prove extremely costly. However, we know of one young newcomer who has emerged with fresh energy and inspiration, incorporating lessons from the masters in his creative take on xurros. The best way to save this endangered species is to eat it, so here are our five favorite xurrerias, which make these star-shaped doughnuts with great care – and with delicious results that are worth seeking out.

Editor's note: Our third installment in the Global Bar Crawl takes us to Barcelona, where gin continues to be the drink of choice among locals. Tomorrow we head to a spot in Istanbul where you can spend an evening visiting a number of bars, all without leaving the building. Spain is a country that loves a long-drink – alcohol in combination with a soft drink, refreshing and open to invention and reinvention. On the heels of creative gastronomy’s efflorescence in recent years, many old drinks, cuisines and forgotten ingredients have returned, revived through new and more sophisticated techniques and interpretations. The gin and tonic, called gintonic here, is one such Spanish obsession, and all that ingenuity and focus have gone into taking this highball to the next level.