Barcelona Eats: Gyoza roundup
I think cities are sometimes best experienced on the third or fourth visit. The first couple of times are spent sightseeing, trying to pack all of the "must see" sights. After that, one can just relax and try to experience the ambiance of a city without the pressure of rushing from place to place.
Such was my weekend in Barcelona. I'd already seen a Gaudí house, La Sagrada Familia, walked around the Gòtic quarter. This time I just wanted to explore new neighborhoods and get a better sense of what "Barcelona" was without the obligations of sightseeing.
Another obligation that was gone was visiting all of the wonderful Catalan restaurants in the city. Coming from Valencia, I was really craving good Asian food. Asian Asian food, not Asian fusion which is quite popular in Valencia. So it turned out that in three days, I had gyoza three times, twice in Japanese restaurants, and once in a Chinese restaurant.
My favorite gyoza was at a restaurant just down the street from my Airbnb in the Gràcia district called Fan Shoronpo. I hadn't read anything about it, but wanted to try it since a) it was just a block away, and b) it specialized in shoronpo, or xiaolongbao in Chinese. This was a really unique find because Japanese-style Chinese food is a genre of food that's hard to find outside of Japan, apart from ramen houses which one can argue is now more "Japanese" than Chinese.
These were the best gyoza I tried on this trip because they were nice and crunchy on the bottom, very juicy on the inside, with skin that had just the right amount of resistance.
Unlike Fan Shoronpo, I had read a lot about Ramen-ya Hiro, also in the Gràcia district. It seems like it's the new "it" Japanese restaurant, because even though I arrived 10 minutes before the opening time of 8:30pm, I still had to wait 50 minutes to get my single spot at the bar.
These were okay. The skin was a bit too thin and weak, that when you pulled the gyoza apart, they broke. I think I only had one gyoza with skin on both sides of the filling. But the taste was good and it was nice and crunchy underneath.
Like Ramen-ya Hiro, the Chen Ji restaurant near the Estacio Nord bus station has also been "discovered" by locals, being very much hyped in reviews and blogs online. I went at opening time around 11:30am so walked into an empty dining room, but when I passed by another day around lunch time there was a mob outside waiting to get in. This has been lauded as a "Chinese Chinese" place, authentic and not Westernized
Unfortunately I did not like these very much. They were barely golden on the bottom, while the insides were lukewarm and rather dry. Probably adding to the uneasy feeling was a cockroach which kept returning to my table, and the owner running around zapping insects with his electric paddle.
While dirty Chinese places often serve authentic Chinese food, I hope people don't fetishize the dirtiness and think that authentic Chinese food only comes from dirty places, or all dirty places serve authentic food.
