Cuisine

Pintxos 

Walking around Barcelona, I have looked inside restaurants and have seen an array of plates with food sitting on the bar. Each one of theses plates are full of pieces of bread with bits of food placed on top of these pieces of bread with a toothpick holding everything together. During my time in Barcelona, people have asked me if I have visited the toothpick places and I never had any idea what they were talking about. Then, after constantly seeing these restaurants around Barcelona, I wanted to learn more about this food. I found out that these are called pintxos and come from the Basque Country. Today, there are many restaurants in Barcelona that sell pintxos. They have many similarities to tapas. When I went to the pintxos restaurant, I was a little confused. There was many different types of pintxos at the bar but I did not know how to order them.The bartender had to go about explaining to us how these things are eaten. It turned out that it was similar to a buffet. You get a plate and are able to chose what kinds and how many of pintxos you want. The thing that is important to remember is to keep the toothpicks. The toothpicks are what determines how much you pay at the end of the meal. At the restaurant, I thought it was going to be very expensive because I thought is was going to take many pintxos to fill me up. I was wrong. They turned out to be very filling and delicious. My favorites were the ones that included a big piece of cod. Pintxos come from the Basque Country and not Catalonia. I wanted to include pintxos because it seems as if Catalonia has adopted them. There are even some Catalan inspired pintxos. For example, there was one that had pan con tomate and ham. Pintxos can be said as being a more Spanish tradition than a solely Catalan tradition.