Where can I find a local-style dinner in Barcelona away from crowded tourist streets?

The city publishes that list for an administrative reason, but it reads as a dining guide. These six districts ring the hillside above the Gaudí property, they sit well off the harbor-to-Eixample axis most first visits trace, and they are the places where the municipality has decided residents need protecting from visitor pressure. A restaurant in Can Baró or El Coll is serving the people who live in Can Baró and El Coll.

The hours confirm it. Park Güell's regulations reserve 7 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. and 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. for residents, and leave 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. as the shared visitor window. The evening half of that reservation covers exactly the hours when a neighborhood eats. If you want a dinner that is not a visitor's dinner, you want to be inside those districts during the hours the city has set aside for the people who live in them.

Weather pushes the same way at certain times of year. AEMET's Barcelona normals put the rainfall maximum in October at 3.58 inches (91 mm), concentrated into a small number of heavy episodes rather than spread across the month. When one of those arrives, the places with indoor rooms rather than pavement tables keep serving, and in the hill districts that is most of them.

The streets above Gràcia climb hard enough that the squares are terraced into the slope, and a restaurant's two halves can sit on different levels with three steps between them — the gradient is why these districts never got the wide avenues the flat city below did.

Barcelona's Gaudí properties are inscribed by UNESCO under criteria (i), (ii) and (iv), and Park Güell's monumental area accounts for 12 hectares of that inscription — but the 8 hectares of woodland beside it carry no ticket and no inscription. Walking out through that woodland rather than back down the way you came drops you into the residential grid rather than onto the visitor route, and it costs nothing.

• Before 8 p.m. — Too early; the kitchens in these districts are not yet serving their own neighborhood.
• Around 9 p.m. — The local hour, inside the window the city reserves for residents at the park below.
• In October — Choose a room, not a terrace; the month's rain arrives in bursts heavy enough to end an outdoor meal.

These districts are genuinely uphill, and the gradient that keeps them quiet also makes them hard walking after dark — the metro does not serve all of them well. Many smaller neighborhood restaurants close one or two days a week and for stretches in August, and they do not always advertise it in a language a visitor reads. The State Department asks travelers in Spain to exercise increased caution over terrorism and civil unrest; in Barcelona that most often shows up as transport disruption, which matters more when you are a hillside away from where you are staying.

The food-and-drink question in this chapter covers which Catalan dishes and drinks to order once you have found the right room.