Where should I eat in Barcelona, and which local food or drink is worth trying?

Those four dates are the most reliable guide to how Barcelona eats that any official timetable publishes. Christmas Day, Sant Esteve on 26 December, New Year's Day and Epiphany on 6 January are family meal days first and visitor days a distant second, and a monument cutting to a half day is the visible edge of that. Plan a restaurant meal on any of the four and you are competing with the entire city for a much smaller number of open kitchens.

Catalan cooking is not Spanish cooking with a different accent. It is built on bread rubbed with tomato and oil, on salt cod and escarole, on the stewed-and-grilled combinations that come out of a farming region with a coastline, and on sparkling wine from the hills inland rather than from anywhere near the city. The word to look for on a menu is català rather than español, and the distinction is taken seriously enough that it will shape how a kitchen talks to you.

Season matters because Barcelona's weather is unusually top-heavy. AEMET's normals for the Barcelona Aeropuerto station, measured over 1981 to 2010, give August a mean daily maximum of 83.3°F (28.5°C) — the highest of any month — and put the rainfall peak in October at 3.58 inches (91 mm). August is when the city eats outdoors late because indoors is unpleasant before 9 p.m.; October is when terraces become a gamble and the interior rooms fill.

Barcelona reserves parts of its own public space for residents at mealtime hours. Park Güell's regulations hold the 7 a.m.–9:30 a.m. and 6 p.m.–10 p.m. windows for local residents, and six neighborhoods — La Salut, Vallcarca i els Penitents, El Coll, Can Baró, Baix Guinardó and El Carmel — can apply for free access cards. Those are also the hours and the districts where neighborhood restaurants are serving their own clientele rather than a visiting one, and the overlap is not a coincidence.

• Lunch — The long midday meal is the serious one in Catalonia, and the better value; a kitchen that offers a set lunch is showing you what it actually cooks.
• Early evening — Too early for dinner, right for a glass of the inland sparkling wine and something small standing up.
• After 9 p.m. — Dinner proper, and in August the first hour that an outdoor table is comfortable.

The holiday half-days are the hard constraint: on 25 and 26 December and on 1 and 6 January the city's rhythm is domestic and much of it is shut. Spain's State Department advisory asks for increased caution over terrorism and civil unrest, and the busiest eating streets are also the busiest pickpocketing ground in the city. In October, an outdoor booking is the one that gets ruined, because the month's whole rainfall total arrives in a handful of episodes rather than spread evenly.

The companion question in this chapter on finding a local-style dinner away from crowded tourist streets takes the neighborhood end of this further.