Here we are in the Bishop’s Belly, La Panxa del Bisbe, which is not the midsection of a Catalan priest, but both a restaurant and a mountain. The latter is one of the peaks of the sacred Catalan mountain of Montserrat, so-called because its shape evokes a small head over a rotund, pronounced belly. It’s frequented by numerous mountain lovers, like Xavi Codina, chef and owner of a restaurant that he named in honor of the peak. The restaurant La Panxa del Bisbe sits not in Montserrat, but in upper Gràcia, in Barcelona, very close to Codina’s home.
Codina opened La Panxa in 2007 after cooking in other people’s restaurants, including his two main influences, which have since closed: Paula Casanovas’s Michelin one-star Las Petxinas and Paco Guzmán’s “gastro-tapas” restaurant Santa María.
In his own restaurant, Codina has created a menu of almost 30 tapas or platillos (small dishes) and four desserts, combining traditional Catalan cuisine with international influences that Codina has encountered in his life or in the neighborhood. All the tapas and platillos are fairly affordable, and groups have the option of putting together two possible menus with many tapas to share, at a price of €30 per person.
Much of the menu changes according to season and customers’ tastes, but there are a few perennial favorites, such as the homey croquettes, with their generous quantity of chicken and carrots; duck liver with pears and wine; and the cap i pota, a traditional dish made from pork trotters and head. Codina’s version of cap i pota varies all through the year. The current iteration is a surf-and-turf stew with a gently spicy touch of paprika in a substantial sauce, with bits of green pepper and celery and topped with tasty grilled squid. It’s robustly flavored and delicately textured.
La Panxa’s seafood specialties are some of our favorites. Codina respects the unique flavors of his ingredients, coaxing out a delightful intensity in each – especially for such wonderful specimens as the Galician clams. He cooks these with El Prat artichoke hearts and very delicate, almost creamy mongetes de Santa Pau and dresses the dish with a typical sauce from southern Catalonia, picada (“minced”), made with ground almonds and bread. The rockfish soup with clams and mussels is another highlight, a soul-comforting cuenquecillo, or “small bowl.” It’s not for sharing, but enough to have an individual good dose of broth made from rockfish and pieces of monkfish, with a couple of bread slices luxuriating within. (We wouldn’t want to share this anyway.)
When we’re more interested in meat, we might order picanya (the Argentinian beef chop) with potato threads and béarnaise sauce or the succulent lamb neck with potato and red pepper escalivado (meaning “roasted” or “baked”), served with a pensamiento (literally “thought” but also the word for pansy), a pastoral touch that harkens back to the restaurant’s mountain roots.
Codina continues to climb other culinary peaks. In the spring he’ll open a refurbished Panxulina, La Panxa’s little brother and located nearby, which will be dedicated to private dinners.
Published on February 26, 2015
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