On recent visits to Madrid, we’ve noticed that a new breed of food market has taken hold of the city’s attention. While the traditional kind with food stalls slowly disappears, vibrant, culture-focused gastromarkets are booming. In addition to great food, they offer a mix of businesses, along with cooking demos, live music, exhibitions – the list goes on. In 2009, the private society El Gastródomo de San Miguel refurbished a beautiful building that was built in 1916 and located very close to Plaza Mayor. It was opened as the “culinary space” Mercado de San Miguel. Though the initial inspiration was Barcelona’s La Boquería, San Miguel is utterly different, with its own colorful, unique personality. The market is dedicated not just to selling quality seasonal foods, but also to allowing visitors to enjoy them in situ, at tables and chairs distributed throughout common areas. They can choose from cod, fresh shellfish and other seafood, various vermuts, pickles and olives, paella, churros, Spanish wines, international beers, delicious Iberian ham and cured sausages and cheeses, ice cream and non-Spanish items, such as pasta or sushi. Unsurprisingly, the concept has been a hit, and other similarly styled markets have since popped up around the city.

In the latest installment of our recurring feature First Stop, we asked chef Massimiliano Alajmo where he heads first for food when he arrives in Barcelona. Alajmo is the chef of Le Calandre, in Padua, Italy, which received its third Michelin star in 2002, making Alajmo, at 28, the youngest chef to ever achieve that distinction.

Providing something simple, cheap and good to eat in Spain is easy – as long as there’s a proper fire exit and plumbing. Life is harder for street vendors and food trucks: Spanish law permits cooking and selling fresh (unpackaged) food in street stalls only during festivals or events or in markets run by an organization.

Ivan Rodríguez Vivancos is el tiet, Catalan for “the uncle,” a nickname given to him by the cooks who worked under him at renowned fine-dining restaurant La Terraza del Claris. Today, “El Tiet” is at the helm of his own restaurant, away from the stressful environment of alta cocina, in a place where he can also transport his customers away from the stress of daily urban living.

As a side benefit of his former life as a financial advisor, Xavier Maymo got to spend 20 years dining at some of Europe’s finest restaurants. When he would return home after his business trips, he would relax by recreating the dishes he had enjoyed at these restaurants in his own kitchen. His mother had taught him the basics of cooking when he was a kid, and his natural gifts and intuition allowed him to recall flavors and then to riff on them and invent new ideas. Over the years, Maymo also sought out many chefs in order to learn from them, and in the process he became friends with them.

In Catalonia around the summer solstice, we make one of our most traditional liqueurs, ratafía, for which the herbs, fruit and flowers that are macerated in alcohol must be collected on Saint John’s Eve, or June 23. This highly aromatic digestif has long been believed to have medicinal properties. There’s even an old Catalan rhyme along those lines: Ratafía, tres o cuatro al día (“Ratafía, three or four per day”). Different versions of the liqueur have been made for centuries in eastern Spain and some regions of France and Italy but, like the other herb liqueurs throughout Europe, they originated from the Ancient Roman and Greek custom of macerating fruit and herbs in wine, from Arabian perfume distillation and from the sophisticated medieval distillations in monasteries and convents that created the first aguardientes, or grape-based, medicinal liqueurs.

The favorite outdoor pastime of most Barcelonans is eating and drinking on a terrace. From the simplest bars to the most sophisticated, multi-starred alta cocina restaurants, something like half of our fair city’s eateries have space where diners can enjoy their meals a la fresca (and smoke a cigarette, too). Many of the best-known terraces sit on the rooftops of hotels, providing lovely tables and astonishing views that extend to the limits of the Mediterranean and menus that fill the pages of the latest Michelin guide.

In Barcelona, these are fortunate times we’re living in, gastronomically speaking. We’re blessed with a growing multitude of tapas bars whose humble appearances belie the excellent culinary chops behind them. Bar Resolís is one of these. The eatery is known mainly because of its location in the heart of Raval, the most multicultural neighborhood in Barcelona. It sits on a street lined with vintage clothing shops and is outfitted with a cute mini-terrace, a small open bar and windows that frame a wall full of colorful graffiti in the passageway adjacent. It’s the ideal laid-back setting for us to enjoy a vermut with our elbow on the sill while checking out the intriguing handbags in the shop window in front.

Editor’s note: In the latest installment of our recurring feature, First Stop, we asked Michael Costa, head chef at the award-winning restaurant Zaytinya, in Washington, D.C., where he heads first for food when he arrives in Barcelona. El Passadís del Pep is home to the best, most authentic Catalan seafood in the city. There is no menu but they curate the experience in such a warm, kind way that you may find that you prefer not to have to deal with a menu. The cooking is classic, minimal and serves only to enhance the natural beauty of the ingredients. No Egotarian Cuisine here, just excellent product treated with respect.

Dear Culinary Backstreets,My wife and I love to cook at home and for our friends, and we would love to learn more about Spanish cuisine on our next trip to Barcelona so that we can recreate our favorite meals when we return home. Where can we take English-language cooking classes in the city?

Editor’s note: We asked writer Anya von Bremzen where she heads first for food when she arrives in Barcelona. She is the winner of three James Beard awards, a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure and the author of five cookbooks, including the recently published Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing.Most Barcelona tapas haunts, old and new, pay homage to the bares de producto, the astounding ingredient-laden kioskos (dining stalls) of the buoyant Boquería market. It might be crowded and touristy but on my first morning in town, Boquería is still my Holy Grail. The best time to go? Around 10:30 a.m., when the stalls are less crowded between lunch and dinner. Right by its entrance, I stop to pay my respects to the legendary chickpea-and-butifarra sausage stew at Pinotxo. Its owner, the venerable Juanito Bayen, is now nearing 80 but looking dapper as ever in his satin vest and bow tie. Juanito is still a maestro of counter banter, spiking coffee with brandy for dour resident fishmongers, plying Japanese tourists with pristine razor clams, smiling for cameras next to Ferran Adrià.

The reach of globalization and industrial agriculture is such that you can find pretty much any kind of vegetable all year long at markets throughout Spain, but there are a still a few holdouts that arrive at very specific times of the year, and only for a fleeting moment. This is the produce we look out for, along with signs indicating the precise provenance. Artichokes from El Prat and the Ebro Delta are nearing the end of their all-too-brief visit, while the rare strawberries and wonderful peas of Maresme, on the coast of Barcelona province, have just begun appearing at market stalls. Others, such as the humble fava, arrive with less heralding but are no less welcome.

You are what you eat, as the saying goes. Is it any surprise, then, that food figures so largely in popular culture all over the world? In Spain, we have a veritable cornucopia of food-related expressions. Here’s a taste: Dar una torta, “to give a cake.” To slap someone. But darse una torta, “give a cake to yourself,” means you hit something else. It’s a mild, lighthearted expression, even with tortazo, which is a bigger biff, and comes from the funny old circus setup where a clown throws a cake into the face of another clown.

The perpetually packed Bar Mundial is one of Barcelona’s elder statesmen. It opened for business in Santa Caterina-El Born in 1914 under the name Bodega La Chispa, and was rechristened with its current name in 1925, when the Tort family took over. The place is now run by third-generation owner Paco Tort. The old bar has history, that’s for sure – even El Chispa ("Spark"), the bartender, is a 30-year veteran of the place. And what keeps people coming back to Bar Mundial are the delightful seafood tapas, classic and contemporary, that issue from the tiny kitchen.

In the weeks leading up to Easter, Barcelona looks like an extension of Willy Wonka’s factory-fun house: chocolate castles, houses, animals, cars, motorbikes and even cartoon characters and fútbol celebrities fashioned out of cacao populate the city’s traditional patisseries. Catalonian confectioners expect to sell some 600,000 chocolate sculptures decorated with yellow chicks, chocolate eggs and cakes studded with hard-boiled eggs and colored feathers this year. The last are known as monas, and godparents traditionally give these to their godchildren throughout Catalonia and other parts of Spain to mark the holiday.