Barcelona, by way of Gràcia

Gràcia was a separate town until 1897, when Barcelona annexed it, and it has never entirely agreed to the arrangement. Its streets run at angles the grid below would not permit, and the whole quarter is organised around its squares, each with its own temperament and its own hour. We took a flat in the middle of it, on Carrer de l'Or, a street whose name means gold and whose reality is laundry strung between balconies and a neighbour who sang while he watered his plants. You can stay near the things that bring you to a city, or you can stay somewhere that is a reason of its own. Gràcia is a reason of its own.

The one we kept coming back to was Plaça de la Virreina, a square with a church at one end and plane trees doing the work overhead, and the right place on it for a late tapa when the evening had gone soft and slow. Anchoas laid out without ceremony, the good kind, brown and salt-cured, that make the supermarket version taste like an apology. A cold beer. The square filling and emptying at its own pace, families early, everyone else later. You learn a neighbourhood by its squares, you end up with a favourite, and you defend it.

But the real reason we were in Gràcia at all was two streets from the flat, on Carrer de Tordera, and it was open in the morning. Cal Boter is a family restaurant, a Restaurant de Gràcia in the full old sense, and its walls are a lifetime's accumulation: framed festa posters going back decades, a painting of the whole neighbourhood sat down at one enormous table, a wall of postcards sent home from everywhere, a lottery ticket blown up to the size of a door. I had come to Barcelona, if I am honest, at least partly to have breakfast here.

What Cal Boter does in the morning is the esmorzar de forquilla, the fork breakfast, and it is worth being clear about what that is, because it is not brunch and the Catalans would thank you not to confuse the two. It is a nineteenth-century idea, born of the farmers and market porters and dock hands who had started before dawn and needed, by the middle of the morning, a real meal and not a pastry: hot, cooked, eaten with a knife and fork, and taken, traditionally, with a glass of red or a beer while the rest of the world was still on its first coffee. It has come back into fashion lately as the city's own answer to the international brunch that has turned up everywhere else, and there is a gentle patriotism to it now. One Barcelona food writer called it the best defence traditional Catalan cooking has.

We were the first in, the place opening at nine or so more or less for us, and what arrived was lunch. Botifarra de cap, the Catalan sausage made from the head, coarse and dark and serious about itself. Cua de bou, oxtail, coming away from the bone the way it does after long hours low and slow. A truita de bacallà, the salt-cod omelette, thick and set and unshowy. Bread rubbed with tomato to begin. The wine and the vermouth that are supposed to go with all this we let pass, the hour being what it was, which was about the only concession to the clock we made all trip. Oxtail at nine in the morning, and nobody at the next table thinking it strange, because there was no next table yet.

We saw far less of Gràcia than it deserves; the days filled the way days fill, and the quarter kept most of itself back for another time. That is the kind of thing you say about a place you already know you are coming back to, and I am. For the squares and the odd angles and the town that never quite joined. But mostly, if I am honest, for a breakfast two streets from the door that I would fly back for on its own.