Mercat de Sant Antoni

Although we stayed within a 15 minute walk of Mercat de la Boqueria, we discovered we were actually staying a stone's throw away from Mercat de Sant Antoni, a much more local, but no less amazing food market near Sant Antoni metro station. As well as being close, there were none of the annoying photographers as in Boqueria who just snap and don't buy anything and hence annoy all the shopkeepers.

I really started thinking about buying a holiday home in Sant Antoni whilst walking around this market - how amazing would it be to have it as your local! The shopkeepers were absolutely adorable here. Most don't speak a word of English, and my Spanish is atrocious, yet you can tell they really respect their food, as well as knowing tons about it. They take so much care with each customer, it's simply a pleasure to shop here. For example, I asked to buy some avocados at one stall, and the woman refused to sell it to me because she said they were passed their best - you'd never get that in London.

Again, it was the variety of seafood that really caught our eye. Just look at the variety of stuff you can get - so many different types of prawns, huge hunks of tuna, dover sole, 白飯魚...:

Gorgeous looking red mullet:

So many types of clams, we were confused at what to buy. We ended up with some Berberecho (middle left hand bucket) in the end. The attention the woman paid to them was amazing - she repeatedly tapped them to seek out the empty ones, and threw any away that she wasn't happy with. We ended up putting them into a hotpot, the soup was impossibly sweet.

Even more exciting (how can you get more excited Connie?!) was the discovery of 賴尿蝦, mantis shrimp which is affectionately known as 'pissing themselves prawns' in Cantonese:

These are an absolute childhood favourite, I have such fond memories of gnawing at their impossibly sweet meat. However, they have become quite rare even in Hong Kong, especially the small native ones that we used to eat. You can still get mahoosive ones that are normally fried with garlic in the big seafood centres in Hong Kong, but they are just not the same.

But the ones in Barcelona were more like what I have in my memories. They are a complete bugger to get into - very sharp shells with lots of little hooks to get into your fingers - but they are so worth the effort. We very quickly boiled them, and they retain all their gorgeously sweet flavour. Such a shame we only ate these once.

The most disappointing though were the crayfish which we experimented with:

They look fab, don't they, but their meat was very disappointing - soft and withered. We wondered whether they had died in transit, and had started emitting enzymes which met their deterioriated really quickly.

A note on these markets though, and probably a note on Spanish shopping in general. These places stayed open really late during the weekend, until about 8pm, but there is the siesta time, anything from 12 to 4pm, when nothing is opened. Markets do not open on Sundays, and even on Mondays, they are very quiet, with the seafood sections completely dead. I suspect it is because everyone's too busy at church to go and fish on Sundays - we'll know that we should make it a weekday visit next time.