6 MAY 1995, Page 58

THOSE of us in England who don't auto- matically distrust

foreign food, suspecting it to be cooked with too much garlic, too much oil and not enough respect for basic rules of hygiene, tend to veer quite as dramatically in the opposite direction. This is the lot for whom a Mediterranean kitchen is proof of a distinguished provenance: a guarantee of good cooking every time. I admit that I, too, can sway in that direction, but possibly only where Italy is concerned (with the exception of Venice where the chances of coming across good cooking are remote. At a later date I will tell you how I think you might best avoid the worst kitchens).

At least you will never hear me utter the idiotic words that 'it is impossible to eat badly in France'. It is utterly possible, and indeed ever more probable. The decline in cooking in France, not in the grand, much- Michelin-starred restaurants, but in those once reliable, little, family-run places is quite staggering. About Spain, I am guard- ed. I have never quite been bowled over gastronomically, but then it is a country in which I am very ill-travelled. I went to Barcelona expecting to eat well, but not daring to hope for culinary seduction. I'd say my expectations were met.

Except in tourist guides, there is no such thing as 'the best restaurant' in any city. Still, it is a noble cause to go seeking. In Barcelona I didn't have to make the jour- ney blindfold: an old friend, and chef, who works there pointed me in all the right directions. Leopoldo is tucked away behind Ramblas, off the left near the top, in what is thought by taxi-drivers, at least, to be a shady area. You might find it difficult to get a cab, though it's not worth getting wor- ried about — it really isn't bad. The room is heavy, gleaming wood (even the large fridge is clad in it) and swirlingly coloured tiles. It's the real thing, unpretentiously Spanish or, rather, Catalan, quite a differ- ence. Here, we started with the most basic and most delicious of all Catalan dishes pa amb tomaquet, sometimes called pa amb ol6 — which is, to draw a comparison with what's now a staple on Anglo-Italian menus, rather like bruschetta. Thick slices of bread are rubbed with garlic, smeared with tomato and soused with olive oil. In most Catalan places this will be given to you without your even having to ask. With this we had cogollos de lechuga con jamOn, tight buds of that vivid leaf-green lettuce called (too twee) little gem over here, with ham, a deep, puce pink, intensely salty, intensely sweet. A plate of albondigas con sepia y gambas was not a great success. I thought cuttlefish and prawns would be ground up with the forcemeat of the meat- balls, but they appeared instead swimming in a rather gloopy, undistinguished gravy.

While we were still eating these, but before we'd quite graduated to the main courses (there were four of us eating, so it was not as incontinent as it might appear), we got through a celestial plate of almejas al jerez, like moules mariniere, only for mussels think clams, and for the wine sub- stitute sherry. Magnificent. A plate of fried little fish, fritura de pescaditos, consisting of whitebait, sardines, squid and the fish that the Spaniards and the Canadians are squabbling over, could have been handed straight over to some presiding body and admitted as evidence for Canada.

My main course of chipirones salteados, a well-lubricated dish of sautded whole, minute baby squid was deeply compelling. The squid are cooked in their entirety, their innards infusing the dish with a livery, gamy `Sound the all-clear when it's over ' highness. A sea bream for two was bouncily white and fresh, but would have been much better without the unheralded prawns on top. End with crema catalana if you've got room, or some fresitas, spiky little wild strawberries, with some moscatel from Sit- ges, nearby, thrown over them. We had some truly splendid vifia Alberdi Rioja, like ruby velvet. This dinner wasn't cheap. Rather like La Corte Sconta in Venice, Casa Leopoldo only looks workmanlike: even with the peseta as low as it is at the moment, our dinner for four came to around £150.

If you so much as mention Los Cara- coles, everyone will sneer at you, I'm sure. This old restaurant behind the Placa Real is said to be, by those who desire more than anything else to be considered chic, sophis- ticated travellers, just too touristy. In a way it is a tourist restaurant, but it is a good restaurant, too. And it looks rather marvel- lous in an almost clichdd Spanish way. The Spaniards don't like it because they have that peasant thing of hating to eat the food they ate back in the kitchen at home.

Their idea of a good restaurant is some- where which serves nouvelle cuisineish stuff in Californian-style sparse surroundings with fancy light fittings. Paella at Los Cara- coles is wonderful (well, since Valencia, where paella comes from, was once part of Catalyuna, it almost counts) and the spit- roasted chicken is good, too.

If what you really want is a plain, almost undecorated place, a room in which people who work nearby just come to eat, then you should go to El Caballo Blanco (or it might be El Caballito Blanco) in the Calle Mal- lorca, in the Eixample. The esqueixada de bacalau was something I'd anyway been looking forward to in Barcelona: salt cod, soaked and soaked, and drained and drained, then marinaded in olive oil and vinegar, with parsley, chopped tomato, red onion and olives. Try here, as well, the pul- pitas en su tinta, a pungent dish of squid, black with its own ink. Other dishes were OK. To drink: a bottle of local Catalan white, Vifia Sol, grassy and fresh.

But I think that really the best food I had wasn't in a restaurant at all, but in a tapas bar. Cal Pep isn't even one of those beautiful old tapas bars with pendant hams and fat- studded, carmine-coloured chorizos gleam- ing out of Murillo-tinted rooms. But the food here is out of this world: jaman iberico, nava- jas — those sweet, fat-fleshed razor clams pinto beans with bacon, deep-fried little pep- pers, pimientos de padrOn and chanquete, whitebait as fine as string, lying in a whis- pery-crisp sandy tangle on the plate. And of course that soft, aromatic, evocative, tomato- doused, garlicky bread.

Casa Leopoldo, San Rafael 24; tel: 00 34 3 441 30 14. Los Caracoles, c/Escudellers 14; tel.. 00 34 3 302 31 85. El Caballo Blanco, c/Mallorca Cal Pep, somewhere in the Barceloneta.

Nigella Lawson