It’s hard to tell what @ultramarinosmarin is at first glance. The nondescript storefront gives nothing away.

Their signage suggests that it could be a laundromat selling sea-friendly cleaning products. But inside this asador-style eatery in Barcelona, you’ll find a narrow room bisected by an open kitchen on the right, and on the left: a row of tables littered with the kind of metal cafeteria-style chairs you’d find in the sunken atriums of early 90’s American suburban malls.

By nightfall, comely-looking people show up and convince you that this is the right place to dine on a hot Friday, in June. You may find a menage of silver foxes with crisp white shirts, heads buried in platters of botifarra (country sausage) and clams, savoring prawn heads as though from a feeding tube; a solo diner on what seems to be a champagne and anchovy diet; and a sweet young couple bent over a carafe of cava, demolishing the remains of a whole scorpionfish. It’s a riot.

So is the kitchen, where cooks led by Borja Garcia(ex Extebrarri, Dos Pedbrots), the chef, are flipping meats, like clockwork, not minding the flames that dance in the air, nor the haze of smoke that’ll blur your view of the emerald-tiled backsplash, gruffly (and endearingly) plying guests with whatever emerges first from the plancha.

If you manage to flag down your server, order the baby squid before it runs out. Garcia takes fisherman-to-table seriously, which means that the squid that arrives on your table is likely the sweetest mollusk you’ll ever try. The chefs kiss it with heavy char, yet what lies within is clean with a briny undercurrent. It’s spectacular. So, too, are all the gambas — both red and white — the ceps, the vegetables, all presented simply in a shallow pool of its own juices. Yes, the food is purist, sometimes to a fault, but where else could you derive pleasure from toast crowned with a sundae’s worth of bottarga? The salt-cured tuna, pounded thin, suspended in olive oil, displayed like a taxidermist’s fantasy? The whole-roasted skate? They’re all glorious.

🙏 Meg and Chain for this gem of recommendation. Less