Prieto Empanadas | Barcelona

If you’re looking for the Barcelona of the postcards—the one with the gauzy sunlight hitting the Gothic spires and the twenty-euro gin and tonics—you’ve taken the wrong turn. To get to Prieto Empanadas, you have to commit. You get on the L4 metro and ride it north, past the point where the English menus disappear and the tourists start looking nervous. You get off at Via Júlia, in the heart of Nou Barris, a neighborhood that doesn’t give a damn about your vacation photos. This is where the city’s backbone lives, and this is where you find the real stuff.

Prieto Empanadas is a storefront that looks like a thousand other storefronts in the working-class suburbs of Europe. It’s bright, it’s functional, and the air smells like hot oil and rendered pork fat. It’s an Ecuadorian stronghold in a Catalan world. They call it an 'American restaurant' on some maps, but that’s a lie of omission. This is Latin American soul food, specifically the kind that sustains you through a long shift or cures a hangover that felt like a terminal illness.

The star of the show, the reason you made the trek, is the empanada de viento. It’s a massive, air-filled pocket of dough, fried until it’s a golden, blistered landscape. Inside, there’s a modest, salty payload of melted cheese. But the kicker—the thing that makes it—is the dusting of granulated sugar on top. It’s a weird, beautiful contradiction of salt, grease, and sweet that hits your brain’s reward center like a freight train. You eat it with your hands, the sugar sticking to your fingers, the steam burning your tongue, and suddenly the forty-minute metro ride feels like a bargain.

Then there’s the chicharrón. We’re talking about serious, unapologetic chunks of pork belly, fried until the skin shatters like glass and the fat underneath turns into something approaching a religious experience. It’s served with the kind of heft that demands respect. If you’re feeling particularly brave, or just particularly hungry, you go for the fritada—braised and fried pork that’s been cooked down until it’s concentrated essence of pig. It’s heavy, it’s honest, and it’s exactly what food should be when nobody is trying to impress a food critic.

Is it perfect? No. The service can be 'relaxed,' which is a polite way of saying you might be waiting a while if the delivery orders are piling up. The lighting is fluorescent and unforgiving. The 3.8-star rating reflects the reality of a neighborhood joint that doesn't have a PR firm smoothing over the rough edges. But that’s the point. You aren't here for the 'ambiance.' You’re here because you want to see a side of Barcelona that isn't for sale to the highest bidder. You’re here for the tres leches cake that’s so soaked in milk it’s practically a soup, and for the humitas that taste like someone’s grandmother spent the morning in the kitchen.

This is cheap eats Barcelona at its most visceral. It’s a place for the locals, for the Ecuadorian diaspora looking for a taste of home, and for the occasional wanderer who knows that the best meals are usually found at the end of the line. If you can’t handle a little grease on your chin or a waiter who doesn’t speak English, stay in the Eixample. But if you want the truth, head to Carrer d'Argullós. The empanadas are waiting.