Can Culleteres is Barcelona’s oldest restaurant, opened in 1786. Its interior reflects this age via faded murals, bright Portuguese-style tiles, and signed portraits of famous guests. Yet ask a native of Barcelona about the restaurant, and it’s likely he or she will conjure up a pasta dish.
Trade with Italy and later an influx of Italian laborers meant a longstanding culinary exchange between Catalonia and Italy. One of the most iconic examples of this is canelons, a Catalan take on cannelloni, and a beloved Christmas dish in the region, typically made with leftover meats.
Today, the dish is arguably the most iconic menu item at Can Culleteres, and it takes the form of long pasta tubes stuffed with a savory mix of veal and pork, buried in a béchamel that’s been seasoned with a generous hit of nutmeg, and topped with pleasantly charred Emmental cheese. First served at the restaurant in the 1950s, the pasta dish is now its best seller, with as many as 300 sold on a Sunday.
The restaurant is also known for another iconic Christmastime pasta dish: escudella: Served on Christmas day, the soup starts with a ham bone broth that’s supplemented with snail-shaped pasta known as galets, four different types of meat—perhaps chunks of veal and/or finely chopped minced butifarra sausage—and garbanzo beans, carrots, potatoes, and cabbage.
Other traditional dishes sold at Can Culleteres include emblematically Catalan combinations of fruit and meat such as ànec guisat amb prunes, duck braised with prunes, and mel i mató, local cottage cheese drizzled with honey and topped with walnuts.
