Vegetarian and vegan dining in Barcelona has come a long way since the days when the only options were a seitan stew and a bowl of suspicious lentils. There are now a dozen places where the cooking is good enough that even a committed carnivore would not miss the meat. Here is the resident's list.

The properly set-up restaurants

Teresa Carles on Carrer de Jovellanos, just off Plaça de Catalunya, is the long-running vegetarian fine-ish-dining place. The room is large and feels like a proper restaurant rather than a wellness café. The wine list is generous, the cooking is precise, and they take reservations. Per-head spend around €30 to €45 for two courses with wine.

Flax & Kale is the bigger, more health-focused sister operation. The flagship on Carrer dels Tallers has generous tables, a mostly plant-based menu that runs from kale Caesar to vegan pizza, and a juice and cocktail bar that pulls double duty for an aperitivo. Worth knowing before you book: it is flexitarian rather than vegetarian, so there is salmon, tuna and corvina on the menu alongside the vegan dishes. Reservable, slightly pricier than Teresa Carles for marginally less ambitious cooking, and a good pick for a proper sit-down meal or a group.

Aguaribay is the smaller, more intimate vegetarian bistro, over in Poblenou on Carrer del Taulat. Closer-to-home cooking, and a good answer for anyone who finds Flax & Kale a bit corporate. One thing to check before you plan around it: Aguaribay serves lunch only, roughly 13:00 to 16:00, and does not open in the evening. The wine list leans natural; the chef changes the menu seasonally.

The Born and Raval picks

Veggie Garden on Carrer dels Àngels in Raval is the cheap-and-good Indian-leaning vegetarian place. Cash-friendly, casual, but the food is genuinely well-cooked and the lassi is excellent. Per head €15 to €20. Not the white-tablecloth option; the "we will have a thali and walk to a cocktail bar" option.

CatBar is the small bar-restaurant doing vegan burgers and craft beer. A genuinely good burger, a tap list that takes itself seriously, the kind of room where you can talk. Good for a casual meal, less so for a special occasion.

Hummus Barcelona is the Levantine option: hummus done several ways, sabich, mezze, falafel. It is fully vegetarian, and it sits on Carrer de Valencia up in Eixample rather than down in the old city, so treat it as a separate trip rather than part of the same crawl. A mezze table for two adds up to about €25 to €35 and is a good warm-room dinner. Service is generous, the bread is fresh, and the room handles a group dinner just as well as a table for two.

The cuisine-specific options

For something other than the standard Mediterranean-veg trope, two places worth knowing.

SWAD is the Poblenou Indian restaurant with a deep vegetarian half to the menu: paneer tikka, aloo tikki, palak patta chaat, samosas. It is not a vegetarian restaurant, there is chicken and mutton on the menu, but the vegetarian cooking is the reason to go. The room is functional rather than fancy, but the food is the point and the price is gentle.

TAiTU is the Ethiopian restaurant with vegetable-set menus served on injera (the spongy flatbread used as both plate and utensil). You eat with your hands, sharing from one plate, which makes it a good pick for a group that wants to actually talk. About €25 to €35 a head with a bottle of Ethiopian honey wine.

The Poblenou pair

The two names that come up over and over in Poblenou-vegetarian threads.

Sopa is fully vegetarian, Poblenou-based on Carrer de Roc Boronat, and built around soups, salads and a midday set menu at €9.90. Genuinely good value, and the room is small enough to feel intimate and big enough to hear yourself across a table of four. One catch: it closes at 20:00 on weekdays and 17:00 at weekends, so plan it as a lunch or early-evening booking rather than a dinner one.

Little Fern is the New Zealand-run place on Carrer de Pere IV doing brunch and plant-leaning plates. Less fully-vegetarian than Sopa, more vegetarian-friendly. It is a brunch spot rather than a dinner one: the current listings have it closing at 16:00 every day, so there is no evening service.

What to order without thinking

A handful of things that almost always work at a vegetarian dinner here.

A starter of pa amb tomàquet with whatever the kitchen does well. Vegetarian or not, this is Barcelona; start with bread.

The vegetable of the week. Several of the kitchens above run a market-driven specials board; the answer to "what is good tonight" is the right thing to order.

A proper green salad, anchovy added back in if you are not strict vegetarian. The bitterness wakes the meal up.

One stew or curry per table. Lentil, chickpea, paneer: the kitchens above do these well and they are the dishes the chef is most likely proud of.

A natural wine. Catalonia has an excellent natural-wine scene and most of the vegetarian places above lean into it. Ask the floor staff what they are drinking; their pick is usually right.

A note on price

Vegetarian dinners in Barcelona are cheaper than the equivalent omnivore meal in town, especially if you skip the wine. A two-course dinner for two with a bottle of natural wine at the places above runs €60 to €90. Veggie Garden, CatBar, Sopa and Hummus & Co are noticeably cheaper. Teresa Carles and Flax & Kale are at the upper end.

Tipping is included in Spanish convention. Round up to the nearest euro, or leave some coins if you want to. Card payments universal at all of the above.

What most people miss

The best vegetarian meal of your week is often the menú del dia at a non-vegetarian Catalan restaurant.

The lunch menus across the city almost always include a vegetarian first and main, the cooking is properly Catalan, and the price is €13 to €18. For a casual lunch this often beats the dedicated vegetarian list above. For a proper sit-down dinner, though, book one of the rooms named here. The atmosphere, the wine, the kitchen that knows what it is doing: that is where the money goes.

For the cocktail-bar move afterwards, see the related cocktails guide. Two Schmucks, on Carrer de Joaquin Costa, is about five minutes on foot from Teresa Carles and Flax & Kale. Solange is further out, on Carrer d'Aribau up in Eixample, so budget nearer 20 minutes on foot or a short taxi. The dinner-plus-cocktails crawl is a Barcelona classic for a reason.

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