Esqueixada is a Catalan summer salad: salt-cod, hand-shredded raw, with tomato, sweet onion, black olives, dressed with olive oil and a splash of red wine vinegar.

Esqueixada (Catalan for 'torn') belongs to the wider Mediterranean cooking-without-fire summer tradition: the salt-cod is desalted in cold water for 24 hours, then shredded by hand rather than knifed. The dish belongs to the inland Catalan kitchens where salt-preserved bacallà was the working-class fish; Barcelona refined it into a sit-down summer starter by the 1900s. The canonical version layers shredded cod over halved cherry tomatoes, ribbons of sweet white onion, oil-cured black olives, and a few drops of olive oil and Pedro Ximenez vinegar. Casa Amalia and Can Vilaro both run the textbook plate; modern Catalan rooms like Mont Bar plate it with heirloom tomatoes.

3 editor picks for Esqueixada in Barcelona, ranked by editorial score. All Barcelona signature dishes · Esqueixada across every city.