"Welcome to Clos de Ca Gras. I invite you to a calçotada and I'll make the sauce for you," she tells us. It's Pilar Dolç, a surname—what sonorous surnames, Catalans!—that seems to have predestined her in the kitchen. She's the daughter of farmers and now, at seventy-eight, she's still going strong.

Arnau Pérez de Tudela Guasch is from Valls and runs a communications agency in Altafulla. A few years ago, Gerard Cañellas Prades, from Riera de Gaià, joined the agency. They both always said they had to do something to bring together everything in the world of calçots (where to make them, where to buy them, where to find the sauce...) and one day they had a lightbulb moment. Inspired by the hit app where people noted where to make hearty breakfastsThe CalçotApp has arrived.

On paper, it's just a type of spring onion, rather mild and without much mystery. As the calçot grows, the farmer piles more soil on top of it (that is, he mulches it), tricking it into stretching and stretching until it reaches the right size. Finally, he harvests it, and it's ready for the fire. But these unspoiled vegetables have given rise to calçotadas, almost unique gastronomic and social celebrations that continue to grow in popularity. Throughout Catalonia, and especially in the Camp de Tarragona region, between the calçotadas organized by families, the ones at the local barn, the football team, coworkers, and lifelong friends, two can easily happen in a single weekend. From January until well into April, there's no respite.

Waiting for the city of Valls to organize as every year The great calçotada festival, which this year will be on Sunday, January 26, in which participants break records for eating calçots per minute, we recommend some of the places where you can go to eat with the sole aim of having a good time. There is probably no other meal that unites friends and family more in a delicacy in which it is necessary to look up to the sky, as the late director Bigas Luna said: "The calçot, the porrón and the castellers come out of the earth and make me look up to the sky." And finally, eating is Enjoy good nutritional properties, because calçots provide fiber and they are beneficial because they feed the bacteria, especially those that should be more present in the colon: lactobacilli and bifidobacteria. Be that as it may, here is a suggestion for restaurants to sit down at while looking at the sky.

Every good Catalan needs to dedicate himself to an unavoidable activity during these dates: the calçotada. Every good Catalan, if he can, will teach his foreign friends this curious and unique way of eating bonsaied spring onions, unique, earthly and heavenly. Every good Catalan will have more than one calçotada. The one at work, the one with his football friends, the one with his walking group, the one with his parents at school... If he wants to be a good premium Catalan, he will be the one to organize it. A bad Catalan diverts the calçotada (just as he diverts the tió to hug Santa Claus).