The beaches have long been a draw to this region, but tourists are now finding exciting food and ambitious wines too.
		Where to eat around Tarragona
		Montsant Visit an up and coming wine region near Priorat

Every afternoon, fishing trawlers return from a long day on the Mediterranean Sea to their docks in Cambrils, a pretty harbor town 10 miles south of Tarragona on Spain's eastern coast. As they have for centuries, the fishermen unload the day's haul, then weigh the cod, bream, bass and squid for auction. The colorful hulls brighten the harbor, and fishing nets dry in the grass of a nearby park.

But times change, even in this remote corner of Spain. The old Cambrils auction house is a tapas bar now; today the bidding on fish is conducted by computer. There are still plenty of fishermen's bars near the water, but at Can Bosch, a Michelin-starred restaurant located a five-minute walk from the docks, owner and chef Joan Bosch prepares a sliver of octopus, fresh that day, with fava beans the color of a putting green. He serves it in an oversized spoon, to be eaten in a gulp, in a spare, modern dining room.

Can Bosch is not the only culinary innovator in the region. At Merlot, a restaurant in Tarragona's old quarter, a cream of prawn soup is accompanied by wafer-thin slices of raw kangaroo bathed in the intense local olive oil. Falset, half an hour's drive inland, bordering the emerging wine regions of Priorat and Montsant is home to El Cairat, where chef Juli Mestre conjures up a quail-and-potato dish devised as a gastronomic representation of the Comb of the Winds, a sculpture by Basque artist Eduardo Chillida that sits in San Sebastian harbor in Basque country.

Tarragona is an old Roman provincial capital that sits in the shadow of Barcelona, an hour's drive up the coast. The invention of romesco sauce, typically a blend of garlic, almonds, olive oil and indigenous peppers, is its most notable claim, culinary or otherwise. Yet suddenly, the province is becoming a destination for enlightened gourmands. Because its fame has only just started to spread, the region's best dining rooms are frequented mostly by locals, joined by a few sun-and-sand tourists astonished at what they've stumbled upon.

To be sure, many food pilgrims still head up the Costa Dorada to Barcelona and the towns around it for outlandishly imaginative lunches at Michelin-starred gastronomic laboratories such as El Bulli in Rosas. That rush started in the early 1990s, and in today's world, word travels at Internet speed.

"A few years ago, you started to see it trickle down," says William Devin, an American who married a Spaniard and is the export manager for an olive oil cooperative near Tarragona. "The raw materials have always been here, but now the chefs of Tarragona are doing something exciting with them. I think of it as a painter with a clean canvas and a full palette of colors. He can choose to do a simple, elegant portrait, or abstract impressionism."

Food is only one reason to visit Tarragona. The beaches are another, and if you stroll through coastal towns such as Salou from spring through late summer, you're more likely to encounter a sunburned Englishman in flip-flops than one of the Catalan farmers or seafarers who have inhabited this region for centuries.

Tourism is a staple of the local economy, and serene village streets up and down the coast are interspersed with clusters of white and pink hotels with names like Villa Mar and Casa del Sol. It isn't as ugly as tourism sometimes gets, but it's hardly picturesque. You can buy the International Herald-Tribune, the London papers and enough souvenir T-shirts to outfit an entire youth-soccer program. But just when it seems you're closer to Brighton than Barcelona, a slant of light against a tile roof evokes the Mediterranean, a gull glides slowly overhead, and Spain is again at hand.

A few miles inland, the hills rise abruptly. The topography, the sea breezes that abate the summer heat and the crushed-slate llicorella soil combine to make this an ideal region for growing grapes. As it happens, the surge in Tarragona's cuisine has accompanied a revolution in the local wines, which makes sense. There is hardly a great wine region in the world that doesn't serve exciting food.

Most of the few tourists who make the drive on the newly built highway from Tarragona to Falset are looking for the area's emerging wineries. Yet some of the most inventive restaurants in Tarragona are well off the beaten path, in towns whose appearance suggests you'd have trouble finding a decent cut of meat, much less foie gras paired with mullet.

Mario Ribal, 55, is the fourth-generation owner of La Grava, which used to be a restaurant and bar for factory workers, in the nondescript, blue-collar town of El Morell. When Ribal traveled to El Bulli for a meal several years back, he experienced a revelation.

"We used to have traditional cooking here, cooking of the grandmother," Ribal says. Now his 26-year-old son, Gerson, a culinary school graduate, is making sirloin tacos with macadamia nuts and asparagus, or perhaps a play on the traditional Catalan surf-and-turf dish of mar i muntanya using rabbit and lobster. The vast wine list covers the Priorat and Montsant appellations, and includes selections from Rioja, Ribera del Duero, obscure Spanish appellations and beyond.

"The concept changed," Ribal says. "The idea of simply serving a good meal on a plate disappeared. Now it's the chef doing something new." He shows off his menu of Spanish olive oils, culled from six different appellations. "Why can't we have world-class cooking, even right here in El Morell?"

To be sure, many chefs are still making the traditional Catalan cuisine of the sea, grilling fish with olive oil and herbs. The best of those is Joan Pedrell Font, 59, whose Michelin-starred restaurant, Joan Gatell, fronts the Cambrils harbor.

There isn't a single meat or poultry dish on Pedrell's menu, only seafood and fish. He uses tiny baby eels, squid and octopus, even the succulent dátiles del mar that actually live inside rocks on the floor of the sea and taste like a swim in the ocean. He roams his dining room, suggesting a fragrant white wine here and a small-batch Rioja there as suitable matches for his delicate food. "I work very seriously," he says. "The product I get is always perfect, and I have to do my part."

Other chefs take the raw material much further. As mentioned above, Mestre enjoys constructing elaborate visual puns with his take on simple peasant dishes. When Clos Mogador's René Barbier arrived in the province from France in the late 1980s, representing the advance guard of what would become a vinicultural movement in Priorat, Mestre's El Cairat was literally a cafeteria. It slowly started to evolve into something more as Mestre read cookbooks and experimented.

Today, you can still order up a simple piece of fish there, or just stop by for coffee, but if you put yourself in Mestre's hands, you're in for an El Bulli—type experience. Out comes chocolate pasta; trompe l'oeil appetizers such as savory strawberry soup in a parfait glass topped with Asturian cheese imitating whipped cream; main courses shaped like sculptures. Why not? Like the chefs at El Bulli, El Racó de Can Fabes and L'Esguard, autodidacts all, Mestre doesn't realize he's breaking the rules.

Because it's the best restaurant for miles around, tiny El Cairat -- just one room and a small balcony above -- has come to serve as a sort of clubhouse for local winemakers. They entertain outsiders there, fete each other, wander in when they have nowhere to be. Mestre stocks their wines, so the drinking is invariably good.

On a given night, Mestre might pause in the midst of his labors, look around the room and shake his head. There sit the makers of L'Ermita, Clos Erasmus and others, some of the most impressive wines in the world, eating food unlike anything that existed in Tarragona or beyond until a short time ago. It has all happened so fast, and the outside world is only just starting to take note.