So I've sat here for the last 45 minutes and this entry has remained empty, so that can't be a good sign for my ability to write Barcelona-related content from 5000 miles away (or whatever the distance is).
A quick Albany update: it's raining outside. End of update.
My plan for now, until my life moves ahead to the next adventure, is to continue writing about Barcelona even from my remote location. To do that, I'm going to organize the blog, mostly for my own purposes, so I'm motivated to keep writing.
This week, I'll write up each day at least one restaurant that I'd recommend and then I'll rehash one that I'd suggest people skip.
Today, we'll start with my favorite, and least-favorite restaurant in Born, around the Catedral de Santa Maria del Mar. There's a huge cluster of restaurant in this area and since it was only about five minutes from my flat I frequented here. The area is usually full of tourists but unlike the Gothic Quarter, there's less places here that are just trying to rip you off-there are some genuinely nice places to eat, in addition to tourist traps (you only get the latter near where I lived).
The Best Full Service Tapas Restaurant
Casa Delfin (Passeig del Born 36)-this was ironically the first place I ate in Barcelona, completely by accident, but it wound up being my favorite. It's not cheap, but it's also not overly expensive compared to other restaurants and the portions are decent. Although it's slightly touristy (open all day-they don't have "Barcelona" hours), what sets this restaurant apart for me is that the staple dishes, like tapas, are more creative than other places.
One of the "problems" with restaurants is that, in many places, the tapas were interchangeable, meaning patatas bravas in one place was exactly equivalent to the patatas bravas somewhere else. This was true for a lot of meals I had: fried artichokes, bread, padron peppers, chorizo, calamari, fried minnows, etc, if you were blindfolded, you wouldn't know where you were. This isn't necessarily a problem, especially if you like tapas as I do (did-sigh), but unless you are particular about atmosphere then it becomes very redundant, which leads to choosing restaurants based on tedious decisions like whether or not the bread is 1 Euro or 1.50.
Anyway, back to Casa Delfin; the presentation of their tapas was above many of the other places. They make their own bravas sauce, always a plus for me (some places use store-brand sauce, or worse, just squirt mayo and ketchup), and they seemed to add nice touches to the others. For example, their chorizo was served in a sweet wine reduction sauce, and I believe they came with salad and/or padron peppers on the side too.
In particular, I was partial to the monkfish stew. Actually, my love for this restaurant had a lot to do with the monkfish stew. It's in a tomato peppercorn sauce. It's good.
One to Skip:
Cheese Me Restaurant- the anglicized title of this restaurant should have been something of a dead giveaway, but nevertheless, this place shows up in numerous guide books and online listings. It also had appeal because it's not a tapas restaurant, instead it's supposed to have a more "fusion", international cuisine appeal; as the name suggests, it specializes in cheeses, and so the menu items theoretically offer creative variations of cheesy dishes.
When I ate there, much of the food was actually quite good. I had some kind of carbonera with pasta pillows filled with sweet potato, or something along those lines. The cheesecake was fairly good as well, not spectacular but memorable enough. So the food isn't the issue.
The problem here is it's just a money pit. The portions were too small for the prices they were pushing, and although eating small portions is good for the diet, Cheese Me isn't advocating a healthy lifestyle, they're just ripping you off. I don't want to say how much I spent on a glass of wine, but I will say they filled the glass only about a quarter, like in a feaux-snooty restaurant. Don't ask me me why I didn't complain, I felt kind of cheated but I'm sure they do that at least for all the tourists/non-locals, my sense of righteous indignation isn't peaked to the point of direct action, but I knew after that, my first and last meal at Cheese Me were going to be one and the same.
Places like Cheese Me in some sense count on people (tourists) not knowing any better than to think that they are getting a good price. But the reality is that there are plenty of places that are somewhat more expensive but don't try to cheat the customer. I suppose the difference is that between a place like Cheese Me and Casa Delfin is that one place counts on the ignorance of tourists while the other counts on the expectation that people will spend more money on a nice meal in Barcelona. Not that there aren't places where you can get a nice meal AND not spend a lot of money, but in Barcelona, those places are often harder to find and require taking some risks. Which is fine too. But this has already diverted into something different than what I wanted.
Summary:
Treat yourself occasionally at Casa Delfin if you are in the Born area.
Take the Americans (or English-speakers) you don't like to Cheese Me and they won't understand the joke.
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