Friday night we were wandering around the University area of Barcelona, and came across a little restaurant with some nice looking outside tables. It was still early, only 9pm (that is early for dinner in Spain!) Now here we ignored one of what is normally our cardinal rules, we were going to eat in a restaurant that advertised it had an English menu.
But we hadn't had much for lunch at the beach that day so were famished. We elected to eat inside as there were a few smokers outside....and this is where our trouble starts.
Inside we order a nice bottle of Albariño, Hussy went for a start of beef carpacio, and I went for the calamari. They placed starter plates out for us to share...they were dirty. They we noticed strange red floaters in our white wine. OK.
His beef was covered in so much Parmesan you could not tell what the meat looked like, the condiments container have a couple of millimetres of dust bunnies in the bottom of it so we ignored using them. My calamari came out about 10 mins later - swimming. No, it wasn't still alive, it was swimming in oil as they had obviously not gotten the fryer hot enough before cooking the dish, so it had absorbed the equivalent of the Mediterranean Sea that was leaking out through the paper doilies conveniently hiding another dirty plate.
By this stage we were getting worried, and queasy. Five minutes later our mains came out....Hussybands' was first - hake in a basque specialty sauce. The fish was grey. The sauce was grey. The potatoes were grey. The white asparagus that is not even in season was grey. The clams were grey and more withered than a nuns clitoris. Winter days in London are less grey than this dish was...and Hussybands' face was quickly turning puce to match.
The thought of food by then was making us ill, so we did the only thing we could do at this stage....we went and consumed our calories for the night via alcohol.
Where not to eat in Barcelona:
Restaurant Marcos
Carrer Disputacio 172, E-08011 Barcelona
