A Crappy Paella To Add To My Crappy Day

Tonight, Paul decided we should try a paella restaurant recommended on Chowhound, an online food critiquing website.  The recommendations on this site had worked well for us in New York when we were searching for good, affordable food, so we were optimistic.  As you can see by the title of this blog post, I was NOT impressed….

We had met two guys from Seattle/Bellingham at the hostel and invited them to join us, and thank goodness they did!  The restaurant turned out to be quite far from the hostel and, with my new heightened sense of paranoia, I was really glad to have two other people walking through the dark quiet streets with us!

When we finally found the restaurant, I was dismayed to see that there was only two other groups of people eating there, but since we had walked all that way and there wasn’t much else around, there was nothing to do but give it a try!  Our fellow hostel mates found the prices a bit too steep (the paella was 18 euro/person minimum 2 person order) and opted to just have a dessert and a appetizer instead.

They brought out some bread and a plate of fried zucchini once we ordered, and, since we were all quite hungry and didn’t really speak Spanish and the server didn’t really speak English, we decided we would just go ahead and eat it.  When we got the bill, they had charged us 2.50 euros each for the “Pan y Apertivo”!  Not really worth it, but oh well…

Chowhound had recommended the paella with rabbit meat and snails, so we ordered a two person order of that.  The rabbit tasted like chicken and was quite good, but the snails came in the shell, making them difficult to eat and quite tasteless.  The rice itself was ok, but all in all, we were pretty dissappointed and didn’t want to finish the dish that had originally seemed small for a two-person serving.  The fact that the table next to us was chain-smoking  Marlboros like it was about to go out of business made the whole experience even worse.  I can’t believe they still allow smoking in restaurants in Spain!