We woke up early to get some coffee before heading off to the train station for Barcelona. There was a coffee shop we kept passing by yesterday that we wanted to visit. Oh boy were we lucky to come right before the crowd! The coffee shop is called La Rollerie.
While walking in I saw some parties ordering this same type of rustic looking bread with a an orange color cream sauce. Must be a Spanish thing? I need to try!
Hazelnut cappuccino. Espresso, creamy milk, hazelnut essence, and almond crocanti. This cappuccino was very tasty! Mildly sweet and ridiculously creamy. Smelled like hazelnut.
Andalusian. Roasted rustic bread, with their famous 100% Arbequina olive oil and tomato topping. So the breakfast is called Andalusian, which is a type of light breakfast in a region south of Spain. The bread was light, airy and crispy on the crust. The light tomato cream sauce was a nice dipper. It reminded me of cream of tomato soup.
After the train to Barcelona, we checked into our hotel called the Catalonia Hotel located literally in the center of Barcelona. We are literally in the heart of the shopping center as well! I was starving! It was a 2.5 hour train ride and I need my lunch! I looked up a restaurant that had 10k+ reviews on TripAdvisor with 4.5 stars. We’re going there!
Seems like the food in Barcelona is more tapas and wine! Ugh, this might be our favorite city! We went to CIUDAD CONDAL for a late lunch, which in Spain time, was right before their lunch hour at 3-4pm. Everyone just eats everything late around here!
To start, we had some boiled shrimp and Cantabrigians sea anchovies. Ironically the item we ordered first at the cafeteria is a common snacking item in Spain. The anchovies were lightly salty but contrasted nicely with the olive oil and olives. The boiled shrimp was also lightly salted and cooked perfectly! Just until done so very soft still.
The garlic shrimp was one of my favorites! It was cooked so perfectly that it was still so soft like it’s on the brink of rawness. The garlicky flavor was strong with the butter. The octopus Galician style was also one of my favorites! It is thinly sliced octopus sitting on top of the smoothest potato purée I’ve ever had.
Prawns, clams and mussels grilled was Vince’s favorite of the day! He loved the variety of seafood that it came with and the grilled flavor. It is unusual that here they don’t eat the head or the shells so we tried to eat like how the Spanish eat.
The codfish skewer with tomato compote took the longest to come out but it was definitely worth the wait. They were generous with the huge fish portions and the codfish was incredibly flaky and tender. The sweet tomato on top contrasted very nicely with the fish.
The Bravas potatoes seems to be a very common Spanish appetizer to order. I see it everywhere all the time and finally decided to give it a try. It is basically fried potatoes with a light mayonnaise drizzled on top. Good but nothing too special for me.
I really liked the Salmon and prawn with cheese cream and that is because I am biased towards cream cheese. The raw salmon was very fresh and the boiled shrimp was the same as earlier. They were sitting on top of two thin toasts.
Fig grilled with Jabugo ham was Vince’s pick. The fig wasn’t grilled. It was just raw figs sliced in half with ham put on top. I enjoyed eating them separately versus together.
Catalan cream is a Spanish desert that is very similar to creme brûlée except they use milk instead of cream. The texture is less dense and heavy but still creamy inside.
Yay I finally got my first pair! I’ve been wanting to get one since forever and waiting an extra two years to get these as a 30th birthday to myself because I wanted to shop in Europe for the tax free shopping!
In between shopping and dinner, we stopped by the bar next to our hotel to grab a glass of wine.
The next place we went to for dinner was a big food hall filled with bougie restaurants and bars. We checked it out initially first and it was packed at around 8pm. We weren’t hungry yet so we decided to come back after dinner rush hour which was a good choice because the place we wanted to dine at had a long line.
We did some research and decided to eat at La Taperia because they served paella with squid ink. Eve though we knew we would be eating paella again in our cooking class tonight, we wanted to try the squid ink paella.
Here they also serve personal glasses of sangria! Everywhere else seemed to only serve pitchers of sangria only. This sangria is stronger and a bit more carbonated.
We ordered garlic shrimp again because we were so in love with the one we had at lunch but it wasn’t as good! It was still good but the shrimp was just cooked better at the other place.
I made a mistake ordering this squid Andalusian style because I initially confused it with Galician style from earlier. Andalusian style just means baby squid cleaned inside out and then fried like calamari. It was good but too familiar to home.
Lastly, we ordered the seafood paella in squid ink for 34 euros. It feeds 5 people but it seems that this is the only way to get your own personal paella cooked for you. We were willing to have leftovers. It was unbelievably good! The strong smell and taste of the fishy sea with the paella rice was soo good. There was also a lot more seafood hidden in the black rice like scallops and more shrimp. It was hard to tell because it was all black. I am excited to eat This again tomorrow for breakfast.
