Hello everyone!
I am writing to share with you something that I think is important for people who visit Barcelona! What I am about to tell is something that I couldn’t have learned without living in the Netherlands.
When I moved to the Netherlands, I did miss Spanish food so much that I started to try all different Spanish restaurants. As you can already think, nothing was as tasty as it is in Spain so I decided to learn to cook a lot by myself.
Spanish tapas cuisine is not that hard to make, we only need a few basics and we can mostly find everything in the supermarket.
The thing that I could notice the most is that in all the Spanish restaurants I went around my city is that they mostly care about how beautiful the place and the plate look. Below you can see one of the Spanish places I went to in Eindhoven ?
El Patio Andaluz is one of the best tapas place in Eindhoven I’ve tried so far. The restaurant decoration reminds you of some places in the north of Spain and the food was also really good.
As you can see, everything looks pretty, also tasty yes, but pretty. The thing is that tapas is not about how beautiful you make the food, tapas are about how it tastes! Spanish people eat tapas as an informal meal with friends together with some beers! We hang out a lot in regular bars in our neighborhood where we can find cheap tasty tapas. Those bars aren’t the prettiest bars, but those are our meeting point to watch football, or just to have a talk late in the warm summer night… those nights when you can barely sleep because it’s around 25 - 30 degrees at night ?
I do have a very nice bar very close to home, it has really good reviews and everyone knows it, Can Pere Tapes. If you go late at night there is even a line to sit, it’s not one of those cheap places I was talking about but it’s worth it to pay slightly more money for it.
If you don’t know that place and you are walking by one day that it’s not that busy, I’m sure you don’t think that place is that good. It’s a very normal Spanish basic bar with the typical bar chairs outside but when you try the food, you can for sure be more than satisfied to have tried it.
Bravas and croquetas are a must try!
Another of those bars I usually go to is the Bar Mi Tapa. They have a sauce for the bravas that I haven’t find anywhere, I am not even sure if it’s a real bravas sauce but I just like it so much and most of the people who go with me also think the same.
Patatas bravas is the most ordered tapa for Spanish people when we go for a drink and we get maybe a bit hungry, the first thing we all order is patatas bravas. In most of the bars in the tourist places, they only put ketchup and mayonnaise which is really not what we eat. The sauce of bravas is what gives the taste to this famous tapa, so a good sauce is very important for us.
As you can see in the following picture, that day we ordered some beers and bravas, and we do this at least once a week, mainly in the summer!
One of my last findings was this little bar hidden in a very quiet street in Badalona, a not so small city next to Barcelona. I was walking in the centrum and I suddenly saw a poster with beers from the Netherlands so I went to check out how that place was.
Following the signs, we got to a place that I don’t think we would have ever found, 4 Pedres. Apparently, that’s a very well known place in Badalona, I believe it is like the first bar I was talking about.
Looking from the outside, it seemed a very small place and it was all full of beers labels and a blue light that made that place a bit weird. They had their own beer which was really nice and also pretty strong. We got a montadito with every drink. A montadito is a piece of bread with something on top.
Since we really needed to get some dinner, we got a full plate of different montaditos we wanted to try. Everything was really tasty and also really cheap. The drinks were a bit more expensive but they were special beers so it was okay. We ended up paying 18€ for 3 drinks and around 9 montaditos. Unbelievable!
So as the name of my post says, Barcelona (and all Spain I would say), everything is about how the food tastes, and not about the place or how the food looks like.
So I hope I convinced you all and hopefully you find a place with good reviews in Google Maps and that you don’t back down when you see that the place doesn’t look fancy.
Do you have any other bar with a good bravas sauce that you would like to share with me?
