LA REINA DEL RAVAL / SPICCA

The third day in Barcelona wasn't the best in terms of food, I guess it is karma, we had such good luck since the beginning, we couldn't find every day an amazing place to eat. 
The third day we were walking around El Raval, it was getting late and we were starving, so we didn't really walk further than the tourist area to find a place to get lunch. We went to a very touristic restaurants called La Reina del Raval, you know you are in a restaurant for tourist when you have an offer on tapas and drink, but also a men who start speaking to you to attract you into his restaurant.

We took the offer -7 different tapas and pan con tomate with two drinks 25€, we knew it would be not the best tapas of our life but it wasn't too bad.
Pan con tomate were done on dry white bread, one slice cut in third. 

At the beginning we thought we could choose 7 tapas from the menu, of course the offer was a lot different that was the men told us to attract us. 7 tapas were already chosen by the restaurant, it was meetballs, deep fried calamari, patatas bravas, tuna and coleslaw salad, chorizo, prawns and coquettas.
Patatas were well cooked so it wasn't too bad, meetballs were probably the only homemade dish of all of them and they were nice. Deep fried calamari were very soggy and cold, it wasn't great. Prawns were very fatty and so was the chorizo. Croquettas were as good as the one you can find in Spanish supermarket in the frozen area, so nothing exceptional.

I will recommend to avoid this kind of restaurant,  tapas are made from frozen food. They are usually quite cheap, but flavour less. Only flavour you got from those tapas was a fatty, oily taste. 

2/10.

La reina del raval

Rambla del Raval, 3

08001 Barcelona

For dinner we went to the street we found the night before: Carrer de Parlamente, unfortunately the restaurant we wanted to go to was already too busy and no seats were available. We went to the next restaurant with available seat: Spicca. From outside the restaurant looked cosy and had an original decor.  
We started the meal with a platter of charcuterie and cheese. The platter came with pan con tomate. It was a bit weird because we waited for a while to get the platter and the pan con tomate wasn't already made, instead they brought garlic, tomato and olive oil and you had to do it yourself !  

Pernil de pais, paté, manxego y pan con tomate - Iberico ham, paté, manchego and pan con tomate.

Pimiento escalivado con queso de cabra - Roasted red pepper with goat's cheese

The second dish was good, roasted pepper were nicely cooked and served with hot goat's cheese on top. Nothing spectacular but it was nice. It was served with crackers. 

Service in this restaurant was very slow...we wait a long time between each course. We didn't really understand why we waited so long all the time as not many things in the plate required a long preparation. The long wait totally ruined the experience.

The last dish was a big piece of bread with sobrassada and mozzarella on top, we had one each. It was good but I didn't understand why it took 30 minutes to arrive on the table.

The problem with this place I think it was that waiters were not organised and they didn't pay attention to customers. We requested the bill twice and because it took too much time, we stood up and went inside to request and pay the bill straight to escape quickly and had dessert in another restaurant.

We thought it would have take one hour to get the dessert coming to our table in this place. 

Our meal lasted nearly three hours ! I would have understood if it was for a 8 courses menu with elaborated dishes, but at Spicca the fact you had to do some dishes yourself and you wait 30 minutes for a toast was inexplicable. 

3/10.

Spicca 

Carrer del Parlament, 9

08015 Barcelona