Though the selection wasn’t terribly broad, everything they had was fresh and great tasting. This was probably the best buffet dinner I’ve had. That evening we had the buffet dinner at Restaurante Contraste, the restaurant of the Hotel Princesa Sofia, where we were staying. My colleagues seemed happier with their salads and pastas – so maybe pizza is not the way to go here. I had the Tropix pizza (E12) and it was good, though nothing special. Mango does not actually serve Catalan food, instead concentrating on pizzas, salads, pastas and paellas. I had lunch with my colleagues at Restaurante Mango, on Aveda. The next day was the start of the meeting I was attending. Here I had some more pa amb tomaquet, some ravioli with sauce and some grilled quail – neither of which impressed me. telling myself “I’ll sit down at the next restaurant I find”) at a Galician restaurant somewhere. I didn’t eat again until the next day, when I ended up by accident (i.e. A small lunch at Restaurante Taxidermista in Barcelona’s Plaça Reial was my first introduction to Catalan food – but its brief menu only allowed me to taste pa amb tomaquet (bread with tomato) and some Catalan sausages. The first problem was that for whatever reason I became a bit stomach sick after arriving in Barcelona – whether the culprit was airline food or a Burger King burger from Kennedy airport, I will never know – but the fact was that I didn’t feel like eating anything my first day in Barcelona.
Alas, I ended up being disappointed, not as much as in the cuisine, as in my own experience with it. My sojourn through Catalan cuisine was quite successful and I now wanted to see what Catalan dishes would taste like when cooked right. With the advent of restaurants such as El Bulli (where I have not been and which does not serve Catalan food) and Manresa (in the Bay Area), Catalan cuisine is achieving some sort of recognition in the US. I had been looking forward to my short trip to Barcelona almost as much for the food I was going to taste as for the places I was going to see and the people I was going to see.
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