Well are they?
Plus if anyone knows good restaurants in Barcelona I’d like to know.
Plus I don’t speak a word of Spanish.
I get there in 3 days.
You’ve got three days. Learn the words for beef, chicken, pork, rice, boiled and fried.
That will give you a bigger advantage than most people arriving from the US.
Also learn please, thank you, and no thanks. 
You are not likely to really NEED Spanish in Barcelona - a very cosmopolitan city but if you want to impress then find out the words in Catalan which is what they speak in Barcelona.
Hell you might get a free meal.
You want to do the Ramplas after midnight too …what a city should be like. 
The very old Roman Market is wonderful and there are a ton of places along the Ramplas.
Barcelona is a city full of tourists. You will struggle to find a restaurant which doesn’t have a menu in English, or waiting staff who don’t speak English. It doesn’t mean it’s a tourist trap. Just do some research before you go so you don’t just wander into the crappy places.
A menu which includes English translations is not necessarily representative of a tourist trap. It may be or it may not be.
However, if the restaurant has a big board out front with pictures of the food, it’s almost certainly a tourist trap. Steer clear.
My cousin’s restaurant is excellent and it is not a turist trap. The menu is in Spanish and Italian, but the waiters speak many languages. It is in Avda. Diagonal, 501, 08029 Barcelona
The restaurants in las Ramblas, in the new port, in the Plaça Reial are all turist traps, as are the places where somebody tries to drag you in when you walk around.
This happened to us in Lisbon. I was off looking for a toilet and my wife’s guard was down. Terrible place. She promised not to do that again.
What would be the nature of the “trap” in question?
- Overpriced fare?
- A bad case of indigestion coming in 5-4-3?
- Sketchy financial transactions?
- A dirty or otherwise unappealing eating environment?
- A bunch of kitschy paraphernalia on sale?
- Con artists working the tables with their schticks on unsuspecting tourists?
I don’t think they’re necessarily tourist traps, nowadays a lot of European restaurants offer also English menus given the number of tourists that come by, even if they do not exclusively cater to tourists.
In Barcelona i recently dined at Raco de la Vila which offered also an English menu and has English speaking staff; there were a lot of tourists but the food in my opinion was good and plentiful, seemed fairly authentic. Be aware though that authentic Paella is mainly rice so you’d need another dish/entree to have a more complete meal.
Waah? Paella is loaded with protein (fish/meat) and vegetables, so not sure how it doesn’t constitute a complete meal!
What I understood is that adding lots of vegetables and fish and meat is not always considered true paella, so authentic may actually be quite sober, but I admit that I’m not an expert. Sorry if I misspoke, a native may be able to correct me. In the restaurant I visited the paella was sober like this (but nice for what it was), so didn’t want to give an incorrect impression.
Yup. But you just need to go a block or two away and you can find better food at lower prices and with a more enjoyable atmosphere.
Lousy food.
Poor value for money, basically. I acknowledge, however, that this has varying importance for different people.
I’ll use an example to illustrate.
A week from tomorrow, I’ll be traveling to Venice on holiday. I’ve been there before and know my way around; this trip is for the benefit of my parents, for whom Venice has been a lifelong bucket list dream.
Venice has its own distinct culinary traditions. Venetian food is not the same as Roman food, or Sicilian food, or Tuscan food. If you are interested in experiencing Venice fully, you should make some effort to eat Venetian specialties for at least some meals: cicchetti, squid-ink pasta, and so on.
There are tourist-trap restaurants that cater to visitors who don’t know anything about their destination and are expecting to eat “Italian” food, like spaghetti and lasagne and pizza. If that’s what you’re expecting, if that’s what you want, then you can certainly find it; the tourist traps offer it and will serve it to you.
A seasoned traveler, however, knows this is a subpar experience. The pizza in Venice is simply not as good as the pizza in Rome or Naples. It’s not a matter of Venetian pizza being different, either — it really is worse, because of local rules about the kinds of pizza ovens that can be used. If you’re paying inflated tourist prices for lower quality product, that’s obviously poor value for money.
However: maybe you don’t care. Maybe you’re one of those people who regards food as simply fuel, whose palate doesn’t differentiate between flavors, who would be perfectly happy eating a bowl of Human Chow breakfast, lunch, and dinner. These people exist, and their needs are entirely served by a lower-tier tourist trap. I don’t judge them or begrudge their disinterest in culinary authenticity. If they’re happy having a slice of pepperoni sitting alongside the Grand Canal, that’s fine for them.
But for someone who really wants to be in Venice, this is… let’s say, suboptimal.
My parents have put themselves in my hands for this trip. They want to experience Venice. I won’t be taking them to any tourist traps.
Food is a make or break for me on any trip, and so I always do mountains of research before I go, pre-booking my evening meals, with ideas for lunch options in my notebook. There’s nothing worse than wandering the streets of a strange city at night, hungry and confused, and ending up somewhere sub-optimal because the good places are either hard to stumble across, or fully booked.
As for language, in these days of Google translate, it really doesn’t matter much if they don’t have an English menu, and if they do, it isn’t a certain marker of poor quality either - some owners are just be a bit more commercially-savvy.
Same-same. Are you me? 
When my wife and I first started dating, she was bemused by the seriousness and attention I devoted to the quality of my food. She didn’t resist, she went along with it, but I could tell, it wasn’t her thing.
But after a couple of years, she confessed: she got it. She understood the difference. And now she’s become, by her own admission, a bit of a snob. She’s not willing to do the same homework I do in advance; she trusts me. When a restaurant falls short of expectation, though, she lets me know.
But when the place is outstanding, when the food knocks our socks off, she raves for months. She still talks about this one phenomenal hole-in-the-wall family place I found in Athens. ("Those potatoes!" [orgasmic eye-roll] 
)
Looks fine, and quite reasonable prizes, in the ballpark of Italian restaurants here in the German boondocks.
(though I should report you for nepotism 
)
Yep- if you go to Italy and eat at the places with the pictorial sign boards right on the square with the tourist attractions, you’ll basically get tourist trap Italian. Probably frozen and reheated, probably pretty bland, etc… And like @Cervaise points out, it’s Italian food as imagined by people who haven’t been to Italy. No cuttlefish, no quatro stagioni pizza, and so forth.
Personally, I’ve had fantastic luck with the Rick Steves guidebook restaurant recommendations for whatever city/region I’ve visited, so long as I’ve got the most up-to-date one. We’ve also had some random choices that have turned out fantastic while traveling and some that have been pretty godawful as well. You kind of have to be a bit of a gambler to try holes in the wall in foreign cities without a guidebook or personal recommendation.
And I’ll clarify/echo @Cervaise’s point about the pizza; find out ahead of time what sorts of food the place you’re going to is known for and get THAT. You wouldn’t go to Texas and get clam chowder any more than you’d order barbecue in Maine, would you? And when in New Orleans, you get shrimp creole, bbq shrimp, or any number of other Creole/Cajun things.
So if you’re going to say… Naples, you get pizza. If you’re going to Milan, you get osso buco with risotto, and so forth.
I wouldn’t limit tourist traps to foreign restaurants. I like New York Italian restaurants. But the one time I went to little Italy, there was a lot of the menu outside and aggressive hawker trying lure people inside.
Also there is a Bubba Gump Shrimp restaurant in St Pete Beach. Not really real gulf shrimp being served.
I’m staying in the Gothic quarter, which is part of the touristy area. I could walk to that guys cousins place.
I like to know, “hello”, “thank you”, and “excuse me” before i enter a country. For menus, Google translate will work fine.