If you drink, many places in Barcelona still give you free tapas with drinks. They don’t always, or usually, tell you what it is, they just drop it off at your table, but it was all good, whatever it was.
I tried cuttlefish in Barcelona, as I’d never had it before, and it was on most of the menus. I thought it was … okay. Bland and a bit chewy. I always like to try new-to-me animal flesh when i travel, so I’m glad i had it. But i probably won’t have it again.
Cuttlefish being fairly close genetic cousins to squid that’s not too surprising. Who hasn’t “enjoyed” bland rubbery calamari as an appetizer someplace? It can be cooked to be less rubbery, but that secret seems to have been withheld from most American restaurants IME.
I’m not a fan of shellfish in general; the flavor is terrible. However, the mussels I had in Barcelona were delicious! Likely because they were extremely fresh. I highly recommend getting any sort of local seafood dishes while in Barcelona.
We ate along Cornellà de Llobregat just south of Parque de Can Mercader.
This statement kind of puts me off the rest of what you say. Instead of being descriptive (the pizza is less [whatever]), you’ve jumped into your preferences (as if your preferences are the determinant for what others want).
As someone who has been living in Prague - a popular holiday destination - for a long time, I can say that having an English or other foreign-language menu is not a guarantee of the place being a tourist trap. Some perfectly decent “local” establishments have them. Hardcore local pubs don’t but many middle-of-the-road places that I would gladly visit as a “local” do.
I’d say that, rather than language of menus, the location is key. Places right in the center of the city and around the main landmarks tend to be tourist traps. Places a few streets behind these tend not to be.
This. You will have many interactions, make an effort to begin the interaction in their tongue.
It’s likely they will rattle off something you don’t understand afterwards, but first impressions are a big thing and you will always makes loads of first impressions in a new country. It greases the wheels of commerce, transportation, dining, just about any interaction you’ll have on the trip.
Anyone who doesn’t put in at least a bit of air flight crash course studying is treating the culture they are about to enter with a bit of contempt.
During my families Mediterranean cruise, we’d do a crash course for each port’s local language. Know how to say: hello, yes, no, please, thank you. It helps.
Barcelona is a fantastic city, one of my favorites in all of Europe.
I very strongly suggest getting a City Pass. Not only is it much cheaper than doing things piecemeal, you’ll save mountains of time by not having to stand in line to get tickets for things.
Plus it includes train and bus passes.
They are available in 1, 3, 5, 7, and 10 day versions.
To answer the OP, no, not always. However, if you are a tourist in a touristy city, like Barcelona, it’s likely a lot of restaurants will have menus in English - that alone does not make it bad or good. I would look for other signs, like is it crowded? Is everyone inside a tourist? Is there someone on the sidewalk hawking the place? Any intel from travel blogs or sites? Or just a recommendation from others? Just having English words on the menu shouldn’t be the only factor.
This is why, “hello” is the first word i try to learn. Followed by “thank you”, because as a tourist, lots of people will do small services for you, and even if it’s as minor as selling you a ticket, it’s nice to be able to say “thanks”.
I’m unusually bad at learning foreign languages. But i can learn to speak a handful of important words. As for learning food words like “pork”, you don’t need to say that. Reading it is good enough. Recognizing the letter patterns in your guidebook is good enough. Google translate is more than good enough.
Very interesting! I haven’t been to Italy in something like 34 years, so my memory is fuzzy. But if you asked me about the best pizza I’ve ever had, I might mention the pizza I had in Venice when I was 17. All sorts of factors might confound the memory–I was by myself, it was a gorgeous location, I’d had plenty of pizza I didn’t care for on the trip, and so on–but I remember it being very delicious, full of fresh herbs and flavor.
I second this. But be careful not to wrinkle it. My husband had to get his replaced because it stopped working due to minor mechanical damage.
Pizza, IMHO, tends to be one of the “funnier” foods out there in terms of determining what is actually better. ISTM that for most foods there tends to be broad agreement on what makes something good or not so good, but with pizza there’s so much variation it seems impossible to take someone else’s recommendations on what is good and what isn’t.
I can wholeheartedly recommend not going to the hole in the wall in San Francisco that I went to in 1996 around midnight, where they literally used ketchup as their pizza sauce; but beyond that, I agree. I mean, it’s not like I was a seventeen-year-old Anthony Bourdain out there, for all I know it was a decent fropi gussied up. I just know that I still think of that Venetian pizza fondly.
You’ll find that in Chinatown in San Francisco as well (and probably other Chinatowns around the world). You can get good food if you know where to look, but along Grant Ave. (the main street through Chinatown) it’s mostly restaurants with pictures in the window and hawkers aggressively trying to lure in tourists, serving the same sort of mediocre Chinese-American food you can get at your local Chinese takeout place.
You can get lousy food in a place that’s not a tourist trap. You can get great food in a tourist trap.
I was in Germany years ago for training and I went with a group of soldiers to Rüdesheim. It’s a quaint and lovely town on the Rhine that is basically one big tourist trap. Still lovely. We went into a tourist trap restaurant to have German food. It was a tourist trap restaurant with decor that a tourist would think was authentic old world German. I had the jaeger schnitzel. Jaeger schnitzel might be my favorite meal in the world. When I lived in Germany for over two years I had it whenever and wherever I could. That tourist trap restaurant was the best I ever had.
There is very little that is Italian in Little Italy anymore. The demographics changed long ago. When we got the paperwork back from Ellis Island it showed that my grandmother was going to an address on Mulberry St. we have no idea who they were going to live with but apparently some family members lived in the heart of Little Italy. Now literally no one from Italy lives there and about 5% of the residents claim any Italian heritage. You are better off going to the Italy pavilion in Epcot.
I hear that Arthur Ave in the Bronx is still an authentic little Italy with very good restaurants. I’ve never been. My Bronx experience is strictly Yankee Stadium.
Or hop on Amtrak and visit Boston’s North End.
I haven’t been to NY for a while, but I seem to remember quite a few very good Italian restaurants in Manhattan. Sure, they weren’t bunched all together on a street that looked vaguely like 1920s Palermo, but who cares? Good food is good food. If the Italian restaurant happens to be between a Thai-Haitian fusion restaurant and a locally-sourced vegan bistro, that doesn’t make it any less tasty, it just makes it New York.
Yes, Little Italy is hardly more than an enclave of a couple of blocks inside Chinatown nowadays.