| rev:text
| - This a very interesting, albeit a little bit confused, upscale-ish pub downtown. Here's a few things it does really well: drinks (particularly gin-based), food quality, restaurant layout. On the other hand, here's what it doesn't do so well: atmosphere, service, some food prices.
Best bet here is to come on Monday night to take advantage of their pizza specials. We had the mushroom pizza and the veal one. Very high quality with fresh ingredients. These will run your $10 each and are a sizable portion. Sangria is on special that night as well for $17 a pitcher and is of very high quality and comes in three varieties. The tomatoes Barcelona was delicious as well.
Things to avoid are the lobster ravioli ($12 for two pieces... not exactly a share plate) and the manchego fondue (which is 8 pieces of bread a very tiny cheese-based dip).
Barcelona has a number of gin-based drinks. I tried the lemon-ginger, strawberry-basil, and grapefruit-sage. All were excellent. I do not recommend the $3 tonic upgrade, however, as it isn't particularly noticeable.
The restaurant was completely dead; roughly 8 or 9 tables of 2-4 people, yet service was surprisingly slow. We had to flag down our server to order food, and he seemed a bit surprised. Plenty of staff, mainly hostesses, roaming around. Seems to me that there are some kinks to work out but it's nothing that can't be fixed.
|