Barcelona Tavern — Restaurant in Calgary

My girlfriend and I arrived at Barcelona Tavern on Saturday March 25th at 8:45pm after the Dr. Dre orchestra show down at the Palace.

Upon arrival at Barcelona, we were seated in the 2 seater section in between the front and back of the restaurant. I had asked to be moved to a different location in the main restaurant to a table that looked available but was told we couldn’t sit there because there was a Latin show later in the night.

We ordered a pitcher of Red Sangria to share as our beverage and the drink was good. My girlfriend ordered the chicken and parpadelle dish, while I ordered the Messi burger and fries, food was mediocre at best.

During our dining experience while eating our meals we were approached my a man and women promoting the Latin show in the restaurant and was asked if we wanted to partake in Latin night and that it was a $20 cover charge each. I was a little taken back as I would assume that since we were in the restaurant prior to Latin night having dinner that we would be exempt. I feel like it’s pretty unprofessional to ask customers while dining, I declined and was told that we would need to move to the back of the restaurant if we didn’t pay the cover, needless to say it felt like we were on a beach in Mexico getting accosted by the locals selling trinkets on the beach. Reluctantly, we paid the $40 and received a green flappy wristband.

After dinner, we decided to leave our seats and go stand by the bar for a final drink before heading home for the night. We ordered a strawberry margarita and a corona from the female bartender and I was paying upfront for the drinks. I was provided the debit machine with the totals already input on the machine for $22.50, I thought that was strange that there was no tip option, not to mention the cost for the two drinks. I asked for a copy of the receipt to which I received my debit receipt, I then asked for the itemized receipt and after a bunch of fumbling around it was handed over to me, only to find out that the bartender added her own $3.60 tip to my bill before having me pay.

The entire experience left a really bad taste in my mouth for being accosted to hand over money while eating dinner and then being taken for a ride by the bartender for her own thieving benefit.

I used to frequent this place during the lunch hour and had nothing but great things to say, but after last night I’ll...

I went to Barcelona Tavern this evening with my friends. Since the last time I went (last year in the summer) the service and experience has totally changed. Our server was sweet but not too attentive (it wasn't a busy night) and while the food was really tasty (we had the truffle fries and wings) the drinks were terrible. We shared a litre of their white sangria which was 3/4 ice and 1/4 of their sangria mix. It was really disappointing as you barely got the flavour of the sangria just ice and for $23 that's super pricey. My friend ordered a strawberry gin and tonic which was actually gin and SODA! When we told the server this she's like okay I'll go ask the bartender and 6 minutes later she comes by and says oh yeah the bartender did say he made it with soda so he's going to make it again for you (so the remade drink came like 10 minutes later). If my friend wasn't a bartender then we would have just been drinking gin and soda. Finally we ordered the churros. They were completely over cooked (you could snap them in half they were super hard) and extremely oily you could taste the flavours of the food that was cooked in that oil. We told our server and she's like oh okay, and when I snapped our churro in half she believed us. She was nice and offered if we wanted another dessert but we were super turned off. It would have been nice if the server quality checked us sooner and more often instead of me having to try and catch her eye every time she walked by us. Or it would have been nice to have a manager come and check on us when we returned the drink and the dessert to find out what the problem was and so we could have given this feedback in person. Overall fries and wings were good but wouldn't ever go there for their...

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.

Heads up though. They ask you what you want for water upon seating. Sparkling or still. I know what you're thinking. 1 or 2 bucks for sparkling usually right? How about $8.50 each? Yeah.. And the server acted like that's...