Braseria Barcelona — Restaurant in Barcelona

Grab a chair, because this is going to be a long review. I heavily debated what to rate this place because we were given a 50% discount since we had made a reservation (not sure why tbh), and also a free dessert or shot at the end of the dinner. But I don't like the common strategy of trying to essentially buy a positive review with a couple treats, so here we go!

Food: the meat was undercooked (asked for medium-well but got medium-rare), the milanese was tough, and honestly not great. Was it the worst one I've ever had? No, but also not the best one by any means, and definitely not on par with the current 4.9 google reviews rating. Service: had a reservation for 2 people at 21, we were seated at 21:30. That 30 minute wait was at the door, with barely any AC. Our server was friendly, no complaints there. But in the span of a single 2-hour dinner: we were given a side dish we didn't order, I hear it's common in Barcelona, while they pretended to not know if it was included in the main dish or not (spoiler: it wasn't). Then, the lady at the table to our right asked for her meat to be cooked slightly more, ended up waiting for almost an hour, having to complain about it, and being served essentially the same thing again. She rightfully refused to eat it, while they tried to convince her to bring it home as take-out, most likely just to be able to charge for it. Finally, the table to our left... also had to ask for their meat to be cooked a bit more! Did I mention the meat was undercooked? 🙃 Atmosphere: barely any AC, except for the one unit blasting on my neck the entire evening. Tables being squeezed together to accomodate way more people than reasonable. Very loud, and barely any personal space, I could have easily grabbed a bite of (undercooked) meat from the table next to us if I wanted to.

No idea why there are so many positive reviews. Or maybe I do. I guess people like free...

Found this place on The Fork and it came with a nice 50% discount for food items. Making it much more worthwhile. Our waiter Diego was fantastic, super friendly and was able to deal with multiple requests from multiple tables at once. Definitely ask for Diego if possible during your visit.

Unfortunately the food quality was a bit lacking. While the grilled/charred flavor was quite nice, the steaks were cooked unevenly due to varying thickness of the cuts. The parts that were actually medium rare was fantastic but the other parts were a bit dry and overcooked. We also got a few wrong orders that likely resulted from language barriers from staff that is not Diego. We had an extra order of fries and only got regular water when we asked for soda water. Luckily we had a lovely Spanish couple beside our table that helped us with translations. Not entirely their fault as we are English speaking tourists in a Spanish/Catalan speaking city but just something to note as this seems to be a place marketed towards tourists.

At the end we were gifted a complimentary tiramisu cake (which I think every patron got) and were asked to leave a review. Overall, I think this place has a lot of potential, it just felt a bit of a miss for me due to the quality of the cooking. Flavors were there but...

It was a disaster mixed with pleasure:

I was having a dinner with my wife; I ordered sirloin steak medium rare (and it was just perfect), my wife ordered entrecote medium, but it was cooked somewhere in between rare and medium rare (which could happen in a busy place like that and is completely understandable) and the piece had huge parts of fat (well, one could argue that it’s just a bad luck), but for some reason it was cooked using a chemical burner and had gasoline taste, so we had to ask to replace the meal.

Since I already knew that sirloin is perfect, I asked for sirloin as a replacement, and since they undercooked the first one, I asked it to be medium well.

As a replacement my wife was brought two small pieces of unknown cut (it didn’t looked like sirloin though) burned well past well done.

We have decided not to make a scene, I helped my wife to finish one of the pieces, we were even offered free desserts and this review wouldn’t even existed if by the end of the evening we didn’t got a severe food poisoning (my stomach isn't well even on the next morning while...