CUINA PANDA — Restaurant in Barcelona

Hidden gem! Excellent food and wonderful service (some of the best in Barcelona). I’ve visited Barcelona 9x, counting this time, and this time I’m living here for a month. I have never run into a place with such A-level customer service, exceptional quality of food, efficient service and very reasonable pricing. I’m from LA, where we have literally the best customer service globally—want your latte with two pumps, no foam, 180 deg? No problem. Want to complete reconfigure a salad on a menu, not a problem! It takes a hell of a lot to impress me especially in the restaurant, food quality or customer service arenas. Well, call me “impressed.”

I ran into this place by chance after going to a pharmacy bc I have a terrible cold and it was the only one open on Easter Sunday! 🐣 They had a “brunch” menu advertised for €7.50. 😳 It included choice of beverage (5-6 choices), 3 choices of items to eat (e.g toast, jamón Serrano, two eggs any way, bacon, manchego cheese, etc...like 8-9 choices), plus fruit! Incredible! I ordered the jamón serrano, the manchego cheese and the eggs. I added toast for €1.50. The coffee was excellent in that they even had oat milk for my coffee 🤜🏼 The quality of the food was excellent, it came out super fast and the man who brought it to me (owner I thin, a Chinese man; this is also a Chinese restaurant in the evenings) was super kind, smiled and worked extremely hard making coffee, bussing tables, taking care of prepping tables..etc. He had a couple of people helping him but he was deeply involved and “on it.”

Highly...

I don’t like to say bad things about restaurants that I don’t like, but I am about to make an exception for reasons which I will explain below.

Firstly and most importantly, the food is not good, for my tastes at least. I lived for many years in China and Southeast Asia and during that time I ate a lot of amazing and not-so-amazing Sichuan food. The food here is to my tastes the worst Sichuanese food I have ever eaten. You might enjoy this restaurant if you have no idea what genuine Sichuan food tastes like.

Bad food would not normally be sufficient cause for me to leave a one star review which I understand could negatively impact the ownership and staff. In this case I am making an exception due to the incredibly awful things the ownership has said in response to other bad reviews. Seriously, go and have a look at some of their responses to other bad reviews and then decide if that is the sort of business you want to support. I just read one where the restaurant owners responded to a bad review by calling the reviewer ugly and a “XXXXX BXXX. FXXX U!” There’s another where he tells a reviewer to “shut up your filthy mouth”

Cyber bullying is super lame and so is...

What a nice little find , after researching local Chinese CUINA PANDA-Homemade Sichuan Food , had some lovely reviews so me and my mother chose to pop in for some lunch.

The owner/waiter was an absolute gem and was so helpful , sharing both menus their lunch time menu and their main menu. Me and my mother chose their main menu choosing a few random dishes such as Estofado de ternera con especias de Sichuan ( a flavoured beef stew ) Estofado de panceta estilo Sichuan (sichuan style) and some boiled rice.

We also ordered Gambitas sabor cebollino y soja ( SCALLION&SOYA FLAVOR SHRIMPS-) which was made into a noddles dish for us .

The owner also kindly gave my mother a taster of a tofu dish when she had made a comment about liking tofu. I cannot put into words how delicious each dish was and how wonderful the owner made me and my mother feel when dining here.

Even when the restaurant had a lunch time rush and started to fill very quickly we weren’t made to rush to finish and leave, me and my mother have not stopped speaking about it all day and will definitely will make another visit before...