Porvenir — Restaurant in Barcelona

Seafood paradise!

If you want to go a "No b@llshit" seafood restaurant, this is your place.

We ordered the 1/2 O'retorno seafood plate, 1/2 plate of chipirones and pan con tomate, wanted to order one for tapas plate but the waitier was really nice and advised to slow down a bit cause he thinks the food we already ordered will be enough. And he was right, the size of the seafood plate is enormous (and we had the 1/2 plate)

The chipirones were good, but not significantly better than in any other decent tapas place, but the seafood plate is world champ, i would order it again and again, maybe next time would go with the Fermin plate which has extra lobster and some other type of claims, maybe scallops.

For dessert we tried the cheesecake and the nutella/hazelnut cake, they were both good but pretty sweet so if if u r not into the super sweet ones maybe better to share 1 dessert between 2 people

After payment they let us to stay and talk until we wanted, did not feel any sign to indicate they want us out, they event gave us 2 rounds of free shots.

We had some beers and paid around 35€/person, if you skip dessert etc u can easily get the price between 25-30€, i was really satisfied.

Will definitely return,...

Server was nice enough. But he recommended way too much food for just the two of us. While ordering, I switched my original mussels order to clams. Then, he acted surprised when he brought out the mussels and I reminded him we had switched it to clams. They didn’t charge us for the mussels at least (we couldn’t have eaten more even if we wanted to). Where things really went wrong is with a bottle of water we ordered. Bottle came to the table already open and DIRTY - with visible floaties swirling around inside. We figured “oh it must just be tap water” and ordered a beer to drink instead, but then were shocked to see a charge for €4 on the bill. At this point our server had already left. The woman collecting the payment couldn’t speak much English and told me I should have told my server. The truth it that I would have told the server IF I knew we’d be charged for an already open bottle of dirty water. She argued with me about taking it off the bill. Overall left feeling like the food was sub-par, but the real issue was more around the level of service provided - and questions about whether they were...

Very mixed experience here… place was packed, servers were struggling to keep on top of the lunch rush, seating felt cramped (we got stuck next to the washroom, with all the smell that entailed), had to send back calamari because there was a hair in it (and the calamari was average - a bit greasy and not very flavourful), side dishes were completely cold. But I have to say… the swordfish was perfectly cooked and the best swordfish steak I’ve had anywhere. Perfectly soft and rare inside, golden outside. So someone in the kitchen definitely knows what they’re doing.

I’m not convinced I’d come back - if I did I guess I would reserve an outside table, go off-peak, and get grilled fish. But it would be impossible to give Porvenir more than 3 stars based on my...