Mesón La Cartuja de Cádiz — Restaurant in Cádiz

Well, should have checked the reviews before siting down.

TLDR; Undercooked food, extremely expensive (€107 for lunch for 3 starters and 2 mains + drinks), might be worth sitting down for a couple of drinks during the day giving it's nice and sunny and has great atmosphere.

It started really well, nice sunny place with nice atmosphere. Our first starter was garlic shripms and it was probably one of the best we've ever had. Nice cold beer and tinto de verano but that's where the good stuff ended. Second starter was the weirdest mejillones we've ever had, but we like to try different things and we thought it was ok. For main we have dourada and robalo, both extremely tasteless and undercooked. The entire underside of my robalo was so undercooked that I didn't eat it concerned with food poisoning, it was like it wasn't cooked at all. The douranda wasn't as bad but still pretty tasteless. After the amazing first starter we could only believe we were unlucky and had to ask the lagostinos tigres to finish it well and leave with a good impression but they were also completely undercooked, we asked it grilled and at best they put it for 10 seconds in boiling water, also very tasteless.

Tried to express our sentiment about the food to the manager while paying the bill but he was very argumentative and we gave up. The excuse was that they serve it undercooked so you have the option to ask to cook it further if it's not to your taste, first time I hear this, not sure if the right policy specially at the price tag. If anything at least let people know and ask how they would like their fish cooked ahead of the time. The manager also said the appropriate sanitary measures are taken (freeze the fish for X hours for X amount of time) to ensure no food poisoning would occur from the undercooked seafood, I guess we will have to wait a few hours to figure...

We had an awful experience here. Service from the waiters was great and drinks too. We order seafood and grilled fish. Everything was undercooked. No salt nor seasoning. The bill was over 100 we tried the langostinos, we tried the grilled dorado, the clams, and everything tasted and smelled thaw and last a bitter taste. Not cooked. We ended up giving up on the bad restaurant choice we made. Ask for the bill. When we paid the bill we told the manager that everything was undercooked, his argument was that’s how you taste better the fish and that they undercook everything so when you try it you can ask back to be cooked more (we weren’t inform about this when we ask the food). He continued and compared it to sushi… We kept quiet and didn’t argue, because it was obviously there was no point of it. We express our health concerns regarding undercooked fish and he said everything was frozen so it’s fine “as it should”. We left disappointed and with a bad taste in out mouth due to the food. The way I see it is that it looks that they were trying to please everyone after so many reviews of overcook seafood that they decided to go to the extreme, instead of finding the right point and quality to serve food. It’s annoying when you spend money to have a good experience and it all goes south. Anyways be aware of this and fingers crossed that we...

Price for value very poor. Size of paella for its price was ok, but didn’t taste awesome. Fried fish quite mediocre and came with no garment for the relatively high price. The only delicious quality food was the shrimp tortilla, but very small amount for the price of a full-plate meal. I had no issue if it had been served as a tapa a to accompany the beer/aperitivo and priced accordingly. The service was very very slow even for southern Spanish standards. No high chair...