Venta El Buscón — Restaurant in Madrid

With the exception of price competitiveness, this place was terrible in any conceivable way! We visited few restaurants in the vicinity and they were pricey but did serve great food with decent service! Noticing its low price, we gave this restaurant a try! When we walked in around Sunday early afternoon and there was only one table of customers and the restaurant was more or less filled with empty tables! One of the servers right the way expressionlessly instructed us to sit at the table next to the front door! We immediately frowned upon this gesture but fortunately another server was aware of our displeasure registered on our face and led us to a quieter and more comfortable table inside! According to our dining experiences in Spain, restaurants seldom flunked seafood dishes and thus we decided to order paella and rice with lobster! When the food arrived, we were surprised by the lack of basic presentation but the worst was yet to come! Paella was excessively moist and sand and shell were present in almost every spoonful! And as for rice with lobster, the astounding disproportionality between lobster meat and lobster shell was infuriating! As we rummaged through the whole bowl, we could barely identify about 10gm of lobster-meat-lookalike and they tasted bland (if not bad)! And as for that glass of so-called “sangria”, I mean, come on, admixing sugary syrup, bitter red wine and few pieces of diced fruit was not a recipe for sangria but a disaster! WHAT A GASTRONOMIC...

(also posted on their Yelp page) Dinner for three people on a week night. There were many tables open, so we opted to sit outside. At first we were looking for Alhambra, but the server said they're the same. The "Alhambra" store sign was next door and boarded up. Maybe the owners went on vacation.

The servers spoke Spanish and not much English. When I tried to pull up Google Translate on my phone, they didn't seem to care for it. We put in orders for a salad, the meat plate (menu says it's for 2 people), and the garlic shrimp. Another server came back to tell us it's way too much food. He suggested to remove the salad since the meat plate comes with fries and salad. We agreed.

The garlic shrimp was delicious. They served it on a clay plate, and it was still sizzling when it arrived on our table. meat plate was indeed a lot of food. Some meats were ok, like the chicken and sausages. The beef was on the tough side and we had to add ground black pepper. We asked for steak sauce ("salsa di bistecca") but they only brought out Tabasco. The fries also needed to be salted, and they brought ketchup when we asked.

The tinto de verano was really good. It was better than the sangria because it's carbonated. I thought this restaurant was pretty good for Spanish food.

During our meal we saw people trying to sell roses and other trinkets. There was a pair of males beatboxing/rapping in Spanish trying...

Omg! This is our best food experience in Spain so far. We had the menu del día and the food was fantastic. Lobster and seafood rice for appetizer, salmorejo as an extra, and beef with buscon (?) style (honey-mustardy) sauce. We even got a little taste of their fries with garlic sauce at no charge.

Our server was amazing, very kind and welcoming. They recommended to sub the app for 1 of our menus because the portions are so huge, and I'm so glad they did. We would have wasted a lot of food, not to mention our money. Thank you, Jessica y Maria!

If you're looking for some authentic local little spot, don't search any further, I swear you won't regret it. Just go!

Service: A+ Food:...