Restaurante Casa Sánchez — Restaurant in San Cristóbal de La Laguna

We were left quite surprised by our experience here vs this place's very high rating.

We came in the evening. Service was achingly slow with just one waiter for the whole place, who was also serving drinks. It took 30 minutes to receive a drink and 1 hour 10 mins to be served any food (and we did not order paella). We had ordered 2 main courses. Both were quite tasty, but the portion sizes were so small, more like a decent tapas plate. Our only garnish was 4 very small papas arrugadas and one slice of tomato each. Afterwards we went straight to a bar for some more substantial food. 2 suggestions - if it is going to take this long, perhaps offer some bread + mojo/olives? I'd also suggest that the place should write up a chalkboard with their menu, because it seemed not ideal to me to have to wait for the waiter and then make a snap decision on what to order based upon what he could remember being available and without any view of the prices too. It probably would have been far harder too if we didn't speak some Spanish...

tl;dr: Unpretentious and super delicious. Cash only! What a pleasant surprise! We are staying at Punta del Hidalgo for a few night and we went out for a walk without the car. Not many restaurants were open, so this was one of our only options. From the outside it looks totally unassuming, I wasn't even sure whether I wanted to go in, because we already had one disappointing restaurant experience. Thanks to recent reviews, I decided to give it a try and let me tell you, it was totally worth it! The menu is simple (not that there's exactly a menu per se, just photos online), but the food was very delicious, everything was fresh. Both the mussels and the fried fresh fish are strongly recommended. If you've fallen in love with the Canarian mojo sauces, the mojo verde cream version goes amazingly with some bread. And all this for half the price of what we'd usually pay. We will come...

This was the biggest surprise for our whole trip! We were looking for a place to just have a quick lunch and head to the lighthouse afterwards. We didn't expect much from this very ordinary bar, but we ended up eating the best paella ever! My husband and I are not big fans of paella generally speaking, but this one was so freaking delicious, I have no words to describe! We also had the (burning) shrimps al ajillo. Amazing food, we were blown away! P.S. One paella is for 2 people, and I would add for 2...