El Bodegón de Luan — Restaurant in Tías

I'm surprised this place has no Yelp reviews yet - I happened to pass by it many times and read into it on Tripadvisor. I felt like this was the closest to Spanish island authenticity you could get. While the touristy "English" options likely, and probably suck, their highlights are their tapas wheels.

They have meat tapas wheels, fish tapas wheels, meat + fish tapas wheels, potato + sauce tapas wheels, and a vegetarian tapas wheel. So many options! I think the winner, and the one that I selected on my first night, was the mixed choose-your-own-tapas wheel. For a little under €12, you can choose 5 tapas dishes from a list, or pick 4 tapas + garlic prawns. I opted for the latter. It comes out on a literal wheel (ie. Lazy Susan) with segments for each dish.

I still get confused on the difference between shrimp and prawns. I thought prawns were bigger, but these shrimp were typical sized. This was delicious, the garlic oil they were swimming in was so wonderfully garlicky. I, being a fool, tried this first and promptly burnt the tip of my tongue. For the 4 others, I chose: Canarian potatoes, chorizo, fried Lanzarote cheese with fig jam, and the chicken paella. The Canarian potatoes are essentially plain, baked baby potatoes that are accompanied by 2 killer sauces, 1 green and the other red. These are called mojo, and I strongly favored the green one which is apparently made with avocado (or so my Spanish understood...). The chorizo was pretty good, but not overly spicy and swimming in grease. The fried cheese was stellar with fig jam, but make sure you eat while hot otherwise it cools down and gets all congealy-cheese-like. Paella was okay, chicken and some clumps of rice were a bit dry.

I also had a whole bottle of tempranillo, seeing as it was so cheap. When I asked for la cuenta (the check), the server came back with a shot of banana liqueur. I think everyone gets it - does drown out the garlic party going on in my mouth. Overall, I would definitely check this place out for the tapas - I'll be back more times to update with my favorites. I'm giving it 5* because out of all the patrons, there was just 1 guy taking orders and another lady delivering drinks/orders. Very impressive given how hard they were...

Extremely bad service and even worse food. Started off with a laugh as the waiter forgot to open the bottle of wine, unfortunately the laughter soon turned to anger as the starters arrived the croquettes were stone cold and tested frozen in the centre. On to the mains we both had the mixed skewers. The chicken was undercooked and clearly pink we highlighted this to the waiter (an older gentleman) who decided to ignore this, we waited about 5 minutes until I raised my voice and said excuse me when the younger waiter came over he took away the meal and it arrived back with the chicken missing and again stone cold. We refused to eat the meal and sat for 25 minutes while none of the waiters would make eye contact with us, I had decided to walk out of the restaurant but as my partner is more level headed he decided to speak to the waiter at the bar, he was offered no apologies or no reduction of the bill just a shot of honey rum to smooth over the situation. Eventually my partnered offered €40 which to me was still too much for the diabolical service we received. Never again and we holiday here 6 to 8 weeks a year and this is the worst restaurant we have ever been to...

This was the first restaurant we visited for our first trip to the island, having seen the many high ratings and reviews. The service was really good, however the food doesn't really match this. We initially ordered a mixed tapas sharing platter which gave us a sample of what's to come, however the main dishes we looked forward to were unfortunately not great.

The octopus was overcooked and rubbery, with the biggest upset was having petit pois in the Paella. Having eaten both dishes before from other areas around Spain, I had expectations that weren't met at the least as I'd never seen peas in a Paella before. The location of the restaurant is in a very touristic area, therefore it's great if wanting to stop in before heading on a night out or to watch some sport, but for me not for a great culinary experience.

If you like to be in a busy area with lots of tourists with bars and restaurants at the ready to add to the sun, sea, sangria, also offering Spaghetti Bolognese, English and German fry ups, then...