La Española Meats, Inc — Restaurant in Los Angeles

🇪🇸 SPAIN Excerpt from Eat the World Los Angeles: Despite only taking up a very small percentage of the overall building, the market at La Española is overwhelming the first time you open the door. A gift to lucky citizens of Southern California, a wonderland of everything Spanish you could want. The shelves are lined with bottles of wine from every region of Spain, big jars of capers and olives, and boxes of Spanish tortas to start.

Beyond this, you cannot enter the factory of course, but most of the dried and cured offerings are in the refrigerated case for all to buy. Cheeses and beers are in another. But behind all this is something even more amazing, the employees beyond are hurried in the back, putting together orders for pickup and takeout, for there are many prepared foods you can come here for as well.

Saturdays are busiest here at the market because of the availability of many different paellas. A tented area seats people and parties in better times, but even before the pandemic a paella to go would be served in a styrofoam container. Some may consider this "truck stop" paella, but there is a charm to getting such quality fare from a gas...

I made a purchase two weeks ago. I am from Spain. I ordered jamon serrano de bellota, a chorizo and basque beans and I was extremely disappointed. I usually don't leave reviews but I sent them an email that they never replied. Which I felt it was very dismissive. First: The Jamon Serrano was brown and I had to throw it away. Maybe if you go in person they will give you the good one but not over the mail. I paid over $25 for 2 ounces, which I am ok with the price but to get brown Jamon Serrano that is not right, if you guys take pride of selling Spain products, you should sell the good stuff not brown Jamon. The chorizo had no taste and it said it was spicy (a joke) and the Basque beans from Tolosa were red. Anybody that knows a bit about the Basque beans from Tolosa they are not red, they are black. In conclusion, please don't buy from them because they are sending you rotten or fake products. You should look at La Tienda better products and better customer service. Sois una verguenza que ni si quiera teneis la poca responsabilidad de contestar a mi email....

Their shipment and tracking is a complete mess, and under no circumstance would I recommend spending money with them.

First, their stated breakdown of "perishable/non-perishable" at checkout was completely inaccurate for my order and stated that only two chorizos would be sent by second day air with the rest, including ham pieces, sent as standard.

This wound up not being true and over 200 dollars of meats were sent 2 day with no shipment notification (not even in the junk folder which they have issues with due to spamming multiple emails), no tracking number, and and no signature so it rotted in my mailroom until I got the delivery notification for the "non-perishable" goods.

This is the worst experience I've ever had buying perishable goods and I will be going with Tienda from now on as overpriced...