The restaurant's interior décor and service were nice, but don't come here if you're expecting good Spanish food. Spanish / Mediterranean is one of my favourite cuisines, so it's very rare that I encounter a Spanish restaurant that I dislike... more specifically, I had never encountered paella that I didn't like (paella being one of my favourite rice dishes), until I came to this place.
The restaurant was completely empty when we went, and we soon found out why.
First, to highlight the positives: the server (who doubled as a bartender) was very nice and friendly. Food came out in a decent amount of time. The restaurant had a nice ambiance with cool artwork on the walls (it had a bohemian artsy vibe). But the food wasn't their best. Don't come here if you're vegetarian or simply like to have at least a bit of veggies with your meal.
The menu posted in front of the restaurant was different than the menu presented once inside. On the restaurant window, the menu had 3 different types of salad available. That wasn't the case. The only salad that we could order, Fig Salad, should've been named "bacon or meat salad" because there was more fatty meat than greens. There were a couple of pieces of Romaine lettuce, mixed with a ton of ham, thick bacon (or bacon-like meat pieces), and shredded meat that was very hard to separate from the green leaves. Yuck. It was also a very non-dimensional salad with no other vegetable ingredients (no tomato, onion, shredded carrot, pepper, or any other ingredients typically found in regular salads). Just lettuce and meat (that I had a hard time removing from the salad). We finally ordered just the lettuce on its own after, because that was the only vegetable "side" that we could order (off the menu).
I've always liked paella at every Spanish restaurant I've visited, except for this one. We ordered both of their paella dishes: Seafood Paella and Mushrooms Paella. Both were terrible. The rice reminded me of when you cook rice in a rice cooker, but put too much water, so the texture is very mushy. Traditional paella usually contains saffron and is very aromatic and flavourful. I tasted none of the saffron in both paellas. The Mushrooms Paella was the worst out of the two - very spicy, saucy (but not a good taste), and had no other veggie or texture other than mushy rice covered with thick spicy sauce.
Seafood Paella was flavourless mushy rice with very tiny rings of calamari (see picture to see how small they were) and some mussels had no meat or very shrivelled up / dry mussel meat inside the shell (I thought someone had eaten the inside and put the shell back on the rice). The prawns, however, were decent - big and flavourful.
Grilled Octopus was okay but I wish they didn't cover the pieces with so much thick sauce. I liked the "mashed potatoes" that it came with because it wasn't like the traditional smooth American-style mashed potatoes (mixed with butter). This was simply boiled potatoes smashed down, where you can still see some pieces of actual potatoes in the mix. It was the only decent real carb that wasn't overly dressed or saucy, and went pretty well with the octopus. But for a main dish, again, it was very non-dimensional and felt very lacking (wish there were at least some veggies in the dish). read more