PaiGu

Taller de Tapas is a chain restaurant in Barcelona, Spain. We sought out its location in the Barri Gothic district on our first night in Barcelona, having read promising reviews online.

Our server did not speak very much English, but we got by with my Spanish. Service was moderately attentive by North American standards, very attentive by Spanish standards. Although the restaurant was nearly empty when we walked in, it started filling up as the meal went on (mostly with tourists, unfortunately).

We started with a pitcher of sangria, which came with large chunks of fruit. The Spanish really know how to make a good sangria. Then the food started coming.

The deep-fried cuttlefish was the best I’ve ever had, with a practically non-existent batter and fresh cuttlefish. Instead of the usual rubbery-ness of fried foods in the squid family, this cuttlefish was surprisingly tender, although still chewy.

Patatas bravas is the Spanish take on home fries. The potatoes were average but the smoked paprika sauce was an interesting twist from ketchup back home. » Read the rest of this entry «

Guu Izakaya opened its doors in Toronto on December 18, 2009. Since then, Ryerson campus dwellers, the work crowd, Toronto foodies, and Vancouver expats have been pouring through its doors non-stop. From the exterior (and from the usual hour-long line-up outside its doors), the restaurant looks more like an exclusive club than a Japanese “pub”. Izakayas in Japan are affordable watering holes that also serve food for salarymen to hit up before going home. However, when I dragged my own crowd of two Vancouver and one Ottawa expats to Guu on a Saturday night¹, we were mostly interested in the food.

As soon as I pulled open the massive wooden door to its entrance, I was greeted with a loud and energetic chorus of irashaimase! from all over the restaurant. I was temporarily shell-shocked and froze in the entrance way, literally too dazed to take another step. Was this a restaurant? Was I still in Toronto? The warm, lively, chaotic scene before me seemed a world away from the wet, cold, windy, and empty street I had just left. I spotted my friends at the bar and quickly joined them.

The restaurant was not very large, but they seemed to have somehow fit a hundred people inside. The commotion of the Japanese chefs behind the bar, along with everyone else in the place, made it so loud I found it difficult to hear myself speak. Every few seconds, the entire staff would shout a chorus of Japanese together, and I would again be shocked into a daze. It took us a long time to order as the shouting made it hard to focus on the menus in front of us. Time here also seemed to go at a faster pace than the outside world. Our server came by four times before we were ready to order – it seemed like we were taking a long time when in reality, we took no more than twenty minutes. When we finished our meal (in a rather timely fashion I would say), we realized we had maxed out our two-hour time limit, but it felt like no time at all. » Read the rest of this entry «

1. It seems that weekends are not as busy as weekdays. Guu is open daily from 5 pm to midnight; if you go before 6pm, there usually isn’t a line-up. After 6 pm, on a weekday, the wait can be up to two hours. [↩]

trü has been in London since late 2004, but it’s presence has only been felt in more recent years. I’d been to trü before for recruiting events, and had always been impressed by the quality of the finger food and attentive service. However, now that I have gone for dinner, it turns out that it was all a big tease.

When I walked into the restaurant, I was ignored for the first few minutes. After my party of four was seated, I asked about the soup of the day, and our server mumbled something awkwardly after a few seconds and ran away. “What just happened?” I asked my friend. “He seems new, but shouldn’t he have been given some training?”
A new server appeared without introducing herself to answer my soup question. I was confused, was she here to answer the soup question or was she going to be our server? This confusion lasted throughout the meal; our table seemed to have two servers, but neither of them were to be found for most of the night.

My friends were more satisfied with their entrees than mine, for good reason. My Five Mushroom Risotto was undercooked and over salty. Risotto isn’t easy to do well, but if they had wanted me to wait longer, they could have warned me so when I placed my order, and I would have gladly waited¹. The mushrooms were good, but including “three onion” in the name for having leeks, shallots, and chives was overkill. (My pictures came out blurry because I was using a friend’s camera and it couldn’t focus for some reason.)

The Duo of Duck is considered to be one of their specialties. The skin was crispy and the sweet potato puree was delicious. Unfortunately, the duck breast was not tender, which takes away most of the novelty of eating duck as opposed to chicken.

The Casarece pasta was probably the most successful dish, also the easiest. The beef tenderloin was somewhat tender and well-done. The pasta itself was a little soft for home-made pasta, but you could hardly notice it with the inclusion of mushrooms and vegetables. In reality, the Cambazolla cream made the dish, and I think the beef actually interfered with the taste of the cream sauce; I would have preferred this as a vegetarian dish.

It took eons for the server to notice us when we were ready to settle the bill. In the meantime, I checked out their bathroom, which unfortunately reminded me of bathrooms in common bars. Not at all in the vein of “New York posh,” supposedly the inspiration for the rest of the restaurant. If trü aspires to be part of the creme de la creme of restaurants in London, it has a long way to go.

Rating:

1. When I’ve ordered risotto at other places, I have always been warned of the wait time. [↩]