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You are here: Home / Journal / Feb 9: 1st night in Barcelona & review of Santa Maria Restaurant in El Born

Feb 9: 1st night in Barcelona & review of Santa Maria Restaurant in El Born

February 10, 2008 by Cheryl Marquez Leave a Comment

Feb 9, 2008: Travel to Barcelona
I just arrived in Barcelona and lucky me, got upgraded to business class on my flight from SFO to London without my knowledge. The gentleman next to me and his wife paid $500 more for each of those tix…all this travel for work I FINALLY get free upgrades, yay!

Anyway, I arrived in Barcelona 24 hours after I leaving San Francisco and I have to say this has been the best flight to Europe in the last 2 years. Baggage claims went without a hitch, no line at the taxi stand, and arrived at my hotel fairly quickly. I gave my colleague a call and said we should have dinner at Santa Maria Restaurant because I saw it on Rachael Ray’s vacation to Barcelona, fortunately I sent him the link via IM when I thought of it in California because the concierge couldn’t find the restaurant online.

Santa Maria Restaurant
Calle Comerc 17, Barcelona 08003
Numero: +34 93 315 12 27

It is an Asian Catalan fusion restaurant in the El Born area of Barcelona with innovative food. We had a 30 minute wait that we put to good use by having drinks at the bar, I had a limonade with anise liquor, I would recommend that you get the limonade suiza that we got with dinner, it is served with a mint leaf and doesn’t have the black licorice flavor as the one with the anise liquor.

Once seated we ordered the “menu disgutacion” which is a tasting menu of the restaurants specialties. Their foie gras is excellent, the outside is crispy and it melts in your mouth. We also had the fried frog legs, which I wouldn’t order if it wasn’t part of the tasting, was light, crunchy, and flavorful (I really enjoyed it). As part of the menu you get mussels which are smaller than the kind we get in the United States, however, the mussels have a sophisticated flavor and melt in your mouth texture. The most innovative thing on the menu was the “Dracula” dessert. It’s a creme anglaise (mouselike custard) with frambuesas (raspberries), and a whipped topping, the waiter recommends that you scoop all the way to the bottom. The surprise in this dessert is that you hear a popping sound when you scoop to the bottom, this is from the hidden ingredient of pop rocks! It’s actually pretty good and the pop rocks popping in your mouth makes this dessert experience memorable. The only thing that I didn’t like was the citrus merengue cafe dessert, everything else, including the vegetables (vegetal in Catalan) was very good, of course no dinner in Barcelona is complete without a little vino. We ordered the house vino tinto (red wine), in general most of the wines I’ve had in Spain are pretty good and fairly inexpensive.

To digest some of the food, you can take a walk to the Museu de Zoologica, it was closed after dinner but a good way to let the food go down a little bit before heading back to the hotel.

I’ll be posting pics soon, I didn’t bring my camera, I have pics of the food and the restaurant.

Sunday: Fira de Barcelona – setting up the booth for Mobile World Congress, yes the unglamorous part of the job.

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About Cheryl Marquez

Cheryl Marquez is an entrepreneurial digital marketing consultant and the former co-founder of Hand Things Down. When she is not jetsetting, she is obsessed with food, fitness & collaborating with amazing people. She describes her life as a constant adventure. Follow her on Twitter @cherylmarquez

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Welcome

Cheryl Marquez is an entrepreneurial digital marketing consultant and the former co-founder of Hand Things Down. When she is not jetsetting, she is obsessed with food, fitness & collaborating with amazing people. She describes her life as a constant adventure. Follow her on Twitter @cherylmarquez Let's dig deeper →

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