Travel

“This one, honey, this one looks good.”  I said excitedly to Shannon on our first night in Barcelona.  We were standing in front of a small, lofted restaurant with windowed walls, wood furniture and an elaborate artistic white chandelier.

We had been walking through the city for hours and wound up here in Barceloneta, a triangular neighborhood which jettisons out from Barcelona proper and is famous for gorgeous beaches and trendy restaurants.  It was a clear spring evening following a warm eventful day and we were starving and exhausted.

I have a romantic notion about food while on vacation.  I believe that the most incredible meals will be found in restaurants on curvy, dimly lit side streets, run by generations of ego-free chefs who just want to cook incredible food for their family and whoever might be brave or lost enough to stumble down their road.  This theory gets me into a lot of trouble.

We had walked down many a crooked street that day to no avail.  The restaurant we stood in front of that night, Lonja de Tapas, was clearly not the place in my fantasy (a lot of money had been put into the décor and it was very crowded), but low blood sugar was fueling my optimism and I bounded through the door.