Barcelona

View Larger Map Another lunchtime restaurant review. I ventured over the Gran Via again on the look out for a new restaurant choice for our lunches at work. Paris Condal is a small restaurant with an attached snack bar. They got pictures of some food in the window, which usually puts me off, but I had a good experience in Andorra so I went in anyway. The restaurant has maybe ten tables and smoking is allowed. I don't understand why anyone would have smokers in a restaurant, but there you go. The bathrooms are dirty like a dark corner in Raval. The lunch menu is 9.90 EUR and I had dolmades as starter, couscous as main and a cortado. Dolmades are rice wrapped in grape leaves on a little bit of boring salad. These seem to come from a tin and were certainly neither fresh or handmade. I wonder what is the point to present something like this in a restaurant. The couscous was nice, a mixture of minestrone and lamb stew with a bit of couscous. It was very well seasoned and not greasy. But I am not sure if I would call it a mains, in another restaurant it probably would make a very nice starter. The cortado was good and hot, which was nice. Overall I give this restaurant one star, because I see some potential and I would try it again.

View Larger Map Because my last restaurant review was so successful here is another one. It was also mentioned on the Python Meetup that it is a bit difficult to find good restaurants in Barcelona, because most of them are mediocre, especially for the lunch menu. I have been there now four times and the food was always good and the service excellent. The lunch menu is very good value for money. For about 10 Euro you get a good sized starter, a main, dessert and a soft drink or wine. Today I had tempura as a starter, which was very fresh and crispy. Other choices are gyoza style dumplings, korean tortilla, sea weed or miso soup. There is also always a complimentary serving of kim chi, pickled cucumbers and pancakes. For mains I had spicy Korean beef with rice. In the evening you can get this and other courses also prepared on a barbecue, which is in the middle of each table. For this it is the best to order a few different items and share them between your group as you can always just put one onto the grill. Other options are sushi, noodles and tofu. I usually don't take dessert but the rice sweets and fried honey bananas are good and my friends seem to like the ice too. Altogether a very nice experience, all the food is fresh and the service is very friendly.

I tried a new restaurant for lunch today to expand the current set of choices. (not everything on there is good) It is called green&wich, located at C/Villaroel and Gran Via, they don’t seem to have a website yet. The location is nice, the space is open to the busy street, the design is minimal and the chairs and tables are a bit wobbly. They have two menus. I went for the 7.90 one, which gives you a salad, a sandwich, drink and a coffee. I had a rocket, tomato and parmesan salad, which was soggy but still had hard stems in it. A pretty awful combination. The “asia” sandwich was ok, but not much better than the packaged ones you get in the supermarket. Barcelona really does need a Pret-A-Manger to show the locals what fresh a sandwich looks like. I had a cortado for coffee, which still contained coffee powder. The search continues…

I just returned from the Barcelona phpconference.es . It was a small on day conference, with just a few talks and not many big names. It was also really cheap at 20€. The organization was very good, especially for Spain. It was held at citilab in Cornellà Centre, which is at the very end of one of the metro lines. There were two rooms with parallel talks. The talks were all in english, which was a change from the last PHP conference. Wifi was available everywhere and there were free drinks and food. In the morning I got hassled a bit by companies looking for developers, though nothing which convinced me to quit my job yet. I am glad that there are companies like this available in Barcelona though, as they seem to be interested in improving the communitiy through supporting events like this instead of seeing PHP or open source just as the “free beer” option. I enjoyed the talk about PEAR and the one about xdebug. But none of the talks was really advanced and each one was more or less just an introduction to the topic. One thing I noticed was the number of netbooks in use by the attendees. I would say the distribution was 30% netbooks, 40% mac and 30% for the rest. I just bought a Asus Eee PC, which is my first portable computer – but more about this another time. Overall I must say that I am probably not a conference person. I enjoy the talks, but I am not so much av crowd person and probably could get the same information spending a day in front of firefox and youtube. But I will give it a another try next time.

Went to see Magda, Gaiser and Richie Hawtin at the Red Bull Music Academy M_NUS @ BAM. It started at midnight, which is a more civilised time than the usual 3:00 we get here in Barcelona. Magda was very good, Gaiser was ok and Hawtin had his good moments. I think Hawtin now has the same problem as Sven Vaeth, he is just too popular and his productions and studio mix sessions are way better than his live sets. It is a pity, because I remember a lot of good parties with him a few years ago. The visuals were also especially good, I have to find out who created them. Also very minimal, abstract and like a good screensaver. It wasn’t a projection, but a enormous LED display wall with one part below the DJ desk. Very good times, can we have more of this please?