Saturday 15 September 2012

The Tastes of Spain: Part 2

Spain is famous for it’s tapas food. You might say that when people talk about Spanish food, tapas is the first thing that comes to mind. During our time in Barcelona, Cara and I were excited to find some good quality tapas to sink our teeth into. After doing a little bit of research, we found a bar which boosted to have, not only the best tapas in Barcelona, but the best tapas in spain. This bar was called "Quimet & Quimet”. 

Many bars and cafe’s claim to have the best tapas around, but Quimet & Quimet had glowing reviews from many different travel websites. So with that in mind, our expectations were high and we were excited to see what they had to offer. As we arrived to the little cafe style bar, we were instantly impressed with the wide variety of wines along with the range of fresh foods. We’d heard that Quimet & Quimet pride themselves on freshness. The tapas on offer included, fresh seafood such as prawns, salmon, sardines and anchoivies, a variety of olives, stuffed peppers, a selection of breads served with olive oil for dipping, along with much more. But one thing that the team at Quimet obviously loved was cheese. The variety of cheeses was astounding.  So with this in mind, Cara and I had some tough decisions on what to order. We decided to get a nice glass of white wine and a selection of breads, olives, prawns and the famous cheese selection. 

The bread selection was a mixture of the basic pita bread, crusty bread, croutons and water crackers. It also included some homemade olive bread and chilli bread which was all very tasty. The freshness of these breads made the taste amazing just on it’s own, but it gets even better when mixed with different oils and stuffed peppers. The prawn dish was a very elaborate concoction which consisted of a slice of olive bread, a marinated pepper, with a king prawn on top and finally finished of with a spoonful of black caviar. I’m not much of a seafood eater, but I couldn’t resist trying something new and this was a dish I knew would be hard to find anywhere else in the world. We weren’t disappointed either. I expected a strong "fishy" flavour, but it surprised me. It did contain a seafood taste, but the peppers and the olive bread balanced the dish out nicely which made it so enjoyable to eat. Our olives were just a simple serving of chilli and garlic marinated olives, but freshness goes a long way, which made these olives very tasty. Lasty was our outstanding cheese selection. If you are a cheese fiend and just happen to be in Barcelona, Quimet & Quimet is an absolute must. The selection was amazing. I wish I knew what all the cheeses were, but I just couldn’t tell. There were flavours which we couldn’t pick. The obvious ones were, goat’s cheese, blue cheese, feta and mozzarella, but the others I couldn’t tell.  It didn’t matter though. We were both enjoying our tapas and savouring every bite. As we continued eating, we looked at some of the other delicacies on offer. Olives stuffed with sardines, Salmon served with yogurt and truffle honey, mussels and clams all seem to be popular. As I’m sure you’ve gathered, the menu was predominately seafood tapas. There was a meat selection, which seemed to be very similar to an Italian anti-pasti meal. So we decided to stay clear of that and try some different things, and we are so glad we did. 


By the end, we both agreed that we’d definitely found the best tapas in Barcelona, maybe even Spain. Our visit to Quimet & Quimet was certainly one of the highlights of our trip to Barcelona. We hope to return to Spain in the future to try some more tapas and see if anyone can rivals the food we’ve had. 


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