Lunch by the beach

It was my lovely partner at work, Alan, who first introduced me to the wonders of seafood in Barcelona, and it was also him that recommended going to Can Majo in Barceloneta. As it turns out, it is one of the most popular places in Barcelona to eat seafood, and we soon found out why. It is literally on the beach, with lots of lovely seating outside. But given we are from Hong Kong, we were very happy with our table inside, out of the sun :p

The inside decor is really very simple, and we had a table right by the kitchen. Some would argue this is probably the worst place to sit in a restaurant, but we loved seeing stuff being ferried in and out. There is also an awesome fridge just outside displaying all their treasures:

One thing I really loved was that they were happy to serve everything 'family-style', which is what we're used to in our culture. For starters, we had some octopus Galician style (scoffed too quickly for a photo), and fried small fish (also scoffed, but just enough time to take a teeny photo) - both excellent. The potatoes with the octopus was probably the highlight of that dish, impossibly smooth and waxy, and the fish so sweet and fresh. We also shared a huge shellfish platter, which was really quite bargainous at €36 given that there was copious amounts of langoustines and lobster:

Perhaps the most exciting thing in the platter was their 'spiny sea snails', which were very reminiscent of the 東風螺 we had when we were all kids. Very sweet, and very pretty:

Can Majo is also very famous for its rice, and even though paella is a southern Spanish dish, almost every table seemed to be eating it. Personally I found it a little too rich actually, maybe because the other two dishes were also 'tomatoey':

We also tried some fideua, which is a Catalonian version of paella, made with short vermicelli rather than rice. This I found to be much much better than the paella, they somehow manage to keep the pasta very al dente, and I loved the texture. I've already eaten lunch, but this has gotten me all hungry again:

We also had a rice casserole with lobster, a more brothy affair. I loved how they managed to very fairly split the lobster between our 6 plates, especially as I got some lobster brains - mwahahaha!

Amazingly, the bill came to just over €200 for lunch for 6 people (inc. a very delish bottle of Gewurtztraminer and 2 desserts), very good value given the quality and amount of seafood that we had. Definitely some of the best seafood I've had in Europe, when's the next trip back?