Restaurants to avoid in Barcelona: El Gran Cafe

For your own safety, remember this shopfront

Here is a piece of advice that could quite possibly even save your life: If you ever happen to be passing through the Calle Avignon in the Gothic Quarter, and are tempted by a corner restaurant that looks like it would have once been the setting for grandiose lunches, teas and dinners  - hence, i"m assuming the name - RUN. Get your ass over to the nearest Pans & Co and get yourself a boccadillo, or to a supermarket and buy yourself a bag of crisps, or even to McDonalds. Pick food out of a bin, if necessary. Whatever you do, resist any urge to go through the El Gran Cafe's doors.

I ended up having lunch there last Friday because a friend who I'd been meaning to see since I got here did exactly what many visitors to the city would do in the same situation. He fell for the fancy shopfront bait hook, line and sinker, and booked a table for three – himself, me, and another Maltese guy who had also been on my list of people to see since I got here, thinking that the setting would have been perfect for a pre-weekend reunion lunch.

The Tourist Trap alarm should have set off when we sat at a table laid out with Gaudi pattern plates, but since we were too busy catching up, it didn’t. There were other signs: the waiter’s insistence on talking to us in English, even though we were talking to him in Spanish, the over-zealous maitre de … Have I put you off yet? Hold on, I haven’t even started with the food.

El Gran Cafe's interior

OK, the food. It was a lunchtime menu, so we had a choice of three starters, three mains and desserts. I went for a spinach, prawn and something else layered thing, with a gooey sauce that could have been wallpaper paste. The other two opted for pasta – never a good idea in Spain – with a sauce that had the same consistency as mine, though it looked a little more lifeless. In fact, it was the same colour as the pasta. Still, deep in conversation – or maybe not to appear rude – none of us commented on the quality of the food, and chewed our way through it politely.

For mains, two of us were intrigued by the idea of steak tartar a la plancha – a culinary oxymoron if there ever was one – which turned out to be something that looked like a charred burger with a raw inside. And we were the lucky ones. The other member of the party ordered grilled chicken breasts – difficult to get wrong one would think – which he had to return TWICE because it was seriously undercooked, like RAW uncercooked!

To end it all, we had tiramisu ice-cream, which tasted like, well, soap was the only thing I could think of. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the washing up water was being frozen and served with a sprinkling of chocolate flakes.

Needless to say, neither of us will be going through the Gran Café’s doors again, and I thought it was my duty to inform any potential visitors to avoid it like the plague. Actually, coming to think of it, even the plague might be a more pleasant experience.