Barça

I don't see the Spanish influence in this "Spanish-Portuguese" restaurant.  I thought those were typos on the menu.  I do however hear the Portuguese music playing in the background, I've eaten the empanadas, codfish cakes (pateis de bacalhau), shrimp cakes (rissois de camarão), bacalhau a braz and kale soup (caldo verde).  All of it was wonderful.  This is certainly a good place to have a little drink.  Check it out....very colorful atmosphere!

I've been 3 or 4 times in the past and was never wowed by the place. Once before, a friend had reserved a number of tables for her birthday happy hour and the hostess had mistakenly given them all away. The manager put us in the upstairs area because he claimed the tables downstairs were all reserved, but once up there, they wouldn't honor happy hour prices and they kept forgetting we were up there. On top of that, the food was awful and as late as we stayed, those downstairs tables never filled up.

But recently a friend and I both heard that the restaurant was under new management, so we decided to try them again. We came by for happy hour with the idea of drinks and a few tapas to share. I looked over the menu and ordered a Sam Adams Seasonal, which the menu said they had on draft. She came back shortly after with my friends' drinks but said that they didn't sell Sam Adams. Not that they were out, they didn't even sell it. She said I'd have better luck with a bottle than draft so I requested a Blue Moon, which was also on the menu. "No, we don't have that either." she quickly answered. She told me that they just had "regular beers" like Bud, Bud Light, Stella and Heineken. With one last attempt, I requested the Corona Light, also on the menu, and she returned with a Bud Light with a lime in it (That doesn't even take away from the experience, I just wanted to share that funny story.) Apparently they didn't have Corona Light either, but they did have Corona Extra, so that's where we settled. But why not change the menu? The menu looked exactly the same as it had the last time I had been when they were supposedly under different management. I would've even accepted some White-Out over the selections that they no longer offered.

We all decided to order some different tapas. We got chicken wings, cod fish cakes, chicken and beef empanadas and shrimp cakes. The chicken wings were very tasty, dipped in a crispy batter. Some places call them "wing dings". The cod fish cakes used to be my favorite thing on the menu, but this time I wasn't as thrilled. They were flavorless and the only thing that saved them was the dipping sauce that they served with every tapa. The chicken empanadas tasted like a pasty stewed chicken wrapped in a pre-made pocket with no real seasonings and the beef version wasn't much better. The dipping sauce made those worse. Last but not least, the shrimp "cakes" were just chopped up pieces of the smallest shrimp in the sea, over cooked in a sauce that looked a lot like that you'd find in a chicken pot pie, wrapped in the same empanada shell. We didn't even eat that and just cut it open and sent it back. There was nothing cake-like about it.

The service was good, but overall, I saw nothing different about my Barca experience. I'm wondering if my friend and I were both just misinformed about the change in management since nothing indicated a difference. Nice location with ample parking, but I'm done trying.

1 line review:  decent food at reasonable prices with a cool, if empty and cold, atmosphere.

When you walk into the restaurant you'll immediately pick up on the vibrant colors and Latin music playing.  Pretty cool, right?  Yeah, don't get too excited.  You and the other 4 folks in there can shiver together as you wait for the one server to come by and take your order.  Now, getting past the basic ambiance issues, the menu is decent with a nice list of tapas at under $10 and a reasonable selection of meat/seafood Spanish dishes all within a $14-$20 range.   I went with the pork/chicken/clams w/ spicy wine sauce.  The sauce was quite nice with lots of flavor, but the meat/clams were a tad overcooked.  Overall, a good dish that could have been better.  The portion size was generous, so you shouldn't go home hungry.  Final price for 2 people, including a couple glasses wine, $50.