Spanish Food — What to Eat and What It Costs
Tapas culture, paella done right (and wrong), and what it actually costs.
Spanish food isn't really 'ordered' so much as grazed: a plate of jamón here, a few tapas there, dinner that doesn't start until 9pm. A tapa runs $2–6, a full sit-down meal $12–25 per person, and a nice dinner with wine $25–45. The two dishes to get right: tapas (order a few per person and share, don't get one entrée each) and paella (it's a Valencian rice dish, not a seafood-and-saffron catch-all — the version aggressively photographed on a Ramblas menu board is almost never the good one).
Spanish food trips up more travelers than it should, and almost always for the same reason: ordering it like it's a normal European cuisine with starters and mains, instead of the shared, grazing, absurdly-late-dinner culture it actually is. Here's what to actually order, roughly what it costs, and how to spot a paella that was made for a tour group instead of for you.
