Jean Galea

Health, Wealth, Relationships, Wisdom

The Best Restaurants in Barcelona

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Barcelona is a fantastic place for food lovers. There is a wide variety of cuisines available to cater for all tastes and price points. Here are my favorites:

Japanese

  • Sato i Tanaka – A highly-regarded Japanese restaurant offering an intimate dining experience, with a focus on fresh sushi and creative fusion dishes, prepared by chefs Sato and Tanaka.
  • Suto – An intimate restaurant where the chef cooks and interacts with you.
  • Shunka – Renowned for its authentic Japanese cuisine and exceptional sushi, Shunka provides a cozy atmosphere and has earned a reputation as one of Barcelona’s best Japanese restaurants.
  • Aiueno – A trendy Japanese eatery known for its modern, minimalist decor and innovative menu, featuring a variety of beautifully-presented dishes, including sushi, sashimi, and tempura.
  • Minamo – Offering a unique dining experience, Minamo combines traditional Japanese flavors with Mediterranean influences, served in a serene, zen-like atmosphere with a stunning water-covered ceiling.
  • Usagui – Super tasty desserts and authentic Japanese food: As the name suggests, Usagui is famous for its delicious desserts and authentic Japanese dishes, including ramen, curry, and donburi, served in a warm, inviting setting.
  • Mutenroshi – Themed around the popular Dragon Ball anime, Mutenroshi offers a fun dining experience with creative Japanese dishes, including ramen and fusion tapas, perfect for fans and newcomers alike.
  • Hitsumabushi – Specializing in eel dishes, Hitsumabushi serves up a variety of unagi-based meals in a stylish, contemporary setting, allowing diners to savor this traditional Japanese delicacy.
  • Sensato – Known for its high-quality sushi and sashimi, Sensato offers an authentic Japanese dining experience, complete with a sushi bar, where guests can watch the skilled chefs at work.
  • 富士鷹 Fujitaka Teppan Okonomiyaki – A cozy, family-run restaurant offering a taste of Osaka with its delicious teppan okonomiyaki, Fujitaka also serves other Japanese favorites, like takoyaki and yakisoba, in a casual and friendly atmosphere.
  • Ekubo
  • Kurai

Healthy

  • Les Tres a la Cuina – Healthy homemade food lunch set menu at 9 Euro.
  • The Green Spot – Excellent cocktails and the best vegan pizza ever. Might be overpriced, but the ingredients are top quality.

Indian

Fusion

Arabic

  • Iakni – Best Lebanese food in Barcelona.
  • Lazeez – Great lebanese.
  • Mazah – Great Lebanese food, so and so service.
  • Karakala – Our go-to lunch set menu during the weekend. Lebanese food.

Italian

  • Il Cuore di Napoli – Hands down the best Napoletan pizza in Barcelona: This authentic Italian pizzeria prides itself on serving the finest Neapolitan pizza in the city, featuring a wood-fired oven and traditional ingredients imported directly from Naples.
  • Don Kilo – A trendy Italian restaurant with a focus on high-quality, fresh ingredients, Don Kilo offers a variety of homemade pasta, risotto, and pizza dishes, as well as an extensive wine list in a modern, stylish setting.
  • Sartoria Panattieri – With a reputation for crafting some of the best pizzas in the country, Sartoria Panattieri combines traditional Italian techniques with a contemporary twist, offering an extensive menu of gourmet pizza options.
  • La Macchina Pasta Bar – Quick and tasty pasta at decent prices: A casual, laid-back eatery, La Macchina Pasta Bar serves up a wide selection of freshly-made pasta dishes, prepared quickly and at affordable prices, perfect for a satisfying Italian meal on the go.
  • Nonna Maria – Authentic Italian food: Inspired by the flavors of home-cooked Italian meals, Nonna Maria offers a warm, inviting atmosphere and a menu filled with classic dishes like lasagna, osso buco, and tiramisu, all made with love and care.
  • La Balmesina – Check out the menu del dia too: A charming Italian restaurant featuring a daily rotating menu, La Balmesina offers delicious, seasonal dishes made from fresh, local ingredients in a cozy, rustic setting. Also try sister restaurant Gina Balmesina.
  • Acqua & Farina – A welcoming Italian eatery known for its homemade pasta and wood-fired pizzas, Acqua & Farina focuses on using high-quality ingredients to create authentic Italian dishes, served in a warm and friendly environment.
  • Mitoa – Great pizza place.

Mediterranean

Catalan

Argentinian

  • La Parrillada
  • Av. Corrientes

Asian

Greek

Polish

Russian

Chinese

  • Oso Panda – A popular Chinese eatery known for its wide variety of delicious dishes, Oso Panda offers a cozy atmosphere and a menu featuring both classic Chinese favorites and unique fusion creations.
  • Wenzhou – Specializing in cuisine from the Wenzhou region of China, this restaurant offers a diverse and authentic menu, featuring dishes like dumplings, noodle soups, and an array of seafood options, all served in a welcoming, traditional setting.
  • Chengducheng – Focusing on the flavors of Sichuan cuisine, Chengducheng provides guests with a spicy and tantalizing culinary experience. The menu showcases the region’s bold and complex flavors, with dishes like mapo tofu, kung pao chicken, and hot pot, all served in a vibrant, contemporary atmosphere.

Peruvian

  • Toma Ya
  • Cevicheria La Barraca
  • Sr Ceviche

Vegetarian

Tapas

  • Viana – My candidate for best tapas in Barcelona.
  • Tosca – Really awesome tapas.
  • La Mundana

Burgers

  • Da Paola – Best burgers in BCN.
  • Bacoa – Epic burgers. Many branches around town.

Steak

Cafes

  • Federal Cafe – Good food and coffee and excellent spot for working.
  • Coffee Hackers
  • Abyss

Masias

  • Can Jane
  • Can Carbonell
  • Can Borrell
  • Can Travi Nou
  • Can Cortada

Take Away

Brunch

  • Enkel – Great brunch selection including sandwiches, eggs in different styles, shakshuka and arepas. Nice juices too.
  • La Esquina
  • Check this site for more brunch options

Fine Dining

  • 130 Restaurant – Wagyu meat and fantastic service in La Bonanova
  • Ekubo – Authentic Japanese in Eixample
  • Mae
  • Disfrutar
  • Hofmann
  • Quirat

Paella

In La Barceloneta:

  • Can Ros
  • La mar salada
  • Ca la Nuri

In Montjuic (good views if u get a nice table)

  • Terraza Martinez
  • Arrosseria Xàtiva (for a more authentic paella)

Other options

Sweets

Calçots

The best calçots are found in Valls, where they make a popular fiesta every year in honor of this delicacy.

If you want to try them out in places closer to Barcelona, you will have to be careful when choosing, as there are many places that are rip-offs with low-quality products.

Here are the places I recommend based on my own experience or that of trusted local friends.

Do you know any other awesome places for eating calçots?

How I Find a New Restaurant to Try

There’s something special about eating out beyond not having to cook and do the dishes. Whether you’re eating alone or with someone close to you, there’s a certain quality to eating at a restaurant that can’t be replicated at home. Unfortunately, going to the same restaurant time after time can get a little stale.

Finding a new restaurant can often be a challenge, as you won’t know what kind of food to expect, what their best dishes are, and what the interior is like. Here are some strategies I recommend.

Take a Walk

By far the most proven method for finding a new restaurant is going out and taking a walk until you find one that you like. Physically exploring each restaurant allows you to get a feel for the atmosphere, and you can take the time to talk to the staff about their menu and what dish they think is best.

Nobody will know what you like better than you do, so experiencing the various options for yourself can help ensure that you make the right choice. If you’re going out to dinner with someone else, you can always make this a fun part of the night as you explore for the perfect place.

Ask Friends and Acquaintances

If walking around sounds a little too tedious, you can instead ring up some foodie acquaintances who’ll be sure to give you the scoop about any great places in town. Since your friends know you and your preferences, they will also be more qualified than a stranger on the internet.

You can even ask your friend if they’d like to come along to the restaurant with you, considering they recommended it. This technique obviously won’t work if you’re on vacation or if you’ve recently moved to a new place and haven’t gotten a chance to get to know people yet.

Use a Restaurant Finder App

These apps can help you find new restaurants regardless of where you are, and they will usually have a taste profile that can help find the best places for you.

While a restaurant finder app won’t know you as well as your friends, it will have a repertoire of all of the restaurants in your immediate area, which can be even more helpful. You can then go through the various options and check out images, menus, and reviews to help you find the best one.

Conclusion

Finding a new restaurant doesn’t always have to feel impossible, and these three methods make it far simpler.

When I’m looking for something new in Barcelona I also look at the Plateselector or Barcelona Food Experience websites to find new ones. Traveler also has a great list of menus del dia in Gracia, my favorite barrio in Barcelona.

If you’d like to learn what are the most typical dishes in Catalonia and other regions of the world, I recommend Taste Atlas.

What are your favorite restaurants in Barcelona?

📁 How to do Time Machine Backups with a Synology Diskstation NAS

Last updated: 16 Comments

backup synology time machine

It’s important that before you start you understand the concept of volumes on Synology Diskstations, because that’s the first thing you will need to set up before you set up Time Machine backups.

Volumes on the Synology Diskstation

You can use the Synology RAID calculator to help determine how you want to set up volumes. That being said, in this case you want to just make one, and then create shares to logically organize things.

The advantage to creating multiple volumes comes when you are using different size drives, want different levels of redundancy, or have significantly different uses .Let’s take an example a NAS with 4 x 6TBb drives. The only advantage you would gain would be less loss of data if an array fails, but at the cost of a higher risk of array failure.

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🆚 PayPal VS Wise Borderless

Last updated: 26 Comments


Wise introduced borderless banking in 2017. The big advantage it gives you is that you can have bank accounts in multiple currencies. As soon as they launched I started to think of how it could help me get rid of PayPal and its high fees.

First, let me introduce you briefly to Wise Borderless. If you want to read my full review of this product, do browse over to my review of Wise Borderless.

The vast majority of entrepreneurs I know require a combination of accounts in these three major currencies:

  • US Dollars (USD)
  • Euro (EUR)
  • British Pounds (GBP)

The problem so far has been the simple fact that it’s unnecessarily and frustratingly hard or downright impossible to open a bank account in another country than the one your business is based in.

So for example if your business is based in the UK, but you make all your online sales in USD, you would probably want a USD account so that you would be able to transfer money to it without losing on exchange rates.

This problem is now solved with Transferwise’s borderless banking system. Once you open an account with Transferwise, you will be able to apply for borderless banking and select the accounts you need (USD, EUR and GBP available at the moment). Within two days you will have them in place and you can then start receiving client payments to these accounts.

So what are borderless accounts?

Your borderless account is a bit like having local accounts all over the world, without having to open a real bank account abroad.

It’s a multi-currency account that lets you keep money in 28 currencies, and convert between them at the real exchange rate whenever you need.

You get bank details (like account numbers, bank codes and IBANs) issued by TransferWise so you can receive money in different currencies around the world with zero fees. These aren’t actual bank accounts (they only work similarly to bank accounts), so you don’t have to fill in any forms or have a foreign proof of address. They’re your unique bank details issued by TransferWise to you, that you can give to your friends, company or customers in the US, UK, Eurozone and Australia to get paid in those countries as if you had a bank account there, with zero fees.

How do they work?

  • Add money to your account in any of the supported currencies. Then activate the currencies you want to convert to or hold money in.
  • Convert money between your currencies in seconds whenever you need, always at the real exchange rate, with our low conversion fees.
  • Send money directly from any currency in your account to pay bills, pay friends or move it to another account of your own.
  • Activate AUD, EUR, GBP or USD in your account to get account numbers and IBANs. Give them to your friends, company or customers to receive those currencies from any bank account in Australia, Eurozone, UK or US with zero fees.

Wise vs PayPal

I’ve written about the loss of money due to currency conversion when using PayPal before, so I was hoping that Borderless Banking would solve this issue once and for all.

First Use Case – Invoicing Clients

The first thing I thought of was to replace PayPal completely with TransferWise. Instead of issuing my clients invoices through PayPal, I would ask them to send money directly to my Borderless accounts thus incurring no fees. Apart from incurring no fees to receive the money, I would also avoid the currency conversions, since I now have accounts in the four major currencies I use the most.

TransferWise works perfectly in this case, and for this purpose I was able to eliminate PayPal completely from my workflow.

Second Use Case – Paying Employees or Freelancers Globally

I’ve always used PayPal to pay my employees or collaborators who work in other countries, but this is expensive for both me and them. Again, TransferWise Borderless proved to be a great solution.

I can recommend the borderless accounts for this purpose as you will definitely save a ton of money.

Third Use Case – Withdrawing money from PayPal

Unfortunately, I still had to keep on using PayPal as it is one of the most comfortable ways to set up automated payments for digital products, especially in countries where Stripe is not yet established.

The problem, as I described in another post, is that PayPal charges hefty fees for currency conversions when withdrawing money to your bank account. Even if you use my method to eliminate the conversion on PayPal’s end, you will still have the money converted automatically by your bank when it arrives there. The ideal solution is to have USD be transferred from PayPal to a USD bank account, and so on and so forth with the other currencies. This makes borderless perfect for the job.

My idea was to add each of my borderless accounts to PayPal as withdrawal methods.

However, after checking with PayPal, they have informed me that at this stage they don’t support virtual bank accounts, which is what TransferWise’s Borderless banking solution is classified as.

2Checkout do not allow withdrawals to a Borderless Banking account unfortunately, so I can’t use them there either.

It would also be interesting to know what Stripe are doing, so if any of my readers wants to try that, do leave a comment with the results.

You should be able to use Borderless Banking with other services that support bank wire transfers, such as affiliate systems like Avangate and Shareasale.

While I did not have any luck adding the borderless accounts to PayPal, several readers have reported that they managed to do so by calling PayPal directly. I hate waiting on calls to be honest, and the prospect of dealing with some PayPal rep and trying to convince them to do something like this wasn’t very enticing, so I didn’t bother.

If you want to try it, here’s how:

Go to the contact page within your PayPal account, click call us and you’ll get a freephone number to call (which works on Skype too) and a code to give them. Once you call you have to answer some security questions, then give them the ACH routing number and account number of the Transferwise US bank account. If you’re lucky it will show up instantly on your PayPal account as the Community Federal Savings Bank.

Wrapping Up

This is a great step in the right direction. Revolut released something similar earlier this year, but TransferWise’s solution is better. The last step now is for everyone to be able to use this type of account with PayPal for withdrawals.

In any case, you can still ask clients to pay you to one of your multi-current Wise Borderless accounts, and that’s already a huge bonus for those entrepreneurs and companies who receive invoice payments directly rather than through payment gateways such as 2Checkout, Stripe or PayPal.

Don’t forget that you can now also get a TransferWise debit card, which gives you direct access to your multi-currency Borderless accounts so that you can spend your money anywhere around the world where cards are accepted.

Sign up to Wwise Borderless Banking

  1. Are You Losing out from PayPal’s Exchange Rates?
  2. 🤔 Which PayPal Account is Best for You?
  3. 💸 Changing Your PayPal Withdrawal Currency
  4. 💸 Understanding PayPal Cross Border Fees
  5. How to Withdraw From PayPal into a Maltese Bank Account
  6. 💳 Withdrawing Money From PayPal for Non-US Accounts
  7. Which PayPal E-Commerce Checkout Service Should You Use?
  8. 🤔 Should You Open Separate PayPal Accounts for Each of Your E-Commerce Stores?
  9. 🆚 PayPal VS Wise Borderless
  10. 💳 Linking Virtual Bank Accounts and Cards to PayPal (Revolut, Wise etc)
  11. How to Change Ownership of a PayPal Account

How to Learn a New Language

Last updated: 4 Comments

I’m currently fluent in four languages (Maltese, English, Spanish and Italian), and I’m aiming to reach fluency in a few more languages within the next ten years.

I have some knowledge of Catalan, Portuguese, French and Russian too.

It’s fair to say that I’ve spent a good chunk of time dabbling in languages ever since my teenage years. I’ve also tried my hand at Chinese before realizing I didn’t have enough time or energy to get good at it. I still hope to get back to it at some point.

I’ve mostly used Duolingo, class lessons, and 1-to-1 lessons on Italki. I found Duolingo great for the initial steps and building vocabulary, while Italki is really good for advancing fast, provided you find the right teacher. I haven’t had great experiences in a class setting, except for when I took Catalan lessons, as we had a fantastic teacher and a great group of students as well.

Resources for Learning Spanish

Over the past ten years, I’ve been learning Spanish in different ways. Here are my favorite resources.

Portuguese

You have Brazilian or European Portuguese. If your intention is to work or live in Portugal or other European territories I would recommend you learn the European version.

This is the website I use apart from having a teacher on iTalki:

Learn European Portuguese

Focus on Sound and Pronunciation

Most people struggle with sound, and it is quite evident that sound can be critical to being understood and understanding others.

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Chicken Breast Fillets in Cream and Parsley Sauce

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Machine used: Bosch Autocook Pro multi-cooker

Today’s recipe is one of the easiest you can prepare and is ideal for those who are using the multicooker for the first time.

Ingredients (4 servings)

  • 4 small chicken fillets (180g each)
  • 300ml fresh cream
  • Half a handful of parsley
  • 2 cloves of garlic
  • Salt and pepper
  • Olive oil

Directions

Start with the sauce by peeling and chopping the garlic. Wash the parsley and slice it up. Mix the garlic and the parsley with the cream and add some salt and pepper to the cream. I tend to use my judgment with salt and pepper, erring on the lesser side. You can always add more salt and pepper when the meal is ready if needed.

Spread enough olive oil to cover the bottom of the AutoCook’s pot. Add salt and pepper to the chicken breasts and place them in the pot. Then select the Fry program and the Medium option and press the Start button.

Cook the chicken breasts for 6 minutes and then flip them over to cook the other side. Keep the AutoCook’s top cover open at all times. Check the time left on the AutoCook’s lid. When there are only 2 minutes left, add the cream sauce to the chicken breasts. Keep frying the chicken breasts together with the cream sauce until the AutoCook emits its end of program sound.

That’s it! You can now serve the chicken breasts with an accompanying plate such as rice or pasta. Alternatively, if you are trying to restrict intake of grains, you can use vegetables. I slice up a tomato and add some broccoli to end up with a colorful and healthy dish that tastes great for lunch or dinner.

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Jean Galea

Investor | Dad | Global Citizen | Athlete