Visit to El Palmar

Paella is emblematic of Valencia. It is the regional dish that made it big worldwide. But, if you have not had a paella in Valencia, you really have not had paella. It’s serious business around here and on Sunday we went to check out THE place to eat the local specialty: El Palmar.

El Palmar is a tiny little village about 20km south of València, on the south tip of the beautiful Parc Natural de l’Albufera, basically a large lake with a park around it, surrounded by rice fields … rice fields that produce the rice that is the basis for all great paellas. I wonder if the Spanish rice I used to buy in Victoria was from here. The village itself is two blocks wide and ten blocks deep, surrounded on all sides by canals leading to the lake and every single street-level business is a restaurant. I am not joking. There may be a grocery store or car repair shop somewhere but we definitely did not see it.

Who is “we”? you may ask. Well, I have now tripled the number people I know in Valencia by meeting a couple of Ewa’s friends, Agata and Marek, who are her fellow students of Spanish. We all took a bus out to El Palmar and after a half hour long ride we got off on the northern tip of the village. Arriving a bit early for lunch (most places here don’t open for lunch until 1:30pm), we decided to wander around and see the town … or village, it’s really just a village. Someone had given A&M recommendations for a few restaurants so we thought we could locate them, see what they had on offer (paella), and decide which one looked best. We also wanted to find the Michelin Star one that was recommended but we all decided that it probably would be way too expensive to actually try out.

The main street of El Palmar, other than offering restaurant upon restaurant, did have one point of interest in the form of a traditional Valencian house, many years old, with a thatched roof and white adobe walls. Apparently there are a few still around, some renovated, some clearly having seen better days.

After going up and down the four village streets, we started noticing that all the outside tables, previously clear, started sporting little pieces of paper attached to them. After further inspection, we surmised that these were reservations and the more we looked the more we realized that unless we choose a place, and quickly, we may have made the trip for nothing. When we first arrived there were very few cars in the many parking lots surrounding the place and even fewer people on the streets, but now the lots were quickly filling up. It seems many people make their way from Valencia and the surrounding towns to El Palmar for their traditional Sunday paella but they also, very wisely, make reservations first. Slightly panicked we picked one of the recommended places, Restaurants Bon Aire, and made a reservation for 1:30pm. With over an hour to kill we decided to continue walking around but after a bit of that, sitting down for a pint seemed like a much better idea — it was a pretty hot day. Fortunately there were still some seats left in a place in the main town square: as good a place to wait for lunch as any.

Eventually, as our tummies were starting to make really rude noises, it was time to go have our paella. We had pre-ordered a couple, one a traditional “Valenciana” (chicken, rabbit, duck, and snails), the other a “Mixta” (chicken, seafood, squid), hoping that once we sit down we’ll be able to eat right away. Or so the thinking went. To our disappointment, it still took quite a while to get the food, and by then we were very hungry and also a little tipsy on some very good wine. It also occurred to us that ordering just the paellas wasn’t as good a deal as ordering the special menus; once you add the drinks and dessert the price we paid would have been the same as the daily menus and we would have had much more food. So, word to the wise: always go for the daily menu! That said, I found the paellas, once they arrived, quite delicious. My Polish friends, however, found them way too salty, a sentiment they have shared about all the paellas they’d ever had. I have to admit I find that a little strange: salt is salt, no matter where, right? Their reaction to the saltiness tells me that maybe Polish salt is less salty than Spanish or Canadian salt so their palates are not used to it. I remember thinking Chilean salt wasn’t as salty as Canadian salt, so maybe there is something to that?

In any case, I found the rice delicious, and the dessert just as tasty. I would definitely go back there and try more places, including the Michelin Star one. Looking back I can tell you that their prices were not any higher than any of the other restaurants in El Palmar. The other thing I would like to go back for is a boat tour of the Albufera lake … had we known we had plenty of time before lunch, we would have done one. I look forward to going back!