Barraca - Hemel Hempstead

Simply amazing meal. I went for the lamb and it was only melted in her mouth delicious! sweet were incredibly delicious! and the service was of course fantastic! even if the cook came out and gave our table free, gave us the chance to thank him personally! one must visit when they are local:

Overall a good atmosphere. Very friendly bartender/mixologist. The menu is nicely curated and the food was absolutely delicious. The only slight negative was the relatively slow service.

The food presentation was amazing, it all looked so lovely. However I don’t think it’s a very good value for money and I think the price is a bit high. Overall the food was good but I personally was not the biggest fan.

Barraca has an extensive choice of foods and dishes. They also have a separate Romanian menu with a lot of choice as well. We ordered the duck breast, pork belly, Romanian soup, mussels, fries and Romanian cheese donuts. I would recommend the duck breast, which was cooked well. Romanian soup was quite salty though the portion size was more than adequate. The Romanian cheese donuts were quite unique with a combination of sweet and sour tastes. Waitress was friendly however it would've been useful to be informed of what dishes were not available on the day as a lot of the dishes were sold out.

Came here as a group of six after hearing lots of good reviews about the food. They did not disappoint! I had the pork belly bao bun (as pictured), which was tender and full of flavour. My partner had the smoked mackerel pate which was really delicious! Very fishy but not overpowering. For my main course I had a dirty beef burger with sweet potato fries (pictured) which, again, was very tasty. Unfortunately what ruined the meal was the quality of the service. Throughout most of the meal the service was very average, with nobody checking part way through to see if we needed anymore drinks or if the food was okay. After our main dishes were cleared we waited half an hour for a dessert menu, which only came after we ended up asking for it. We then waited another 20 minutes for no one to take our dessert order. In the end we asked for the bill as we decided to get dessert elsewhere. Again, another 20 minutes or so after receiving the bill and we had to actively ask someone for the card machine. Service charge was automatically added so we asked for it to be removed. When the manager asked us what the problem was we explained that the service had been very lacking. His response was I noticed you had been sitting there but some of our staff are in training so I wanted to see what they would do . This was not an acceptable excuse, as the customer should be top priority and the new staff could have been given a prompt from said manager. We remained polite and paid for our meal. This was a real shame as the food was delicious and the presentation impressive, however the quality of the service really let them down.