Plenty of Paella

Could you ever imagine a restaurant dedicated to only Paella? Well in New York they have restaurants dedicated to everything. French fries, mac and cheese, pizza cones, doughnuts and I'm sure plenty others. Socarrat is a semi-new joint in the heart of Chelsea that basically runs on serving huge amounts of paella. Of course they have other Spanish inspired tapas but it's the paella you go for.

The restaurant is known for its long waits and tiny establishment. There is only one long table in the middle of the restaurant and it's kind of like a puzzle to determine how long your party is going to wait. Fortunately for my group of 5 and other hungry patrons, the wine bar next to Socarrat now serves the whole menu and not only a few selected tapas like it used to.

I was the last to show up and was so happy when we had our own table in the wine bar and a glass of sangria at my seat. I was extremely nervous that we were going to be told that we had to wait at least an hour. Our waitress was straight out of Spain and recommended we get around 4 tapas to share and two different paellas. You have to order at least paella for 2 people and we heard the portions were huge so we stuck with two paellas each for two people.

We started out with the beef empanadas, chicken croquettes, almonds and olives, the sauteed vegetables with melted manchego cheese on top and last but not least the braised pork belly the waitress convinced us to get. She explained that it was braised for at least 24 hours and that its the best thing on the menu. How can you say no to that?

All the tapas were delicious. I can't taste a difference between an empanada and a croquette except for the filling but they were both good and fried and I liked the empanada better.

The pork belly was worth noting for sure. It didn't have a heavy pork taste and it reminded me of something that I still can't put my name on. The marinate was light and not overpowering also. It came with roasted potatoes underneath, but I didn't get to taste those.

Then out came the biggest skillets I've ever seen with our paella. We got one with meat and one with seafood to satisfy everyone at the table. Turns out that the skillets might be huge, but the actual paella only comes up to about half of an inch, so it was the perfect amount of food. We definitely had leftovers, but couldn't have had just one for five people.

I loved them both and realized that this was the first time I actually have had paella. I could only have one serving of the meat one because the pieces were a little much for me. There were huge chunks of pork rib and rabbit -- two kinds I rarely eat. But the rice was crispier and darker in that dish and I liked that better. The seafood dish was more up my alley, filled with mussels, scallops and calamari. It wasn't as heavy but the rice wasn't as crispy either.

If only they had one with the rice from the meat dish combined with the seafood from the other dish. However, after discussing with my culinary friend Ali, we decided that one of the main reasons the meat paella was so much crispier was because of the fat from the meat cooking the rice more.

We left too full even for churros and chocolate sauce but incredibly satisfied and impressed. My friends were all from South Florida also and they know their Spanish foods and flavor. Good thing it was a nice night out so we could walk all the way home.