Lobito de Mar is a restaurant in Marbella, Spain which specializes in seafood. The restaurant is by Dani Garcia, a Michelin starred chef in the area.
I had high expectations for this place, and was largely disappointed.
Spain has fantastic ingredients. One of them is blue fin tuna. However, I found very few places which knew how to prepare it properly. Case in point, the tartare. I was so excited to see this on the menu. The menu said o’toro and tuna roe. O’toro is a very fatty piece of tuna and should be sublime and melt in your mouth. Not this one.
For whatever reason, the chefs added some type of salty sauce to the dish (I believe it was Asian fish sauce). The sauce was way too salty and completely overpowered the dish. Why put fish sauce on fish? The O’toro on its own is delicious. Sauce not needed.
Next, Carabineros grilled. These were disappointing too. There was zero grilled flavor in them.
Lastly, the lobster paella.
This actually tasted good, but I do not eat enough Paella to know if it was authentic or “correct” but it did taste good.
My only compliant was that the shells should of been cracked more in the kitchen so that it was less messy to eat. The wine recommendations were good and the sommelier was knowledgeable. However, the service was inconsistent. For example, at the beginning, the sommelier would come by often, but later on, a different guy came by and poured wine into a glass with a different wine. We never saw the sommelier again for the rest of the night even though he said he would be back. Anyway, would not return. 6.5/10