A Foodie’s Guide to Valencia Restaurants, Valencia, Spain

I’ve been lucky enough to go to Spain’s sunniest city, Valencia, four times in five years. My brother lives in Valencia part-time, and I’ve visited him every year since he moved there (except of course in the dark days of 2020). So this foodie guide is very much a work in progress: during every trip, I eat in some new restaurants and re-visit some old favourites, tweaking my recommendations as the years go by. My brother is almost as much of a foodie as I am, so unsurprisingly our lunchtimes and evenings turn into a culinary tour of Valencia – tapas, paella, horchata and more…

While many versions of paella are made with various seafood, Valencia’s very own version is made with meat: chicken and rabbit, to be precise. This seems a little unintuitive given that Valencia is right by the sea, but since the city is reputed to be the birthplace of paella I’m not going to argue. That being said, we did cycle to the beach on more than one occasion to eat ours…

In El Cabanyal neighbourhood, La Pepica is one of these large, seaside-y places whose décor doesn’t look like it’s changed much since the ’80s and whose clientele have clearly been coming here for decades as well. Their paella Valenciana is a specialty, and comes according to the traditional recipe with garrofó (a large variety of butter bean), their green bean counterparts (like runner beans but larger), and plenty of aromatic rosemary and saffron. ...... (follow the instructions below for accessing the rest of this article).