St. James

First impression: old school elegant place with a marina looking touch and a little Newport Beach feel to it.
A look on menu and pricing: 30 EUR for a main meal, signature dishes being paella and fideua. Lots of variations of these two dishes. The place is known for its paellas and it shows already on the menu.
Service: first class, and we certainly looked like un-​fancy tourists coming in. The kind that is easy to please with bad food.
But they treated us as if we were royalty, brought us estra alioli for the fideua. When I mentioned that I really like chocolate they added an extra warm chocolate sauce to one of their desserts.
Price: approx 45 EUR pPerson, including soft drink and a wine. Not cheap, but that you will have to pay if you do not want to eat a tourist rip off paella like the ones you get at Plaza Mayor or Calle Cuchilleros.
Highly recommended restaurant for paella and fideua.

The paella was just ok, not a lot of flavor. Lobster Gazpacho was excellent. Best things were the olives and the mussels which were appetizers we didn’t even order. The servers were so rude. Made us feel very uncomfortable and rushed. Would not recommend. 24 euro for mixto paella, 19 for lobster gazpacho, 15 grilled veggies, 3 bread, mussels and olives. What does this all mean the 3 euro item was the best.

Had an enjoyable meal with an entertaining waiter. The grilled squid was amazing. The restaurant is known for paella, I had lobster, and it was just ok. Not great as I expected.

It was our last meal in Madrid during our time abroad… we wanted to go all out and do it right.
WE DID IT RIGHT.
The paella here was the BEST we had within the four months we were in Spain. The appetizers were amazing. Got the ham & the mussels.
The wine selection here is SO good too. Told my friends to bring back some from this specific restaurant.

Had vegetables from the grill and Galician lobster Paella, which was awesome. Rice and lobster (half wild lobster) were perfectly done and absolutely tasteful.
Atmosphere in restsaurant is rather cool and chief-​waiter did not appear to be fully interested, weak welcome procedure, had to place jacket on hanger on my own, although there was not much going on in the room. On the other hand, waitress very caring about guests. The food has its price, may seem high, but worth it.
Right choice if you focus on the upper-​scale food.

friggin awful. this is the classic dog and pony show bull sh@#t. the st james was recommended by our hotel. this isnt the first time weve followed a recommendation of a hotel only to find ourselves at a joke restaurant that no one who lives anywhere near the city would ever go to. St james, madrid, is a FAKE white table cloth fancy nice restaurant. the paella was awful and thats basically the entire menu. the service is decent yet contrived but the food itself is terrible. theres better food and paella at every dive cerveceria all over madrid.

I do not like writing bad reviews. I would much rather tell you about how wonderful something is than rattle off an insulting diatribe, but sometimes it can’t be helped.
I was in Spain recently on vacation and I actually celebrated my birthday here. That said, I try to approach every situation with reasonable expectations. HOWEVER, the service here was ridiculously slow considering my party of 5 was sharing the space with only 2 other groups for most of the evening. The main waiter was incredibly rude to us when it came to ordering our meal and at that point I probably should have walked out the door. We ordered various seafood which was decent, fresh, though liberally sprinkled in chunks of salt that diminished the beauty of the natural product. We ordered two kinds of paella. I would say each serving (you order in terms of servings for each person) had perhaps 1 – 3 pieces of a certain type of seafood which is ridiculous and a huge helping of rice that wasn’t properly cooked (somehow both wet and stale) and very, very salty and unappealing. I could only manage a few bites. The passionfruit sorbet was decent but not a sorbet… it was a very wet slush drink that was mostly liquid though the night wasn’t warm enough for it to melt that quickly.
So…altogether a very unpleasant experience. When the check came… my God. Absolutely, horribly overpriced. Small portions on the seafood, huge portions on badly cooked, overly salted rice. Definitely not worth the around 200 euro price tag that it came out to.
STAY AWAY FROM THIS PLACE unless you want to eat bad food and be mistreated by your servers.