Telefèric Barcelona

Finding a truly authentic Spanish tapas restaurant in or near Orange County has been challenging: Our quest has covered ups, downs, close calls, and sometimes great but not wholly authentic experiences. In August 2026, that changed. Two months after its originally scheduled June debut, Telefèric Barcelona opened its first Orange County location at Newport Beach’s Fashion Island, an outdoor mall previously known for luxe Italian, overpriced American, not-really-Mexican, and not-really Chinese restaurants. Operated by a Spanish family with 10 prior locations across Spain, LA County, and other cities, Telefèric offers authentic tapas fans the real deal – albeit at a price point that explains its choice of Newport Beach as a starting point in Orange County.

Like Telefèric’s earlier locations, the menu here isn’t huge, offering just over 30 small, large, and dessert plates in total across one side of a printed menu card. But virtually all of the classic Spanish tapas are included, and then some. From ham or crab croquettes (croquetas) to tomato-smeared bread (pan con tomate), crispy potatoes with red pepper sauce and aioli (patatas bravas), garlic shrimp (gambas al ajillo), and two versions of premium Spanish ham (jamón ibérico de bellota and a higher-end Cinco Jotas bellota), you can easily find the same tapas here you’d order in Barcelona, at small plate prices from $5 to $38. Six rice-based paellas ($39 to $180) and four “platos” entrees ranging from chicken skewers to salmon and steak ($17 to $112) are also on the menu, wildly varying in price and size; larger and/or more deluxe proteins are on the higher end of each category. A substantial and thoroughly Spanish wine list gets its own multi-page menu, with sangrias, gin & tonics, cocktails, and mocktails on the back of the main card.

Note that the menus photographed and described here are subject to change. Items such as Iberian pork steak, chicken empanadas, beef wellington, and flan have disappeared from prior 2024/2025 LA/Long Beach menus; on our August and September 2026 visits to Newport Beach, new tapas, platos, and a new dessert (“Orange Mochi”) had replaced them. Menus are apparently synchronized between locations, so may be different by the time of your visit.

While the LA and Long Beach Telefèrics are so beautifully and authentically decorated that we could easily have been walking into restaurants in Barcelona or the Basque Country, the Newport Beach Telefèric’s larger space feels a little less traditionally Spanish, with indoor and outdoor spaces better suited to Fashion Island’s open-air mall energy. That said, Spanish interior design is versatile, and the new location’s earthtoned wood, wicker, fabric, and ceramic elements provide just enough of an upscale vibe to feel appropriate to the roughly $100 per person price point – a contrast with, say, Cafe Sevilla. Even during the new location’s soft opening, there was no shortage of guests ready to fill Telefèric’s seats.

Another difference with the Fashion Island Telefèric was consistently excellent service. Unlike the LA and Long Beach locations, where generally very attentive service had different types of hiccups, service at the Newport Beach location was on point at all times during our meals: consistently friendly, attentive, and engaging across everything from ordering to serving and bussing plates, refreshing drinks, and delivering the check at each meal’s end. Thanks in equal parts to a well-run kitchen and a well-staffed front of house, there was no unnecessary waiting across either of our fairly substantial, properly coursed-out meals.

Every dish and almost every drink we tried on our first visit was somewhere in the range from good to great. Pan con tomate ($9) was spot-on, with a layer of tomato pulp topping plush pieces of sliced, oven-crisped bread, and a decadent quenelle of chorizo butter (think pork frosting) on the side. Crispy ham croquetas ($12/3) were each topped with thin slices of melt-in-mouth Spanish jamón and filled with creamy bechamel, while crab croquetas ($12/2) were packed with fresh shellfish flavor and topped with thin slices of tuna sashimi – individually expensive but certainly amongst the best croquettes we’ve ever had.

As was the case with Fat of the Land, we deliberately ordered the high-end Cinco Jotas jamón ibérico de bellota ($38/3 oz.) to see whether this luxe protein – aged, acorn-fed, thin-sliced ham imported from one of Spain’s top producers – was handled properly. Here, it was close to flawless: thin sliced, full of the expected acorn-fit flavor, and neither dry nor artificially greasy. Though the pieces didn’t appear to have been hand-sliced from a 5J leg, that’s probably too much to expect from almost any West Coast Spanish restaurant besides José Andrés’ Jaleo Las Vegas. And even as long-time fans of Jaleo, we found Telefèric’s dishes impressive enough that we no longer feel the need to visit Nevada for authentic tapas.

Patatas bravas ($10) combined cubed potatoes, an impressively spicy red pepper bravas sauce, and gentle aioli in one of the better versions of this classic tapa we’ve found outside East Coast Jaleo locations, confined to a small but distinctive serving bowl. “El Ceviche” ($28) surprised us as a large, thoroughly tasty, saffron-soaked bowl of sliced shellfish, tomatoes, and citrus – a truly unique spin on a Latin dish not traditionally found in Spain. Lobster paella ($62), a splurge here, combined incredibly tender lobster tail, jumbo shrimp, and sliced octopus with a generous portion of lightly crisped bomba rice and judicious dabs of aioli. We were quite pleased by the flavors and textures in Telefèric’s version, apart from the notable absence of socarrat at the bottom of the paella pan.