We were scheduled at 8 at Rauxa, a Catalan-themed restaurant in Union Square,Somerville (space formerly housing the Elephant Walk, which is now in Porter Square). I missed my bus so walked the easy mile from Sullivan to the restaurant (not something to do after dark, perhaps, but it was a balmy and bright evening), getting there just a couple minutes ahead of time. At 8:00:10 a cutish dark-haired woman walked past me - I asked her if she was AnnaS ... no. A couple minutes
later, another cute woman, with bright red hair, arrived - the real AnnaS. After the usual preliminaries we headed down into the restaurant, where we found jetsetter waiting for us. We made ourselves comfy at the waiting area and were shortly joined by dgolds and his colleague Kevin (who reminds me quite a lot of my friend Fiona in SF, but I didn't get round to asking if they're related).

No room at the bar for us all, and a party of 10 in the dining room had expanded to 17, eating up not only all the food in the place but also a couple much-needed tables. We elected to take our appetizers in the waiting
area: artichoke-manchego cheese salad, braised short rib, garlic shrimp on toast, broiled chorizo, and octopus-squid-chickpea salad (I didn't find any octopus, but the squid was good). Tasty and not too expensive at $7 a pop off the tapas menu. In retrospect I think we'd probably forgo the garlic shrimp (very inefficient flavor/cost
and calorie/cost ratios), but everything else was quite nice.

At some point five places opened up at the bar, so we claimed them. It's difficult to carry on a conversation strung along a bar, though, so I took to wandering down to talk to people: and the inevitable happened, someone nicked my place. Luckily, the folks at the other end made room for me: Robert, a planner (city? fiscal? we didn't ask) and Mary, a poet (the woman I'd originally
accosted, asking her if she was AnnaS). We ended up including them in our conversations, and the upshot is that we might have another flyertalker or two someday - we told Mary that she could even post in haiku if she chose. After a little plate of jamon serrano (not on the menu) we split:

the short ribs again, served as a main dish with a chickpea mash - didn't taste this iteration, but the appetizer serving was delicious

black and white paellas with shellfish - quite good

the signature and most expensive dish in the place, a toasted pasta in paprika broth with lobster, about which I've read a lot - this was fine but not worthy of the press it's gotten

and a couple cremas cremadas (cremes brulees) for dessert.

Accompanying all of this were bottles of Ty Nant water and Segura Viudas Aria, a very nice clean sparkler from Freixenet. Also all the assorted olives and crusty breads one could dream of.

At our end of the bar, the conversation ranged from flyertalk to flyertalk: I tried to steer it more toward the food end, as that's my field of interest; dgolds did the
mileage talking; and jetsetter and dgolds brought in a few arcane computer-related topics. Sorry to miss out on what Kevin and AnnaS were saying, but the layout was such that a unified discussion was impossible.

The restaurant is pleasant and homey, and both the manager (name forgotten) and the waiter (Julian, or was it Jason?) made us feel comfortable. The food, although regionally inspired, isn't particularly
Catalan that I can see: I'd expect much more garlic, salt, peppers, and olive oil in the dishes, and lamb and duck instead of beef and chicken on the menu. That being said, what we were served was very tasty, and I'd order most of the dishes again. A restaurant worthy of the big city at just slightly less than big-city prices.

A very pleasant evening, good company, I was made to feel right at home, and if I had paws I'd put them up.