El Puerto Restaurant

You'll walk into El Puerto on Paget Road and immediately feel the pull of somewhere that takes its food seriously without the pretension. It's the kind of place where the owner's actually cooked Spanish food for decades, and it shows—the seafood is impeccably fresh, the paella isn't mucked about with, and they're not trying to reinvent the wheel. The room itself is warm and unpretentious, filled with locals who've worked out what we've all quietly known: Penarth's got some proper restaurants if you know where to look. Come for the prawns, stay for the fact you've been properly fed without spending a fortune.