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What a paella is, and why the question is not neutral
The chorizo joke has been made so often that it has stopped being funny in Valencia, and it is worth understanding why rather than just avoiding it. Paella is Valencian, and paella valenciana has a defined recipe: rice, chicken, rabbit, garrofó beans, flat green beans, tomato, olive oil, water, saffron, salt, and in some versions snails or a sprig of rosemary. There is a designation of origin for Valencian rice and a regulatory council that takes the recipe seriously. It is cooked flat and wide in a pan — la paella is properly the pan, and the dish is named after it — traditionally over a wood fire, which is not decoration: the flame reaches the whole base and produces the socarrat. It is a lunch dish, cooked outdoors, eaten on Sundays and by preference from the pan with a spoon. What it does not contain is onion, cream or chorizo. Onion is excluded because it releases moisture and the rice must stay dry and separate. And this is where the sensitivity comes from: the versions served to tourists elsewhere in Spain, often with chorizo and peas and a slice of lemon, are regarded in Valencia not as variations but as a different dish sold under a borrowed name. An internationally famous chef posting a chorizo recipe under the word paella produced a genuine national argument some years ago, which is why the waitress's reaction is quick. The distinction she offers is the useful one and it is offered generously: eso es otro plato, otro nombre. Rice dishes with seafood, with vegetables, with ink, cooked in the same pan, all exist and are excellent — arroz a banda, arroz negro, arroz del senyoret, fideuà with noodles instead of rice. Ordering one of those by its own name will get you a much warmer response than ordering a paella with modifications. And the same principle governs every regional food argument in Spain, from what belongs in a tortilla to whether a Galician empanada counts: nobody minds you liking something, and everybody minds you calling it by the wrong name.