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Miguel, I'm spanish, so I learned (or hinted) there was a difference between seafood and fish looking to eGullet posts and the dictionary. I believe I don't qualify to establish a standard here, but as you said, my interpretation is that seafood stands for "marisco" and fish for, well, fish.

Guys, you have to team up with vmilor and write a series of articles in Daily eGullet about the mysteries of seafood and fish. Really make me feel as an absolute beginner on the topic. Probably because I am.

If I recall properly one of its articles that he wrote some three years ago in El País, the other magical meal he had in the Status would be at The French Laundry. And one of the 1 or 2 left, at Tetsuya Wakuda's (again, if i recall properly another of its articles).

Bruce, let me add some more recommendations for traditional and product based restaurants in the area: La Xicra (Palafrugell), Can Bech (Fontanilles) and Bonay (Peratallada). Pork trotters with snails, goose with turnip, snails and all i oli, pidgeon over foie au calvados, game and mushrooms during season, fishballs, ... Quite solid stuff.

Great!. I can't think of a better place to be from April to September. Cala Montjoi is a wonderful place, as many parts of the Costa Brava Nord (North Costa Brava), both by the seaside and the inland towns. There are great restaurants to sample traditional dishes, others with a more creative edge, others specialized in serving terrific products with minimal intervention, ... .

Right assumption, indeed. Born in BCN, though. Fan of Real Madrid. It was a time when I was, well, thirteen?. My idea of gastronomic heaven those days were the delightful canelones cooked in the Catalonian way by my mother. Now that I think about it, that continues to be the idea of gastronomic heaven. I suppose the country has changed a lot in this 20 yrs. At least, I did. You still can find extremely fresh seafood and fish, cooked in simple and delicious ways. They master this type of cooking up there. Berasategui is a 3-starred chef which runs several restaurants in the Basque Country. His flagship, Martín Berasategui, is about 8 miles from Donostia, and gave place to heated debate recently in this forum. You could find lots of info in: Help in Donosti TDG: San Sebastian Dining: Akelare to Zuberoa, Antidote to the Spanish Indigestion and let's not forget Robert's article: Robert's article along with MB's own thread: Martín Berasategui - 2003, grim We should be reading more about it once Bux make up his mind (and time) to write about his recent trip. Although is becoming not so recent... Sergi Arola, the chef behind La Broche, is a disciple of Adria. He himself gives a lot of credit to how Adria influenced his way of cooking. So you can expect an extreme creative way of cooking in some dishes. As Victor said in a recent post, sometimes brilliant, but with consistency issues. My last dinner there in May was quite a disappointment (in a long menu, just the two entrées were up to expectations). That said, I thought they closed La Broche in Miami. Am I wrong?.

Some kind of rivalry exists, though perhaps it wouldn't qualify as archrivalry. Resuming it a lot, Santamaría is about product and local heritage and Adria about innovation. Santamaría doesn't conceive a meal without wine playing an important role, whereas with Adria approach is almost impossible to match wine and food. Santamaría conceives each dish around a main ingredient, and certainly that's not the case with Adria. IMHO, there are some others that have created a third way taking the best from these two. Namely, Berasategui. From the foodie side, I'm glad to have both chefs around to pay them a visit now and then. God bless this kind of rivalry!

I've just arrived from El Corte Inglés, and I've seen several copies of the second volume, El Bulli 1994 - 1997. Let's see if I can convince any relatives to have them as Xmas. gifts . BTW, there's an excelent site from Zaragoza on this type of books, De Re Coquinaria.

Robert, I believe we're more or less in agreement here. However, I tend to think that the tasting menu as the only practical choice, that many restaurants nowadays intend to impose, are worse than the tapa approach you describe. In this site, a quality that seems to be highly appreciated in a restaurant is consitency, the ability to provide day in day out the same dining experience. For sure, having a tasting menu almost as the single choice, helps a lot to get that consistency. However, I'd prefer to some extent to have some ups and downs, and give room to some degree of experimentation and risk. It would increase the probabilities that if you only pay a visit to the restaurant in long periods of time, something could be not so good as you would expect. But when I think of the restaurants I go at least once a month, they share the pattern I've just described.

I can cover the spanish side of the question. Acording to the Dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy of the language (Diccionario de la Real Academia Española de la lengua: Tapa: "Pequeña porción de algún alimento que se sirve como acompañamiento de una bebida" or "small piece of some food served as complement of a drink".

Robert, I'm not sure I fully understand your point. I'm assuming that you enjoy El Bulli and Adria's cooking, which is highly influenced by the concept of tapa, as Adria himself has acknowledged. The whole concept of tasting menu and almost imposing it to the customers, as noticed to me by several chefs, makes the kitchen work more as a factory, with all the advantages in terms of consistency and optimizing the delivery of dishes, and all the disadvantages of losing the artisan touch, than as a workshop. And at least in Spain, I'd say Adria has been the champion of this dining experience, though back in 99 it was possible to order a la carte at El Bulli. Surely, given the amount of R&D he invests every year to create almost completely new menus, he's well justified to do so and I believe he overcomes the shortcomings around this way of dining. PS: Robert, you should post to this forum often, we miss your contributions.

Well, I got my table for July. I asked for any Friday or Saturday, or any day during my holidays. Finally, I've got a table a Tuesday late July.

Gonzalez Byass is a large producer, but also produces great wines. Jerez producers often get their largest part (inmense part, I'd say) from products not specially good, as cheap brandy and so, but they still produce authentic treasures in a much more reduced scale. Just guessing here, but have you tried Lavinia to get some of these wines?.

Aren't we starting this discussion from a wrong assumption?. Is Adrià really trying to get to Rafa's way of cooking?. I seriously doubted. He could well be trying to do so in certain dishes, perhaps the almonds that have been described elsewhere, but I don't see that's his general trend.

That's starting to change, Bux. Now you can find some Manzanillas that indicate the date when they were bottled, i.e., Barbadillo Saca de Primavera (Winter retrieval, meaning that the wine was extracted from the barrel). And you're right, these wines from Jerez are a total bargain. Not only Manzanillas and Finos, but the rest of Andalusian Vinos Generosos, like Olorosos, Amontillados, Pedro Ximenez (PX), Palos Cortado, ... .

Manzanilla is a type of wine, made from the same variety than Fino (Palomino), but instead of being made in Jerez, where Fino comes from, it's made in Sanlucar de Barrameda and El Puerto de Santa María, both towns by the sea. As Fino, it's a biological aged wine. Both Fino and Manzanilla, pertain to the same D.O.. And yes, at its best, Manzanilla can display subtle salty flavors. PS: Good post.

Interesting questions, indeed. IMHO, I would summarize them in two: a) Do you have to be aware of a context to notice a change in it?. I think you have. b) Would you be able to appreciate the results of that change on their own foot?. Again, yes. Why not?. When I first tasted Indian food in a restaurant in Madrid, I found it enjoyable and interesting, having no clue regarding whether I was sampling the most avant-garde cuisine made in India, or an ultra classic version of their most traditional dishes. The underlying issue I believe you're raising is what's more valuable in Adria's cooking, a) or b). For me, probably a).

I got my table!!. Thanks to Boris, whithout him I would have been waiting till January to ask for reservation.

Eric, unfortunately all of us have our regular dose of spam on a daily basis. Just take a look to your mailbox.

How does Porto de Santa Maria compare with the other two?. (BTW, I'm assuming that you're referring to Madrid's O'Pazo, aren't you?)

I'd say 99% of the traditional dishes and products that are really interesting to eat in Europe are "acquired tastes": snails bourguignonne, bottarga with pasta, maatjes haring, botifarra negra sausage, squid cooked in its 'ink', andouillette, Venetian sarde in saôr, Maroilles cheese, lamprey à la Bordelaise, hake cheeks in garlic... There is often, I've found, a bit of a problem for a number of Americans (and Anglo-Saxons in general) when they face continental European culinary traditions: they tend to react with displeasure to too many unfamiliar and, to them, unsavory things. There is a tendency to stick to a few familiar, generally somewhat bland staples (chicken, veal, sole, salmon), which form the basis of most preferred dishes, in turn made distinctive only through cooking method, saucing or side accompaniments... Obviously a dish of lamb kidneys sautéed in sherry or pig's trotters can be much more intense and also more idiosyncratic... Heck, in a different part of eGullet I've found a thread in which someone wondered if some people actually ate pigeons, so it suddenly dawned on me that pigeon, a basic noncontroversial staple in Iberia, could also be in that 'acquired taste' category! Obviously there is a culinary sensitivity divide somewhere, and it may explain why our ages-old Iberian traditions are not more easily understood by some of our visitors. This is obviously not a part of the world for the squeamish. [...] Interesting point, Víctor. What's not an acquired taste? IMHO, just the common denominator of dishes of the group we're comparing (two people, two countries, ...). Since we in Europe and the States eat frequently beef steak, that's not an acquired taste, but as soon as we start talking about its tongue, there's room to debate whether that is or is not an acquired taste. I'd say that the gastronomic divide, lies on what people usually eat. Simple as that?.

I had dinner yestarday in Aldaba, one of the restaurants in Madrid that now occupies a high place in my list of favourites. The dining room it's quite comfortable, with a decent amount of space between tables, and a kind of old fashioned decor, or should I use the word classic?. Yesterday dinner consisted of: - Amuse bouche: A fried Gernika pepper with Maldon salt, and a delicious piece of chistorra, a kind of chorizo (red sausage) originally from Navarra, which can be fried or grilled. Ours was grilled. - Starters: One of the good things about Aldaba is that you can order half portions, so can create your own tasting menu formed by a couple of starters and a couple of entrées. For starters we had menestra, also a Navarra's dish, which is done cooking separately seasonal vegetables (very important to allow the exact and just the exact point of right tenderness to each type of vegetable). Our menestra was delicious, each vegetable retaining its own characteristics of flavour and taste, yet the whole having a new and complete taste itself. Veal meatballs in spanish sauce with white rice, a very traditional dish, very well assembled and executed. One of the dishes that you know exactly what to expect from and rarely dissapoints you. - Main courses: Mar chose a dish that was offered several times to us since the mushroom season started, and quite frankly, I was very sceptical about the actual result. This dish is also what decided me to write about Aldaba. kokotxas de bacalao al pil-pil (pil-pil sauce cod fish cheeks) with Boletus Edulis. I wasn't sure about how well the taste of the kokotxas and the mushroom will result. It was simply amazing!. The textures were a perfect match, none of the flavours over-ruled the others (I was concerned about the pil-pil and the mushroom), and the whole set was delicious. As an afterthought, one of the simplest and best ways to cook boletus is just sauting them with some oil and garlic, which happen to be the main ingredients of pil-pil. I chose a much more classic dish, steak tartar with poached egg and caviar over mashed potato. Nothing wrong with it, in fact, it's very good, but at this point I was trading with Mar to share his dish. Luckily, she wasn't very hungry so I could get a fair amount of her dish. - Desserts: Aldaba has a good cheese table, that we skipped this time, and I chose a tatin tarte made to perfection with some creme fraiche, and Mar a cheese cake that has little to do with the traditional american cheese cake you're used to. This was made of Manchego cheese, which made it less sweet and more punchy. The wine service in Aldaba is superb, with one of the most knowledgeable sumillers in town, Luis. An incredible wine list, with wines from all over the world, explaining the characteristics of each zone and grape, some hundred pages on it. We let decision of what to drink to Luis, and he suggested one of the newcomers wines in the market, Plazuela 01, a wine from La Mancha made from Cencibel (aka Tempranillo) and some Grenache. Very good, with notes of red fruit and perhaps too present the new oak used. Excellent restaurant, indeed.

Budget blowing also, at least by spanish standards, according to my sources.

The name "Carme" is the catalonian version of the traditional spanish female name "Carmen", that I'm sure at least opera aficionados will easily recognize. Sadly, I must confess that San Pau is one of my peripheral black holes in spanish cooking scene, along with Atrio, Las Rejas and some others. Tried to went there this summer but was closed (Monday, if I remember well). Geez, what a tough job to keep up with the cooking scene in Spain these days!

Carme Ruscalleda cooks at San Pau, her restaurant near Barcelona, in San Pol de Mar. See San Pau in Relais & Chateaux for some more info.