Due to the extreme kindness of friends, we got a reservation to El Bulli essentially handed to us for June 15, 2006. One does not turn such a thing down. So! We're going to Spain in June! Cool! Never been to Spain. We drove up from Barcelona and stayed in Roses for two nights and sensibly took a taxi over the very narrow road over the mountain from Roses. The bay has only 4 or 5 buildings in it and the restaurant sits tucked into the hill over looking the water. From the size and color of the timbers in the dining room it appears to be an old building but they have dug the kitchen into the hill, making a huge room. We were invited to see the kitchen as soon as we arrived and had our picture taken by the every helpful staff before being seated. The dining room is uncrowded, no tables smooshed together. We were given the option of sitting across from each other or side-by-side where we could watch the room. We took the latter of course, so much more fun to watch people and food. Cocktails first 1. gintónic de pepino alexandrino This was foam from a siphon into a martini glass with cucumber instead of an olive, and an orange peel twist. There was definitely ginger in the foam too. After this we suggested to the sommelier that we would like to try local Catalan wines to compliment the Catalan food and he suggested a Cava Augusti Torelló Cava-Penedès, Brut Nature Gran Reserva 2002 2. aceitunas verdes sféricas-l The cava arrived with the famous essence of olive in a gelatin globe. This was sooo much the essence of olive. I've not read the cookbooks but I've been wondering if this isn't actually a distillation, it was so potently 'olive' including some very emphatic overtones of the bitterness as well. Noticeable on the back of your tongue but not necessarily unpleasant. 3. hojas de mango y flor de tagete Mango 'leaf' with a flower from the marigold family. A hint of black pepper in the dried mango. Magically fragile and melted in your mouth. The next four arrived together as an ensemble. 4. "animals" 5. waffles de lechuga de mar y sésamo blanco 6. lo garrapiñado: platano con sésamo a la nuez moscad 7. pistachulines tous The 'animals' were rice crackers in the shape of Prawn, Octopus, and Squid rings and one other flavor we neglected to write down. The sesame seaweed waffles were heavy on the seaweed, very wakame like flavors in them and a bit light on the sesame but delicious too. Banana freeze dried with a lovely coating of something hard and sweet with sesame and something else. Lovely even for the one who doesn't care for banana at all. Unsure if the freezing happened before or after coating. The 'soft' pistachios were a sort of pistachio butter formed around what we believed to be a boiled peanut. A fragment of nut being stuck in a tooth and discovered later evidenced this. 8. esencia de mandarina A spoon of Mandarin soup with a hint of mango in it. 9. caviar sférico de melón The classic dish. It was perfect. To look at it I would have sworn it was the same sort of fish eggs with which I baited my fishing hook as a kid. The passion fruit seeds added just a hint of tartness and edge to the incredible melon tastes of the dish. It is such a perfect illusion from the can upward. We weren't the only ones to laugh delightedly when served this. Biting into them certainly was very like caviar only to have melon burst into your mouth. With this dish arrived a Can Ràfols dels Caus Penedès La Calma 2002. This was very good white wine, local that impressed us more as it opened up. Super price performance too since it wasn't expensive (€45) and compared very well to other chenin blancs we've had for twice to three times a much. 10. piñones tiernos con banda de agua de piña verde This was an all white dish that they carefully showed us the base ingredient -- a very large but immature pinecone. There was a pine nut meringue made of the unformed kernels as I understood it, a cream based also on the nut and what looks like rice is actually the immature nuts. Not terribly memorable, very delicate slightly astringent taste. 11. tempura de aguacate: al cilantro/peppermint/caipirinha Three pieces of avocado tempura, Wasabi (not very much cilantro that I could tell), Peppermint and Caipirinha flavored. All very good with rich avocado and delicate batter. This would be worth trying some variation of at home. 12. won-ton campestre This was so fun. First we were presented with small bowls of Basil foam. Then a large bowl of chicken soup looking broth with this HUGE looking floating balls in it. These were Parmesan wontons and we were instructed to eat them in one bite. The server gently scooped them out with a perforated spoon and placed them in the foam. We looked skeptical since the broth was steaming quite vigorously and the wontons looked like a lot more than a single bite. But popping them in our mouths, we find they were hollow inside, warm not hot and not a flour based dough at all. 13. pasas de PX y moscotel con foie-gras de paty y brioche Foie Gras with Brioche croutons with fennel foam. Each of the dotted sauces on the plate was an intense and different flavor: coffee, cardamom and white chocolate. We may have missed one but each complemented the foie gras on very different levels. The 'raisins' were each a wine reduction in a slightly deflated sphere - sauternes, port and a muscat I believe. 14. blanco An all white dish obviously. This was also Pine based as well as fennel. The more solid foams were arranged around what looked like a continuous mound of fluffy grated white stuff. But at the bottom end the fluff was freeze dried and fluffy and at the top end it was frozen with the slice of anisy ice cream delineating it. More interesting for textures than flavors though eating what felt like 'astronaut ice cream' is always fun. 15. sopa de maravilla de guistante Pea soup with pork rinds. No really. Except the soup was thickened with semolina so instead of creamy you had the texture of very thin Cream of Wheat that tasted intensely of peas. And the little pork rinds were so good. They may actually have been cracklings but mmmm. 16. sopa de pan con Laurencia y yemas sféricas Bread soup with 'egg yolks'. I think this had something like a daikon fish stock base, certainly lots of seaweeds. Intense satisfying flavor with more of the spheres, which I have to confess I cannot remember the specific flavors encased within. 17. pasta / almendra Almond raviolis with Anchovy gelée and a fresh half cherry. The nuts had been blanched and were slightly soft. The sauce was rich and buttery and the bits of anchovy were bursting with that salty sweet flavor that Spanish anchovies have. The acids in the bit of cherry then cleansed that away. 18. falso tartufo con aire de melón y virtuas de panceta virtu Truffle 'skins' with melon foam and then the dried nuggets of 'fat ham' and hazelnuts. The dried skin dissolved leaving tiny bits of truffle in your mouth. I know the title says 'false truffle' but they only said truffle to us and they did have a nice turffle-y taste to them. 19. trufa sférica Spheres in consommé. The larger white ones were truffles, the smaller were clam with nice pieces of clam in them. First sphere that sort of didn't vanish in the mouth but had to be chewed. The small golden ones were 'corn' and were the most astonishing corn flavor, as if you distilled all your memories of the most perfect sweet corn and popped it in the spheres. Discussing this we thought perhaps they may have sprouted corn and then processed that. There was a hint of malt in them that spoke of sprouts to me. 20. ackees/sopa de ternaer a la albahaca, albondiga de pe In some ways this may have been the strangest dish. This was Akees. The waiter assured us this is the national fruit of Jamaica. I'd never heard of it but by gum he was right. It didn't have a strong flavor but it's texture was somewhere between raw and cooked chestnuts. I thought it must be a relative of that at first; the texture was so reminiscent of chestnut. Melon slices and a milk cream floating in a Basil and 'meat' broth. With this dish we moved on to another selection of the sommelier, an Allende 2001 Rioja. Very round and nice, not too heavy for any of the dishes. I really liked letting the sommelier select local wines for us. I can buy a $200 bottle of wine in any restaurant. I wanted to stay with their ideas of how to compliment their food. 21. el mar Seaweed salad consisting of at least 16 kinds of different seaweeds spiraled around a bit of watermelon in a seawater foam. It was amusing how very different each kind of seaweed was. Some delicate, some salty, some iodine flavored. Great fun but I saw other people look at it a bit askance. I think they must not have tons of dried seaweed in their kitchens as we do. 22. buey de mar marrackech Spider crab Marrakech style. Oh this was so good. The crab was lovely big pieces with coriander raviolis, each with a single leaf pressed between two thin pieces of pasta. The Couscous was spicy and toasted or fried after cooking so it crunched in your mouth. Floating in the broth were little slices of citron gelatin. 23. conejo con caracoles al ajillo This was explained as 'rabbit with offal'. Ok. I have no trouble with organs but my sweetie is a 'recovering vegetarian' I ate both kidneys. Nice little rabbit leg with green pepitas, a few couscous pearls a tiny dollop of mashed celeriac. Not sure precisely what other parts of the rabbit some of the meat bits came from. Inside the spheres were bits of intense broth. It was yummy as seen in the pictures, since it was the only one we failed to take a shot of before diving in. 24. la oveja, el queso y su lana This was a 'pre-dessert'. A lovely warm and runny sheep cheese pooled under 'wool of the sheep' which was very cotton candy like and made from the same cheese. We think we detected a hint of something herbaly like tarragon in the wool as well. A little Raspberry jelly accompanied this. I didn't lick my plate but wanted to. With this we started on sweet wines with a Modegas Ochoa Moscatel 2005 from Navarra. Very floral and orange nose to it but not sticky sweet. 25. liquid de melocotón Bonbon and soup of peach. The bonbon looked like it should have been a meringue but no no, too ordinary. Inside was a peachy syrup with peach liquor. The spoon was the peach equivalent of the essence of mandarin we'd had earlier. A complete capture of what makes a peach a peach. 26. pomelo This was the official dessert. Grapefruit, powered green tea, candied violets and pistachio. Tiny hints of nutmeg in the leaves. Not too sweet and again the flavors each standing out but complimenting one another too. après desserts 27. raspberry meringue Looked like a pink dishwashing sponge and made me laugh. But it was a lovely semi-soft meringue with a cream center and a white chocolate and berry disc on top. I thought it each was centered in a pile of powered sugar or chocolate but no, that was just the lovely plates. We had some green tea brought now and we quite fell in love with the spoons which were made just for El Bulli, stamped with MEN 3.3.2 elBulli on the side and are modeled on the throw away plastic stirrers many fast food places have. 28. fried brioche w/ blackberry A variation on the national sweet 'churos" a sort of fried dough strip much like a donut, sometimes filled sometimes not, and usually eaten in the morning with thick chocolate to dip it in. The description they gave is was 'fried brioche' and indeed it was; lovely sweet dough with a blackberry-like filling of whatever the local brambleberry bushes seem to bear. I could eat these every day for breakfast. 29. chocolate leaves A little metal flowerpot, filled with crushed cocoa nibs and a dried coriander branch with the little leaves growing from the soil. So amazingly delicate but with a very natural vein system painted on them. Digestifs The restaurant was starting to empty by now but we had spotted some interesting bottles on the drink trolley as we entered so we asked about that. No menu, we were told, what do you like? Well the answer to that is Armagnac, almost always. 1964 Darroze Bas Armagnac 1978 Dartiglalonge Bas Armagnac They also had a Laberdolive, but we've drunk a fair amount of that and with Armagnacs I *always* try the ones I never had before when given a choice. I didn't get to examine the bottles to see when either of these was actually bottled but while the colors were remarkably similar, the 78 actually tasted softer and more mature than the 64, which if they still have some in the cask, I hope they keep it and let it sit for another 20-30 years so I can try it again in my dotage. Conclusions I am loath to designate 'best restaurant' labels. I frankly don't know if this is the best restaurant in the world. I haven't been to the Fat Duck yet, after all. But I do know it was the most inventive, most amazing, most remarkable food I have ever eaten. We were sated and overwhelmed but not gorged. That would be wrong for that food. It is a magical place and time where everything seems to glow happily and smiles abound even as the staff dances and avoids one another as dishes swoop in for appearance and vanish with a poof. I shall never forget it.
