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The exact names are Comerç 24 and Espai Sucre, Koen. You'll find a zillion references to both on this site, I think.

Interesting and disgusting, some of those web sites. I wonder if there are any similar ones in Europe, and what the contents would be like... There is something that really nags me about this. I have been a restaurant critic for 24 years, working mostly in Spain, and so I have been eating out for far too long, far too often and in far too many places. Yet I very, very seldom see customer/waiter or customer/maître d' clashes of the sort that would, not justify, but at least explain the kind of retaliations these web sites so lavishly detail. So my question is: Are these clashes really so frequent in NYC or in the US in general? Or is this just hyperbole, or perhaps a tool for disgruntled employees to blackmail restaurant owners? Because if these problems really are commonplace, then the adversary relationship between customer and restaurant is really something that sets the US restaurant scene apart from the European scene as I know it.

This rural hotel is a nice place to stay near Trujillo, which is a wonderful town. The noble palaces of the upper town, derelict and occupied by squatters only 15 years ago or so, have been reclaimed and restored by a number of families (mostly from Madrid), and the town as a whole has been revived around the wonderful Plaza Mayor with the imposing statue of Francisco de Pizarro, the Trujillo-born conquistador of Peru, by 19th century American sculptress Anna Hyatt Huntington. Right on the plaza is the classically appointed, endearing Trujillo restaurant, run by the Carrasco sisters, Isabel and Manuela, who specialize in authentic, very rustic Extremadura cookery: tomato soup with figs, 'extremeña' potatoes (braised potatoes with bell pepper strands and chorizo sausage), stewed red partridge, roast lamb, truffle-stuffed hen, 'huevecillos con leche' (a dessert made with eggs, white bread, milk, cinnamon, sugar and lemon rind). Trujillo is just 25 miles from Cáceres, which is one the most impressive medieval cities in all of Europe, and is also home to Atrio, one of Spain's best restaurants. And the torta del Casar, like Portugal's great queijo da Serra, is a fabulous soft cheese - the equivalent of vacherin Mont d'Or among sheep's milk cheeses. It comes from El Casar de Cáceres, on the outskirts of town. I've found a well-designed web site which details the 13 'gastronomic routes' of Extremadura: those of Ibérico ham, sheep's milk cheese, goat's milk cheese, lamb, kid, cold dishes, game, olive oil, smoked 'pimentón' (paprika), tench (a curious stgnant-waters fish the Extremadurans crave), fruits and fruit brandies, wine and river fish...

I just read about Ibiza on another board, and I looked up their web site. I can't tell about the quality, having never been there, but from my vantage point in Spain I can tell you that this looks like a very good modern Spanish place, the likes of which I haven't seen in NYC, San Francisco or Los Angeles!

Wow! Jerez to Teruel is a long, long 500-mile drive, just for a one-day stay! Guadalupe seems more feasible. There is one outstanding, not just good, restaurant in Aranjuez: Casa José is a bit less avant-garde than El Bohío, but in a similar class quality-wise. Don't stop at Jaén. This is a rather charmless, mostly modern city built around the Alcázar and cathedral. Instead stay at nearby (20 miles) Baeza or Ubeda, two wonderful, monumental, Renaissance towns. Better hotels and food, too. You'll find a recent thread here on the Costa del Sol scene in which I mentioned the charming Alcaría de Ramos in Estepona. There are better places around than what your earlier experience indicates. Follow the Campsa, not the Michelin, when on the Costa del Sol - it's much better in that specific part of Spain. La Meridiana, beautiful (a villa with lush gardens) but expensive, will be the best restaurant in Marbella, presumably, until the ultra-avant garde chef Dani García, formerly of Tragabuches, opens his new restaurant at the Meliá Don Pepe hotel in February. Oddly enough, one of the best Chinese restaurants in Spain, Tai Pan, is in Marbella. The Carihuela in Torremolinos is like a lesser version of the Bajo de Guía in Sanlúcar - the old fishermen's quarter. I've eaten very well at El Roqueo, and it's less expensive than Marbella! The best restaurant in Jerez is La Mesa Redonda. A couple of modern notes, but basically, outstanding Jerez-style traditional fare. The best restaurant in the 'marco de Jerez' (the viticultural triangle between Jerez, Sanlúcar and El Puerto de Santa María) is El Faro de El Puerto, in El Puerto de Santa María. On Sanlúcar's Bajo de Guía dock there are no bad places for shellfish and fried fish, but possibly the best four are Mirador de Doñana, Casa Bigote, Casa Juan and the less well-known, less expensive Joselito Huerta. If you do go to Guadalupe, the inexpensive Posada del Rincón or the classic Parador de Guadalupe are two good places to stay (and eat - this is no gastronomic haven!) Toledo has a number of good restaurants these days: the outstanding Adolfo (and its less expensive, very nice subsidiary, La Perdiz), the unassuming but good Hierbabuena, and the avant-garde (in a very old building!) Casa del Temple.

Shunka is interesting and personal (some Japanese-Mediterranean fusion things...) Satoru Miyano in his eponymous restaurant in the ritzy Sarrià area makes good sushi.

Chocophiles have a home: it is called Cacao Sampaka. ← Read further up in this thread, Willie. Some of us are not the greatest fans of Sampaka...

Indeed, the online version of the Guía del Ocio for Barcelona lists 405 restaurants that are open on Sundays. You can refine your search too, if you don't want to run through all 405...

Have some decent Galician wine instead. It won't cost you an arm and a leg. It always surprises me that some food lovers are willing to compromise on wine what they'd never compromise on the solid part of the pittance... Murky wine is unstable wine, having often re-fermented in bottle, and otherwise full of off-aromas and off-flavors. To me, it's similar to eating octopus with the Goodyear texture. No!

Yeah, and Arola at the Hotel Arts is now open only four days a week, as I've just found out. It seems that there's a bit of a crisis in the Barcelona restaurant scene, if we put all of these changes together!

I'm not sure what you mean by "turbio wine", but if it's so-called 'traditional' Ribeiro wine, made murky by its lack of stability due to poor 'traditional' winemaking in one of the big co-ops, IMHO this dreadful swill does not go well with any food... There's much better stuff for much the same price available in Spain today! Good food does not deserve to be accompanied by bad wine on account of defending 'local color'!

There are many places that are open for lunch on Sundays; not so many for dinner. Top-notch modern cuisine: Gaig, Racó d'En Freixa, Moo, Arola. Other modern places: Tragaluz, La Provença. Barceloneta area (seafood, paella): Can Majó (lunch only), Can Ramonet (lunch only), Merendero de la Mari, El Suquet de l'Almirall (lunch only). Seafood elsewhere: Els Pescadors (wonderful website, BTW! http://www.elspescadors.com ), Peixerot (lunch only). Traditional Catalan: 7 Portes, Casa Leopoldo (lunch only; a better choice in the Raval than strange vegetarian places!) Tapas: Paco Meralgo. Grilled meats: Cañota.

In many Spanish restaurants they won't include the ham in the menu - you just order it. No top-notch place will be without some top-notch ham. Mario Sandoval has undergone some of the most thorough schooling any young chef has had in the world: Berasategui, Adrià, Santamaria, Arzak, Subijana, Bras and Madrid's Zalacain and Cenador de Salvador. His brother only cooks the suckling pig - period. He needed no other schooling than watching his forebearsdo it since he was a child.

What "dualism" is this, Vedat? The only thing old on the menu is the family-style roast suckling pig. Everything else is cutting-edge modern at Coque.

Not to knock anyone, but the choice at Lavinia and at Vila Viniteca is overwhelmingly larger than anywhere else in Barcelona...

Shame about missing Coque - really the most interesting ongoing culinary project in the Madrid region.

Omigod.

This used to be called the Barrio Chino - the most downtrodden, dangerous, petty crime- and prostitution-infested neighborhood in central Barcelona, around the Ramblas. But very atmospheric. Over the past 20 years a classic gentrification process has been taking place while the name was changed to Raval, and while not yet completely transformed, à la Times Square, the area is quite different. But pockets of poverty remain. More about it in the Fundació Tot Raval's web page.

In addition to Lavinia, the great (and much more atmospheric) Vila Viniteca, carrer Agullers 5, at the bottom of Via Laietana.

The best restaurant in Puigcerdà is Josepmariamassó cuiner, run by the eponymous young cook Josep Maria Massó, carrer d'Espanya 9.

Thanks for the vote of confidence, but whatever I can or do write will have a much lesser impact than what the Financial Times (which BTW has a larger circulation in the United States than in the United Kingdom) has published or will publish. As far as the 'Food Media and News' section of eGullet, this should be a significant item for discussion, or so I tought: the Weekend edition of the FT, with its strong food and wine contents (Jancis Robinson, Nicholas Lander, Philippa Davenport et al.) is one of the most influential media in the world of gastronomy. For better or worse. Plus, the names involved here - Michael Steinberger, François Simon, Alice Waters - are not exactly lightweights in said world. BTW, I don't really think the intention of this article was of pure, dumb "America bashing", but of constructive criticism. The author took a number of shortcuts, however, and the result is disappointing.

I didn't know you were privy to my life, travels, restaurant experience and ability to judge any culinary scene. I'm amazed at your insight! Why take it out on me? Michael Steinberger wrote the article, not me. He's an American and I think he lives in the United States. Please re-read what I wrote: yes, I have been in top-notch restaurants American restaurants that were on auto-pilot lately, and I've been in others that weren't. And, I added, the 'autopilot syndrome' also vastly applies to France (and, if I may add now, to other countries.) Why do you take offense? Why do you question my qualifications without even knowing who I am or what I do or what I know? Obviously, I don't live in the US. But I am over there more often than you seem to think - more than 30 days (that's 60 meals...) over the past couple of years, in New York, San Francisco, Baltimore, Las Vegas, Dallas and a few points in between. Having been a long-time foreign correspondent in the United States, a restaurant critic for a measly 24 years and, in addition, a wine producer who sells one third of his production in the US, I am well placed to turn those 60 meals into a decent image (no, not an encyclopedic one... but then who has an encyclopedic knowledge, as Bux says?) of what the current restaurant scene is over there. Oh! One of my conclusions, from much before this latest, active period of trans-Atlantic commuting (my last meal there was at Boulevard in SF last November), was that one needs to know the restaurants in a really rather small number of American cities to really keep abreast of what's best in the country. It's a huge country, indeed, but if you begin subtracting the Clevelands and the Boises and, yes, the Honolulus, it becomes a bit more manageable.

That part of the article is indeed full of holes. My guess is that Steinberger, in offering his own view of the NYC restaurant scene further down in the story, seems to be in basic agreement with Simon on this fact: that too many top-notch places seem to be "on autopilot". And I wouldn't disagree with that, recalling some of my more recent experiences, but not all! Obviously the American restaurant system, with so many sittings needed to make a profit, with so many diners simultaneously at a restaurant, is bound to turn the chef into a far less directly involved orchestra conductor or general manager (the telltale expression "executive chef" is an American creation, not used in Europe), and in some cases the delegation of duties, the sheer organization works less successfully than in others. That said, how many French two- and even three-star restaurants often seem to be "on autopilot" these days? Too many.

For... dessert?

If I am not wrong, Michael Steinberger is an American.