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El Mundo's restaurant critic in Barcelona, Xavier Agulló, reviewed Cinc Sentits this week in the newspaper's Metrópoli supplement. Since only the local Madrid pages are for now available on line, I'll translate his report: "Jordi Artal used to work in marketing and IT in Silicon Valley, California. But his real passion was in the kitchen. So, with his mother and sister, he returned to Barcelona. They opened Cinq Sentits, an experiment which aims to offer a global taste experience, with the inestimable help of chef Jordi Anglí. Artal, who is the executive chef, is responsible for the restaurant's gastronomic design with Anglí. Roser, his mother, and young Amèlia, his sister, receive clients in the dining room. Although they have been open for just a few weeks, we can already see what direction they are taking. Very modern cuisine, high-quality ingredients (no farmed fish are used), a somewhat informal atmosphere, controlled prices and a perhaps excessive taste for the world of the sweet-and-savory. Cooking precision is excellent, for example, in a dish of 'foie gras' on a mille-feuille 'coca' with leeks, balsamic vinegar and caramelised sugar. But everything is too sweet. In other cases one yearns for more imagination, not for more technical perfection; for instance, in the beef filet with asparagus or in an already much-seen poached egg on a sauce of 'txistorra' hot sausage. The cream of asparagus with a sea water jelly is fantastic, as is the surprising monkfish with a 'pasta risotto' and crayfish essence. This is a newcomer which deserves a visit and promises much more to come." Agulló rated the restaurant 13/20. Other restaurants in this week's national edition of Metrópoli: Bens d'Avall, in Deià on Majorca Island (16/20), El Perro que Fuma in Gijón, Asturias (15/20) and A Estación in Cambre, Galicia (14/20).

The best European flat oysters (Ostrea edulis) are to be found around Colchester, England - but, as The Guardian reported this week, they can hardly be found in England at all! Countries where enthusiasts are ready to shell out big bucks for oysters, basically France and Spain, are gobbling up large parts of the production, The Guardian says. At La Marée, the best seafood restaurant in Paris, they don't serve belons from Brittany - they serve "les Colchester".

O my goodness! The hallowed Gordon Ramsay! And I was complaining about Spanish chefs being fungally ignorant! Following butterfly's comments - indeed, there isn't one single technique for cleaning mushrooms. Resilient ones, like chanterelles and black trumpets (generally, those that can be dried well and have little tendency to rot), can stand a stream of water well; a thin stream, if possible. Use the faucet in your kitchen.

Actually this seems to be a legend fostered by some misguided Spanish nationalism. The legend is that this sauce was made for the duke of Richelieu (the cardinal's nephew) when he lay siege to Mahón, the main city on Minorca island, back in the 18th century, hence the sometimes-used Spanish word, mahonesa, instead of the usual mayonesa. But the reality is that, 1) the word mayonnaise (probably from the old French verb mayer) already appeared in French texts one century before the Mahón siege, and 2) 250 years ago there were very few olive trees at all on Menorca island, which instead was rich in bovine cattle so that butter was liberally used (Mahón cheese, made with cow's milk, was more appreciated in medieval Italy than Parmigiano!), so I think that the duke would have been more easily served a hollandaise than a mayonnaise!

To me the greatest menestra is the Vizcaya version (also done elsewhere, of course), in which each artichoke heart, each cauliflower flowerette is dipped in egg yolk with a little flour, quickly fried separately, then placed in the earthenware 'cazuela' with some broth, a few small dice of Ibérico ham, a couple of hard-boiled eggs cut in half and some asparagus tips and slowly braised together so that the flavors will just combine sufficiently for harmony but each vegetable will still be whole, with its own flavor and aromas within the great 'ensemble'. A grand dish. Beats ratatouille any day...

I don't know if there an "obsession" anywhere. They are used differently, and each of them has its role. The green ones can be used in more varied ways - we like them fried quite a bit, or in a soufflé, or in a tortilla. They are more strongly flavored, yes - but the subtlety, minerality and complexity of the great white asparagus is unrivaled. Some perfectly-cooked white (or white-and-violet) asparagus with a fine home-made hollandaise or mayonnaise sauce - can this be topped?

The trip took place last spring. So obviously she was not only missing the pleasure of fine asparagus, but of fine fresh asparagus. (Not that good canned Spanish asparagus ever taste of "canned", BTW - no metallic or oxidized tinge whatsoever.)

A professor of History at Oberlin College describes, in the Travel section of The New York Times, a hike in Extremadura to Yuste, emperor Charles V's last residence, where he died. She writes: "We spent that night, as Charles did, in the Castle of Oropesa, today a state-run parador. It is a lovely place, with its Renaissance-era courtyard perfectly preserved, its guest rooms comfortably furnished. From its walls we could look back up over the mountains we had just traversed. We took long hot baths, and confounded the waiter in the parador restaurant by leaving the white asparagus (a Spanish delicacy that we both find repellently flabby) on our salads untouched - the equivalent, we deduced from his reaction, of eating only the toast points on a plate of caviar." This reminds me of a text by another American writer on Rioja or Basque menestra (I can't remember which one it was), describing it as a platter of "overcooked vegetables". It seems to me that in today's vegetable culture, deeply influenced by 30 years of insistence on 'al dente' textures, some people no longer understand the subtlety of tender vegetables - and white asparagus must be tender and melt in the mouth - and confuse them with those boiled, mushy, overcooked vegetables that graced or disgraced plates of home-cooked food (particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world) in a previous era - or sometimes still appear on those plates today. I think these people are missing some great delicacies...

Not everyone has loved it lately. Here's Nicholas Lander in the Financial Times last June: http://www.jancisrobinson.com/nick/2004/nick0612.html

We may tend to overlook Cunini because it's been there forever and is just a "raw materials" restaurant, but possibly this is a style that we'll grow to appreciate increasingly as the overall supply of fresh raw materials of quality continues dwindling!

I admire your steadfast effort to eat well in Granada, Jesús...

Well, I beg to differ... http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=48392 And other Spanish participants would, too: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=50261

Very recent thread on Seville: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=50086 Granada: gastronomic wasteland. Go for tapas. El Churrasco is indeed the best bet in Córdoba.

I'm afraid that's not it, John. There are Michelin stars given to no-frills restaurants in Spain. No, the real but never admitted reason is that Spain is on a numerus clausus diet by Michelin - meaning that the head office will not let the Spanish inspectors award more than approximately 120 total stars in the whole country. The number of stars for Spanish restaurants has hardly budged for the past 20 years - while Spanish restaurants, of course, were budging a lot!

The chicharro is the blue jack mackerel: unfashionable, inexpensive, but extremely tasty fish!

Of course we do. And in Catalonia too - they call them llengua de bou (ox's tongue); in Spanish, it's gamuza. Probably more popular in the Basque Country (tripaki) than in Catalonia (big in Bizkaia), but it can be found as far south as the Albaida valley in Valencia, as far east as the island of Minorca. In Madrid, my friend Iñaki Camba often uses it in his restaurant, Arce, where he always serves a dozen different types of mushrooms during the autumn months. My greengrocer in the Alonso Cano covered market had it last Saturday - at about 18 euros a kilo, I think. I bought chanterelles instead. (BTW, sometimes Spanish cooks are so ignorant, as professional cooks often are vis-à-vis wild mushrooms, that they'll use the French name, pied de mouton...)

Ah, David, what a nice life, that of mushroom and berry picker! It was mine too for a decade and a half, until I had to come to terms with the reality that one can't pick mushrooms and grapes simultaneously and I had to favor my second career as vinegrower and winemaker. I still do the odd foray and I remain a member of the Mycological Society of Madrid, and come springtime I still collect avidly the tender shoots of the collejas, the wild bladder campions that grow on the fringes of my vineyard, and are incomparably tasty in a fluffy omelet; now, in the early fall, I'm still picking figs near the vineyards, some green, some blue, some a mix... But I must admit this is but a shadow of my former self as a rabid collector of anything good that grew in and around the deep pine forests of the Guadarrama mountain range, 50 miles northwest of Madrid! From 1985 to 2000, when we sold our Ciudad Ducal house (ah, those autumns of 1987, 1993 and 1997, wet and rather warm, what tremendous fungal catches!), I walked or rode my Mobylette motorbike with my wicker basket throughout the Las Navas del Marqués area (alt. 4,200 feet), picking toadstools and all sorts of fruits and wild greens! (Local specialties: in the late summer and fall, blackberries and the sloe berries we use to make pacharán liqueur; in the spring, brook watercress and water minerslettuce, which in Spain we call pamplinas or corujas, and is highly appreciated in salads.) A digression here: in general, wild fruits and greens are the best, but for a number of plants it's obvious that pruning and other cultivation techniques devised by man have enormously improved the product: without pruning and cultivation, we wouldn't have any wine or olive oil! (Or, rather, we might have wine and olive oil... but very bad, and very little of it.) Enough of anecdotes, I guess. Let me try and answer some of butterfly's questions about mushrooms in Spain. Ecological and climate considerations determine the presence or absence of fungi and the types of fungi to be found, of course. Spain has the most varied geography and the widest panoply of climates and vegetation in Europe, and this on a rather compact surface of just half a million square kilometers, i.e. the equivalent of four fifths of Texas: from Alpine, high-mountain conditions and vegetation in the Pyrenees and Sierra Nevada, to Sahara-like desert conditions in Almería and the eastern Canary Islands; in between, there are humid, cool Atlantic regions, classic Mediterranean areas (both coastal and mid-mountain) and even subtropical mesoclimates in Granada and the western Canary Islands, where we grow bananas, mangoes and avocados. Even though two thirds of Spain is an arid high plateau, the many mountain ranges provide welcome relief, with much higher humidity and numerous forests. For mushroom hunters, this whole scenario is a boon because practically all the European fungi, from northern to southern ones, can be found somewhere in Spain. There was a second boon until 10-15 years ago: mushrooms were really popular in only two regions, Catalonia and the Basque Country, and forays elsewhere in Spain could most often be carried out in blissful peace, with no competition from other pickers and seemingly a whole mountain for each happy collector. That's now over, alas. First, restaurants made mushrooms much better known and appreciated throughout the country; then, Catalan and Basque pickers, fleeing the hordes that flock to the Montseny or Aralar ranges (as crowded a scene as in the Piedmont or Swiss mountains!), began organizing trips to other mountain ranges and forests, and 'colonizing' them; then, in a rather irresponsible way IMHO, the media began extolling the healthy pleasures of walking in the forest and picking mushrooms, giving some perfunctory advice on how to do it. It was made into a glamorous and fashionable activity, with dire ecological consequences. So now we have crowded forests, ravaged mycelia (inexperienced pickers tend to destroy the environment which ensures the reproduction of fungi) and often slim pickings throughout Spain. Plus a larger number of intoxications or deaths due to the ingestion of such toadstools as Amanita phalloides, of course. But still, there are better protected, less accessible areas, and for the time being both the availability of wild mushrooms in markets and shops and the possibility to collect them oneself remain better than in most western European countries. If you're familiar with mushrooms in France, particularly the bolete-crazy southwestern part of France, that'll give you an idea of what to expect in the northern (and most humid) third of Spain, where the Basque Country and Catalonia are located: lots of boletes, chanterelles, and of course morels in the spring. (I've picked wonderful morels in the Sierra de Cuenca mountains in east-central Spain, much farther to the south.) Indeed, a very large number of the black truffles, Tuber melanosporum, sold in France today as truffes du Périgord, actually come from Spain: there are rich truffle grounds in such places as Catalonia, Aragón or Guadalajara where holm (evergreen) oaks are prevalent. Then there are the more southerly mushrooms. In several regions, particularly the wonderful Monfragüe national park in Extremadura, the king of all mushrooms (revered in Italy, almost non-existent in France) is abundant when it rains in September: it's the Amanita caesarea or Caesar's mushroom (oronja in Spanish, reig in Catalan, ovolo buono in Italian.) There are regional variants due to climate or local taste, of course. For instance: due to the warmer climate, in late summer the Boletus aereus, Italy's porcino nero, will be more frequent than the Boletus edulis, which is the quintessential porcino or cèpe; also, the large number of pine forests means that the Boletus pinophilus, porcino rosso to the Italians, will be abundant in some areas. They are all equally good in the kitchen, so no problems here! Differences are also due to local preference. The Basques are willing to pay large sums (up to 60 euros a kilo), in the spring, for perretxikos, St. George's mushrooms or Calocybe gambosa, as Pedro has explained. (Called seta de San Jorge in Castile and moixernó in Catalonia.) And the Catalans revere a rather viscous, but extremely perfumed mushroom no one else seems to much appreciate elsewhere in the world, the Hygrophorus latitabundus, which they call llenega negra and can be wonderfully used in fine cuisine. In Mediterranean, drier parts of Spain there are popular mushrooms that are far less frequent or appreciated in France or Italy. The not-too-refined but meaty, breakable and rather nourishing saffron yellow cap or Lactarius deliciosus, whose mycelia grow on pine tree roots, is frequent and much consumed as níscalo (Spanish) or rovelló (Catalan). (Actually, the Catalans prefer the rarer, more delicate, wine-tinted Lactarius sanguifluus or bloody milk cap, which is the 'true' rovelló; the L. deliciosus would be, properly, the pinetell - but commercially the name isn't used.) Rovellons are not very much appreciated outside Spain (and, here, the Basques despise them.) Only in Sardinia, southern Poland and Mexico (it's the enchilado of Michoacán) have I seen it as an important part of their cuisines. But maybe there are other places. The other Mediterranean mushroom of great importance in Spain's cuisine, particularly in Castile, is the seta de cardo or Pleurotus eryngii: the Spanish name means 'thistle mushroom', as its mycelia grow on the decomposed roots of a thistle, the Erygium campestris. Much more delicate and tasty than its larger, industrially produced cousin, the oyster mushroom or Pleurotus ostreatus. Attempts to cultivate the seta de cardo had failed until recently, but I've tasted some nice ones this past year. I could go on and on, but I'll just summarize for butterfly what I used to collect in my little Sierra universe near Madrid, in a mid-mountain environment dominated by forests of resin-producing cluster pines (Pinus pinaster), with acid soils, grass- and thistle-covered dales (yes, great setas de cardo!) and many nuclei of oaks, holm oaks and Pyrenees oaks (Quercus pyrenaica; melojo in Spanish). Late summer, early fall: * Macrolepiota procera, the parasol. (They make great 'mushroom schnitzels'!) They grew up right in our small pine-covered lot. (They still do - I sold the house to a cousin, so I can sneak back in for a catch!) * Also, the small surface of grass we planted around the house yielded (thanks to the natural fertilizer used!) an unexpected boon: the wonderfully white and quite phallic shaggy mane, the Coprinus comatus, our barbuda. It grows overnight and you have to pick it early and eat it quickly because in a few hours it'll turn into disgusting black ink. I used to have them with eggs for breakfast. A delicacy! Fall: * Setas de cardo, of course. (Also in the springtime, but it has to be a wet year.) * Níscalos, of course: a la plancha with olive oil and garlic, or in a hearty soup with potatoes and some bell peppers. * The tiny, but abundant and delicious with scrambled eggs, negrilla or Tricholoma terreum, the grey agaric. * Not much of an area for the finer boletes, but the more viscous, less substantial butter mushroom or brown-yellow boletus, the Suillus luteus, if carefully peeled and cooked 'à la bordelaise', can be OK. * In very humid spots, the intensely aromatic pie azul or blewit (scientific name: Lepista nuda), with which I devised a mixed stew with níscalos and some shallots: it's a spectacular mix of blue and orange mushrooms, so I naturally baptized it 'New York City mushroom stew'. * No Amanita caesarea, but its more modest cousin the Amanita rubescens, the blusher or warty cap, is very good in sautéed mixed mushrooms (it must be well cooked, however.) * No one picks the large, white, Hygrophorus penarius - Castilian ignorance about mushrooms! I found a small patch of them, to which I returned every year, and decided that if the Catalans loved llenegas, this cousin of theirs in the Hygrophorus family should be as good. Well, to me it's even better because it's meatier, and you can use it in the same recipes. * Many delightful meadow mushrooms, the Agaricus campestris, of course. A big improvement over the cultivated variety, A. bitorquis! * And several small, brittle, fresh-tasting russulas - nice when sautéed in olive oil with a little garlic! Particularly good is our seta de cura, the Russula virescens. Late winter (even under the snow!) and early spring: * The subtle waxycap, Hygrophorus marzuolus, which we call seta de marzo. A nice counterpart to perretxikos in our area. (This past spring it even showed up in Madrid covered markets.) Spring: * As mentioned, some years we find setas de cardo. * Many fairy ring mushrooms, the Marasmius oreades, which we call senderuela (cama-sec in Catalonia). Very aromatic, particularly when dried, and makes great soups. * In the late spring and early summer of really wet years, the only noble bolete I've collected around Las Navas - the Boletus estivalis (or reticulatus), Italy's porcino estivo.

Codfish is much more pervasive in Portugal than in most of Spain, Pedro. So would we annex Portugal? Not falling into politics, it's a temptation that I hope died out centuries ago! Indeed this points to a different type of culinary identity in Europe: regions, sometimes very far apart, united by their love for a certain product or way of cooking. Examples? Well, salt cod! The lands of salt cod: Northern Portugal, Basque Country, Catalonia, Provence, Kingdom of Naples. How about Brazil, Greece, Mauritius? Maybe they should be in, too! Others? The lands of boiled dinners: Madrid and Castile in general (cocido, puchero), Andalusia (olla gitana), Catalonia (escudella i carn d'olla), Ile de France (pot-au-feu), Vienna and its hinterland (Tafelspitz), Piemonte and Lombardia (bollito misto). Let's not forget New England boiled dinners... And on and on...

In Funchal proper, I have enjoyed the regional cuisine at Celeiro (rua das Aranhas 22, phone 291 230 622), an old-time place with largely local customers. Pretty good espetadas (kebabs). Then again, there seems to be a 'nova cozinha madeirense', or Madeira nouvelle, at such places as Fora d'Água, but these didn't exist when I last was there four years ago, so no idea if they're worth the visit...

Steve: Agreed that these things (onion soup and pâté de campagne for France; spaghetti bolognese and saltimbocca romana for Italy; paella and fabada asturiana for Spain) are served by 'French', 'Italian' and 'Spanish' restaurants all over the world as a summary of what these countries have to offer culinarily. But that's just a restaurant shortcut, a commercial choice, not a reflection of a real, single national culinary identity. Just look at the mushrooming pan-Asian places throughout the world, which simultaneously offer Japanese sushi, Indonesian satay, Chinese dim sum, Thai red curry and Vietnamese nems. Should we conclude that, just because there are such restaurants, there is really a single unified Asian, or East Asian, cuisine? Of course not. Well, New York Spanish restaurants (or, indeed, certain traditional Spanish restaurants in Madrid!) are just like those pan-Asian places. They offer a panoply, a summary, a hodgepodge - however you may want to qualify it, it's still a restaurant menu, a choice of dishes, not a real display of a national cuisine, coming from the same cultural and sociological background, from the same region, with a specific set of available ingredients and culinary habits. Real international awareness of a country's culinary diversity only begins when the restaurant customers in any given city are finally given a chance to move from saltimbocca, pâté de campagne or paella (fake paella, usually) to regionally inspired restaurants. This was very important in the case of Italian food, which really took off internationally when regional restaurants outside Italy began showing the different culinary traditions of Sicily, the Veneto or the Abruzzi. Not quite so important for France because in that case the unified, haughty/haute cuisine was the common thread of Le Pavillon, La Caravelle, Lutèce in New York, or Le Gavroche and the other Roux brothers restaurants in the UK; yet Breton, Alsatian, Lyonnais or Provençal restaurants also showed another decisive side of France's great gastronomic wealth. And, of course, this regional diversification was decisive in the spread of fine Chinese cuisine in the world. (I can still feel on my tongue the searing heat of Hunan dishes 30 years after I first tasted them at Hunam, the first NYC restaurant specializing in that then-unknown cuisine... ) So, should we conclude that just because tortilla de patatas is enjoyed all over Spain, there is a national cuisine consisting of only one simple eggs-and-potato dish? That would really minimize Spanish cuisine to caricature levels! The point about a common Spanish attitude to food, with the spread of tapas, is more relevant here. But it should also be qualified. First, there is little in common, culinarily, between a modern, sophisticated San Sebastián pintxo and a dozen olives in a Huelva bar - other than the healthy habit of not serving drinks on their own, but always accompanying them with a little solid food. Second, tapas originated in Seville and moved rather early to Madrid, but their nationwide popularity is not much more than 30 years old, and they remain marginal in a number of areas. It takes more than 30 years, in the European timeframe, for a tradition to be considered as such. Third, and foremost, a national attitude to food is one thing, a national cuisine is quite another! This thread, I believe, responds to a specific question by Pedro: "Do you think that there's a Spanish cooking?" No, I insist, there isn't yet. Yes, the Spanish, or Catalan-Basque if you will, approach to modern cuisine that's been inspired by Juan Mari Arzak and Ferran Adrià and now followed by youngsters like Andoni Luis Aduriz and Mario Sandoval, an approach that is radically technical and intensely centered on textures and temperatures, could become a unifying culinary force of greater magnitude than anything else ever experienced by Spain. But then it's no longer just a Spanish movement but a worldwide movement. Unless we want to count Blumenthal, Trotter, Samuelsson or Robuchon as "Spanish chefs", which would be somewhat exaggerated... David: Yes, Greek cuisine is rather unified; among other things, it's largely Turkish, as it reflects many centuries of Ottoman domination and has countless points in common with other former outposts of that empire - Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Armenia... (Yes, it's politically incorrect to call Turkish coffee by its name in Greece, where it's "Greek coffee", or in Armenia, where it's "Armenian coffee"... but it's still Turkish coffee!) That said, let me go back to what I wrote in my first post: "The only larger European country that has a true national cuisine is France." Greece is a small country, as are Norway, Hungary, Croatia, Ireland... It would be unrealistic to expect wide regional diversity in countries of much smaller sizes and (even more important) with widely different cultural and ethnic situations; from Hungarian homogeneity to Spanish diversity, the models for European nations vary immensely, and so do the objective opportunities for culinary diversity to prosper. Then again, once one starts digging into a European country's culinary heritage, surprising differences in very small territories may pop up! I grew up in Switzerland, a country of seven million (well, it was only six, way back then...), half the size of South Carolina - and it has three very distinct, albeit quite modest no doubt, cuisines - Germanic, Romand (French-Swiss) and Ticinese. Zürcher Geschnetzeltes, fondue valaisanne and torta di pane have little in common as 'Swiss' dishes. They have probably more in common, respectively, with Southern Germany, Franche-Comté and Lombardy... Again, it's the regions (sometimes supranational regions), not really the nations!

Glad you liked it, John. Just some food for thought: this is a no-Michelin stars restaurant, no doubt the best in Manresa, but of the same level as at least 100 other restaurants in Catalonia alone. That should give us an idea of the general level, of true depth, that's now been reached by restaurants in Spain after the fast progress of the past decade.

I disagree on both counts, Bux. France has many regional cuisines, of course. Great regional cuisines, in most cases. But it also has that unique distinction - one unified, strictly codified national cuisine that from its start transcended regional traditions and was created by great chefs who wanted pomp, circumstance and luxury for the aristocracy and later the rich bourgeoisie they were serving: these great cooks, from Carême to Escoffier (or perhaps we should go back to Taillevent?), created an extravagant cuisine that had very little, if anything, in common with tripoux, aligot or andouillettes. And certainly nothing in common with Ile-de-France cookery. Sole Dugléré, lièvre à la royale and tournedos Rossini were identical when served in Paris, in Biarritz or in Monte-Carlo. Indeed, there was no need to be physically in France to be part of the creative process of that great cuisine – Escoffier did much of his pioneering work while living in London. Perhaps Italy was on its way to something similar when the court of the Medici in Florence was the hotbed of modern cuisine in the Renaissance, exporting much of that knowledge and those techniques to – France, of course! But Italy was several centuries away from political unification, and the Medici experience never translated lastingly into a pan-Italian cuisine. There is no clear-cut common denominator among Spanish schools of meat curing and sausage making. The Andalusian, Castilian, Asturian, Catalan, Basque, Extremaduran and Valencian traditions are extremely dissimilar, from the very nature of the meats used (Ibérico or white pork, venison, beef...) to the cooking, drying, spicing and casing techniques. So if there is not a common thread even within Spain, finding a decisive difference with a theoretical 'Italian school' of sausages becomes an impossible task. We might argue, for argument's sake, that whereas Spain lacks a national cuisine it may be a decisive, driving force in the creation of an international modern school that would run through people like Ferran Adrià, Heston Blumenthal and Charlie Trotter. But I'd say it's too early to tell if it's going to gel and last...

No, there isn't a "Spanish cuisine", Pedro. Not even olive oil is a generalized binding ingredient - take the Atlantic/Cantabric arc: only in Cantabria is there an historic presence of olive oil. Two centuries ago it was not used at all in Galicia, Asturias or the Basque Country, which were salt pork or butter regions. And pork is not enough of a common denominator: heck, pork is big in every Christian-oriented culture of the western world, and that's not enough to make Westfalia and Aragón two close cousins! There was a consensus 40 or 50 years ago that restaurants offering cocina española basically offered a panoply of classic, traditional recipes from various regions: you had gazpacho and a few dishes made with various pulses (cocido, kidney bean soup, fabada, pote gallego, olla podrida...), tortilla de patatas, callos a la madrileña, bacalao a la vizcaína, besugo a la espalda, roast lamb, croquetas, albóndiga meat balls, flan... A varied palette for a varied palate, but that didn't amount to a common corpus. Thank goodness! A big country with a single national cuisine would be very boring. Indeed the only larger European country that has a true national cuisine is France, and that's only because they have a fancy haute cuisine that was systematized by a number of great Parisian chefs since 1800, and which transcends regional cuisines.

Much too fancy and expensive, these recommendations - with all due respect and IMHO, of course! Good, entirely traditional Catalan fare, in Barcelona proper, in the 30-euro neighborhood (well, 40 is more realistic these days)? Go for Senyor Parellada and Casa Leopoldo, no doubt. Re BYOB: call ahead and ask. Usually, regulars get easily permission to bring their stuff (I've done so at Gaig and Leopoldo), but it may not be so easy for casual customers, since the idea of a corkage fee is not well introduced in Spain and they may balk at someone bringing their own stuff for free. Re wild mushrooms (and I mean really wild, not shiitakes or oyster mushrooms or portobellos): there is a much wider variety of those in Spain than in the US, particularly in the Fall and Spring.

It can only improve things, IMHO. The Derek Brown era has been a catastrophe. Standards were inconsistent and capricious, and the little explanatory texts that were added to each hotel and restaurants were so poorly written and inconsequential that they only added size and weight to the book, plus (I guess) added costs. Of course the scandal of the inspector who got away and told the inside story didn't help either...