Augieland

Museum of Ham

When you turn onto Carrera de San Jerónimo in Madrid, about halfway up the block you see a building with bright yellow backlit signs and flashing red and blue neon lights harkening from down the street. It looks strangely like either an adult novelty shop in the night on the Pennsylvania turnpike or the Ripley’s Believe it or Not on Hollywood Blvd. in LA. Once you get close enough to read the signs, you realize all this roadside attraction flare is beckoning from the Museo del Jamón, yup, the ham museum (it seems to be a local chain so, like skipping the many Bulldogs of Amsterdam in favor of the one in the red light district, make your Museo del Jamón this one when dipping your toe in the well of well-touristed spots).

Regardless of my appreciation for kitsch, this place looks overdone, until you are within about 100 feet and you realize there are maybe 1000 Serrano hams hanging from every available inch. There is a counter running along one wall displaying every single type of cured meat you can imagine from simple salamis and non-pig offerings (which I am sure some people want) to the hams of the pata negra, the famous black-footed pigs of Iberia. How famous? How sought after are the pigs of the Iberian Peninsula? So much so that in my somewhat absurd phrase book rife with useful sentences for travelers like, “I have swallowed my contact lens,” you can easily find how to say, “I would like the ham of a young pig that was fed on acorns.”  Hanging over a case of sausages, patés, and bacons are variations on the true star, ham. Everything from Serrano hams made from white pigs to extra aged (extremo) hams, to hams made only from the center muscle of the leg, considered the finest part. It truly is glorious.

Like the prosciuttos of Parma before them, Iberian hams were not legal for import to the States for quite a long time. Unlike their Italian brethren from Parma, though, the best hams of Iberia, Serrano hams, aren’t really wanting for a new market so only one or two makers have gone through the requirements set by the USDA to qualify them for import. At this point their sausages have started arriving, but since there is time involved in the aging of Serrano ham, those will arrive some day soon, but not yet.

At the moment you must travel to enjoy true Iberian hams. Maybe that’s why it seems so fun to wiggle your way into a crowd at the ham museum and stand around a center island bar with small beers, just to clearly embrace tourism. Maybe it's because it is the greatest cured meat in the world. Eat the fat, taste the acorns, you tell me.

El Bulli: 444 impossibillian stars

Throughout history, legendary trips to see wise men have often included scaling a mountain. So it felt appropriate that the trip to El Bulli involved driving straight up one of those one-lane European mountain roads that possess many switch backs, and coming to a full stop every time a car approached in the opposing direction. After about fifteen minutes driving away from a very small town, there was still nothing on the horizon that could have been the building that houses what many consider the most creative chef in the world. Once the mountain was crested, going down the other side, about half the distance you traveled up on the way out of the small beach town of Roses, a cove set deep into the mountainside on the vast gulf of Roses you have been traversing is revealed. At the center of the shore of this horseshoe-shaped inlet sits El Bulli.

I first became aware of Ferran Adria's existence about eight years ago, while listening to two chefs discuss the best chef in the world. Between that and El Bulli receiving the somewhat ubiquitous honor of being Restaurant Magazine's number one restaurant in the world early in April, I had built up some pretty ridiculously mythic expectations for my meal there, if it ever took place. Rather than do the same for you I will simply tell you what happened when I got out of the cab at the bottom of that hill, walked in, and sat down at a table for eight in the deepest room of a humble restaurant built near a seaside town in the 1950's.

EL BULLI

While we waited for our other six diners we were served a Piña Colada. A simple up glass was set in front of us with about eight inches of spun white sugar piled high in it. Into this, our waiter poured a blend of pineapple and coconut purees, melting the sugar. After the second or third sip we discovered that there where three of Ferran's spheres hidden under the cotton candy. When you gulped one into your mouth and pierced it with your tongue you realized it was full of rum, adding the alcoholic bite the virgin drink was missing up to this point. 

Along with the Piña Colada fish crackers were served: crisp fried ribbons that tasted somewhat of grilled sardines and had an aftertaste of a finished meal of fish and chips.

At this point our dining companions joined us and we started the planned menu for the evening with a palate cleanser of tarragon: a simple small dollop of pureed tarragon leaves that had had their moisture removed to leave the concentrated green flavors of light licorice and hints of mint, a rather firm-handed primer.

We started off with a magnum of Cava.

caipirinha-nitro con concetrado de estragón

While we were experiencing the somewhat numbing effect of pure herbal essence on the center of our tongues, the waiters started preparing the solid caipirinhas. Limejuice, caracha and simple syrup were placed in a bowl with liquid nitrogen and whisked until solid. This concoction was then spooned into a frozen shell of lime and served with a gelato shovel. It had the beauty of a frozen drink without all that pulverized ice to bruise its integrity.

aceitunas verdes sféricas-1

Next up were the green olive spheres – truly the essence of marinated green olive, trapped in a very thin alginate skin and served on a spoon. (The spoon appeared again throughout the meal. A snub-handled version with measurement lines etched on it, it harkens you to remember that this chef is the scientist behind all the food science you hear about these days). The olives are presented in a mason jar, floating in olive oil with orange zest, rosemary, thyme, garlic and shallots; they actually taste of all these ingredients and also have a slight, cheesy bite. I am not sure how permeable the membrane of the sphere is, but my suspicion is that this is all affect for presentation and that the liquid inside was made to taste of these common marinade flavors long before the olives were put in the jar.

marshmallow de piñones

Peanut marshmallows were next. Savory marshmallows, each one far too light to actually be made with gelatin, it was more as if stabilized whipped cream had been rolled in toasted peanuts. 

oreo de aceituna negra con crema doble

Then black olive double-cream Oreos came to the table. Black olive cookies sandwiched whipped double cream rather than having twice as much stuffing.

"croquanter" de guanábana

Cheese popcorn. Pieces of popcorn fitted with hats made from a crisped aged cheese (maybe Gouda). There was a bite of what tasted like nutmeg that I never quite put my finger on... until I got home to America, translated the title from Spanish and found that it was nutmeg.

palomita con Reypenaer a la nuez moscada

Then guava chips. If you stacked three on top of each other you could still read through these incredibly delicate crisps that were a light touch of the taste of guava.

pan de gambas

Next, a simple shrimp toast. This tasted like a shrimp stock had been slowly cooked down till it was completely dry with nothing left but the essence of shrimp, powdered, then turned into dust and sprinkled onto a shrimp toast.

caramelo de aceite de calabaza

Pumpkin oil caramel (garnished with a piece of gold leaf). Pumpkin oil had been poured through a tube with hard crack caramel on the end so that the oil pulled the sugar to form a bon-bon. The shell was actually far thicker than I expected, with quite a lot of burnt sugar in the ratio.

esencia de mandarina

Essence of mandarin. Remember trying to mix Tang into a thick paste rather than a thin liquid as a kid, only to be frustrated by its granular nature? Well Ferran has made something with that flavor but none of the icky crystals. You are directed by the server to hold this in your mouth for 30 seconds. It tastes as orange water smells but feels similar to papaya nectar in your mouth.

bocadillo ibérico 2003

Iberian ham baguette. El Bulli is a Spanish restaurant and Spanish restaurants serve ham on bread. I'm pretty sure it's a law. Ferran's is somehow just the crust of a standard white baguette, magically hollow on the inside. His Iberian ham is cooked, with a note of sweetness in the cure similar to a maple sugar rub.

caviar sférico de melon

Cantaloupe caviar. Probably the dish I saw photographed most, and read most about prior to my journey. The presentation is fabulous. A mock oesetra tin is filled with orange balls only slightly larger than, and looking just like, salmon roe, but made of cantaloupe. There are some passion fruit seeds on top bringing tanginess to the equation (along with their look, reminiscent of a developing tadpole back in grade school science class). The truth is the "caviar" tastes exactly like cantaloupe tastes in April, kind of dull, especially next to the fresh mint and tangy seeds. Ferran often explains he wants to make food taste more like itself. Here, he has succeeded. Sadly, long ago I decided that the flavor of cantaloupe only holds my interest at the end of a very hot summer. I wonder what this dish tastes like in August.

We moved to a magnum of Sauvignon Blanc blend.

brioche al vapor de mozzarella al perfume de rosas

Steamed brioche with mozzarella and rose air was our first espuma sighting. A brioche, soft and chewy like a Chinese bun but as buttery and light as any brioche, was topped with a fresh mozzarella that was like the innards of a burrata, soft, loose and creamy as result of a steaming. On top of all this was a very light, white foam that literally tasted just like roses smell, disappearing the moment any part of you came in contact with it and leaving just the waft of rose buds.

I am a devout follower of the new cuisine and seek out chefs dabbling in it at every opportunity. The hard truth is that at this point in its fruition everyone is doing either versions of techniques Ferran played a key role in developing or that they learned at his side (be it in his kitchen or at one of the many gatherings he attends, like Madrid Fusion). You can't get away from them. Orbs, espumas, powders and decompositions are all out there and, up to this point in our meal, we were sampling things from the repertoire of El Bulli's past. To be sure, El Bulli's spheres were better for their thinner skins; its espumas held their shape longer and their density varied with the desired impact of their flavors; whatever made the popcorn taste like nutmeg was so imperceptible I wasn't sure it had actually happened. But honestly I started feeling like I had done this Picasso of the new modern art a disservice by one, going to too many of his acolytes' restaurants, and two, believing the hype about this mad scientist auteur (like Restaurant Magazine’s "best restaurant in the world" grade). Then came:

aire helado de parmesano con muesli

Parmesan cheese bread with nuts and fruit muesli. You are presented with a closed Styrofoam coffin about the size of a school lunchbox, with a beautiful image of the hills of Parma wrapped around it and sealed with a sticker that reads elbulliaire. Sometimes the most profound things in cuisine are born of simplicity, like how well aged cheese pairs with fruit and toasted nuts. In the little white box is a translucent plastic liner that has been filled with Parmesan air and submerged in liquid nitrogen, setting it as a solid (in effect freeze-drying it). Remember the first time you had the sensation of the creaminess of astronaut ice cream melting on your tongue and you were ecstatic that it was exactly like ice cream? This is that for the undisputed king of all cheeses. In a small, plastic zip-lock presented alongside are dried walnuts, raspberries and almonds, to be sprinkled over the top as you dig through the air and discover the textural differences of the parts that were closer to the freezing agent. Before discovering the plastic liner, I decided at some point as I dug into the densest part at the bottom that I might actually be digging out Styrofoam and consuming it, and I decided that was ok. It was so much fun I wasn't going to stop till I hit table.

migas de almendra, tomate raff, saúco y gelé de almendruco

Tomato salad with elderflowers and almond powder (to be eaten separately). Here Ferran has decided to make a salad, leaving the door open to combine many ingredients. In the bowl part of the bowl were peeled sections of tomato (crunchy even for this season), a section of a large-celled citrus fruit with a very light flavor (maybe a pomello) dusted with bitter dried citric oil, tiny elderflowers, basil oil, and a tamarind syrup, all dressed with an elderflower foam. On the edge of the bowl was a white powder, a dust really. It was like it had been dried, put in a blender, pulverized, and then put in an atom smasher just to make sure it was as fine as could be. In your mouth, it re-hydrated to taste milky, with a finishing aroma of that taste right after your first bite of marzipan before it moves to sickly sweet because you overdo it by chewing.

nueces tiernas", té ahumado y wasabi

This culinary movement Ferran has clearly settled at the head of is often called molecular gastronomy, a title I bristle at for two reasons: one, because as far as I know, as much as science is a contributing factor (along with culinary expertise and creative vision), I know of no science these chefs are doing on a molecular level; and two, because I think it allows the old school devotees of Haute Cuisine to trivialize this as a fad, discouraging people from spending their hard-earned money on the childish toying of ambitious, but possibly misguided, precocious youth, and thus convincing folks to pay for the same old experience over and over. 

That being said, I have no explanation for walnuts in textures with smoked tea air. What I suspect is that somewhere in the kitchen is a mold in the shape of walnuts which re-forms purees to resemble walnuts. What I know is that on a plate are a warm walnut dust, three dark brown (as if roasted) walnut halves and three white (as if blanched) walnut halves that have dots of wasabi on them. Both types are held in place by a walnut cream and around that is a golden liquid redolent of a wonderfully rich chicken soup.

Now the molecular part: the best comparison I have come up with to describe the textures of these walnuts is the lupini bean. If you brine raw lupini beans in their shells you get what the Portuguese call tremoços. The white walnuts, which looked completely raw and as if their skin had been stripped, had the almost synthetic crunch of these Portuguese bar snacks. I can't actually tell you what they tasted like other than walnuts with a tiny dot of wasabi and a creaminess on the bottom, because all I could do was be captivated by this totally alien feeling. Having almost wrapped my head around the white ones, I was happy to move to the familiar-looking brown ones, which clearly appeared to be the same kind of walnuts I like to brine and slow roast for 48 hours at home (for snacking). Then, of course, I put one in my mouth, bit down, and it disappeared. Going back to the lupini analogy, it was as if the bean had been steamed to a point where it had no structural integrity left, as if the minute it touched something solid it dematerialized, leaving behind only the impression of a walnut.

Ferran's ability to transmogrify things into finer powder than I have ever felt appears in a walnut version here. It is literally as fine as cornstarch, and this one tastes of roasted walnuts and burnt sugar.

Exciting and stimulating on so many levels, I decided it best to stop trying to figure this dish out and just accept that there is a machine in the kitchen that I had missed on my tour that had probably been used to make the walnuts right after it turned Jeff Goldblum into a fly in 1986 and move on to:

espárragos en escabeche

Asparagus and asparagus escabeche. Asparagus tips (so perfectly pared I could not find a flat side where the cylindrical stalks had been touched by either a knife or a peeler) were awash in an asparagus and saffron espuma reminiscent, to this provincial palate, of hollandaise. Grated over the entire dish was tuna bottarga. The dried roe of the tuna permeated the dish so bites of the espuma were not unlike a tuna salad, and taking all three components together the re-composition was strikingly reminiscent of a niçoise salad.

guisantes al jamócon ravioli cremoso a menta fresca y aire de eucalipto

Ok I am sick of apologizing for it, pork fat tastes good. So I don't want to hear any guff when I explain that this was a viscous, opaque soup of pig fat that contained spring peas, cubes of ham fat, and clear raviolis filled with mint cream, with eucalyptus air and pea flowers on top. It's spring and you are going to go to restaurants and hear all kinds of things about English spring peas, mint, and bacon or ham. It is just a great group of flavors. By stripping it down like this you are left with a dish that doesn't cover up these beautifully delicate flavors with smoking, salt-curing, or anything else. Revel in the joy and, if you are a person with some kind of guilt fetish, go for a jog.

Mejilones sfericados con sopa de patata al bacón y crema doble

Mussels with potato and bacon consommé and cream. The mussels were encapsulated in a gel of either their liquor or the liquor of one of their bivalve friends, each one bursting with moist brininess while still possessing the denser texture of a properly cooked mussel. There were little cubes of pine-infused apple as a garnish and somewhere about halfway through this course you remind yourself that there are bacon-based, cream of mussel soups in America and it's the apple and pine that spruce this one up so nicely. And the fact that what the sphere holds is a perfectly cooked mussel that feels and tastes like a nonexistent thing: a mussel that could be eaten on the half shell, uncooked, at a raw bar.

ventresca de salmón con encurtidos

Salmon and pickled vegetables. The striation of fat in the salmon combined with its opaqueness made me assume it was from the belly/collar area of the fish. There was a white discoloration around the corners of the cubes of salmon that led me to believe it had been cooked in some way, but I can't imagine how. It felt and tasted profoundly of raw salmon. Accompanying it were cucumber centers, alfalfa sprouts, capers, shaved garlic, chives, all kinds of sprouts, pickled ginger, pickled flower buds (mini-daisies, cat tails), a black olive sphere, and caper berries.

At this point we switched to a magnum of red from Ribera del Duero.

colmenillas a la crema

Morels in cream with a pine tree jelly. The morels have to have been prepared in a rosemary flavored beef stock of some kind. This was the first truly rich dish of the evening – there were notes of butter, demi-glace, and some kind of lemon in a pine tree cube. The coolness of this dish lies in how it pairs to red wine. The mushrooms may as well be beef essence and the resin-y pine cubes draw so many herbs out of the wine it ends up tasting like a retsina.

el mar

We were presented with forceps and then a dish they simply titled "the sea" showed up. Five little letters describing the most involved dish of the evening. On a square plate, woven into ribbons of tuna espuma, were all kinds of shapes and colors: aquatic life laid at a jaunty angle, flowing towards a pool of viscous purple liquid. There were about ten types of sea vegetation, flowers in purples, reds, and greens, as well as parts of seaweed leaves bunched in little piles.

Interspersed between each specimen were other aspects of flavor. The sea creatures were primarily bivalves. I clearly identified a percebes, a clam, an oyster, another gelled mussel, along with orange roe (about the size of steelhead salmon's) and a square of watermelon. Luckily for me there was a person at the table who did not like fish so I got two attempts at this dish.

The first time, I started with the flower at the corner opposite the liquid and worked my way in columns, top to bottom, towards it.  It was as if an archeologist had done a bisection in rock of the strata of flavors of the sea – starting at the top where the tuna air was light, foamy and slightly salty, and finishing at the purple pool that was culinarily evocative of the primordial ooze (deep, dark, thick, bitter and most aquatic). As the flavors move from sweeter to more severe you come across the watermelon square about two thirds of the way through and are revitalized before making the plunge into the dark bottom of the sea.

The second time through I put each plant with the next item down the line from it and dipped them in the fluid. Interestingly, as I progressed the flowerage moved from being the lighter side of the paring to the stronger.

Cintas con kalix

In the center of the plate was a clear liquid with a darker liquid in its center which sunk to the bottom. Together they tasted like burnt lemon oil and clarified butter. The taste was biting, as if the oils of lemon zest had been scorched and added later. Reaching out from this pool appeared three white tentacles with an orange vein running up their centers. The tentacles were actually long, thin fillets of a very tightly-ribbed white-fleshed fish (it reminded me of fresh water eel, but our servers said it translated to belt fish). In the cooking process, its thinner edges had tightened around the thicker center of the fillet to make a channel that had been filled with a very small bead roe of kalix.

patas de pollo

Ever sit eating nicely crisp chicken skin and declare you would happily just eat this all day if it weren't so wasteful to go through the effort of roasting a whole bird just to eat the skin? Well, on this plate was the perfectly browned and crisp skin of a chicken thigh, a little pickled seaweed, and milk air. There was a slight bite to it, with the flavors of cayenne and black pepper just strong enough to play off the slightly sour milk air. All the best flavors of good southern fried chicken dish, except for the mac-n-cheese.

tatin de pimiento del piquillo y platano

Banana tarte tatin with red pepper and a tarragon yogurt topping. A red pepper-like lacquer formed a skin around a cooked piece of banana, which was completely soft. The red lacquer, slightly piquant, was too pliant to have been put on the cooked banana but too moist to have been on the banana while it cooked. The tarragon yogurt, served on the side, was just slightly sweet and was actually the sweetest part of the dish. This all was served on a phyllo crisp so you could eat it in one or two bites (any more and the banana would have spread all over the place).

liquid de melocotón

A study in peaches and cream, this was a frozen cream bon bon filled with peach schnapps and one of the laboratory spoons filled to the 2.5 mark with peach nectar.

palet negro

Chocolate in textures. A minty chocolate gelato, dehydrated raspberries, candied ginger jelly, dried chocolate cookies (like big versions of the crunchies in a Cookiepuss) and a square like a gelatinized mousse.

Preserved limquat (lime and kumquat hybrid).

Morphings….

Cookies: chocolate, raspberry, green tea, lemon.

A large, hollow, egg-shaped bitter chocolate wrapped in foil. The foil was cut open and you were presented a small rock hammer to break the strong, orange-scented dark chocolate with.

Is El Bulli the best restaurant in the world? Depends what you are into. If, like me, you believe the strongest attributes a chef can have are creativity and a deep understanding of the interplays between color, flavor, texture, temperature, and aroma, and have spent your lifetime developing a reference base that presupposes many things about cuisine but are happiest when those assumptions are completely shattered... If you eat for the effect it has on all of your senses rather than because your body requires food, and you have learned that there is an endorphin rush from eating past satiety... If you are suspicious that learning a million variations of the mother sauces may actually be an exercise to compensate for the lack of genius required to truly be great... then yes, go through the process, get yourself to El Bulli and put yourself in Ferran's hands. In the long run, it costs less than making an extravagant night of a Madonna show at MSG. This man is a genius. Many people played guitar before and after Hendrix, but don't you wish you had seen him live?

Dassa Bassa: 763 chargedillian stars

Dassa Bassa came highly recommended as a restaurant to visit while in Madrid, which made us regret waiting to book it until the day we landed since we learned that they were fully booked for that, our only free evening of the trip. As a next option we asked our concierge to book us a late table for our last night, assuming a nice meal would be welcome after the drive from San Sebastian to Madrid. Then away we drove, planning to hit Dassa Bassa at 11 PM the night before we flew home.

Darrio Barrio, the chef/owner of Dassa Bassa, is a good-looking, poised, fit young man. I know, because when we arrived an hour early for our reservation to find that we were not in the book he came bounding up the twelve or so stairs that lead to the restaurant. Two things brought Darrio from his subterranean kitchen and dining room: he was terribly concerned someone may have been being caused grief by his restaurant, and his is the best English in the place.

After a discussion in which he explained that the restaurant only does one seating a night per table and that he was sorry for any inconvenience, he went on to assure us that they would get us in but would need some time because there was no change-over to slide us into. We explained we weren't expecting to sit until eleven, understood that things happen, and really couldn't swear to having a firm reservation since we had trusted someone else to make it, so we would be happy to wait, take a walk, or come back next time we were in Madrid. All in all, we sat at the four-seat stainless steel and glass bar that comprises the ground level entrance to the restaurant for about forty minutes, and descended the same stairs Darrio had scaled to make sure we were ok twenty minutes ahead of our lost reservation.

Once at the bottom of the stairs we entered a many chambered, vaulted ceilinged, white-washed brick cellar that obviously predated both steel girders and the modern cuisine. Once we were seated deep in this strangely bright and airy catacomb, the chef made one more visit to make sure we were happy and we informed him that we would be having his tasting menu paired with the Moet and Chandon pink champagne (one of the two tasting options offered).

Menu Moet & Chandon Rose at Dassa Bassa

Filo-pizza
A long, thin strip of phylo with a hard, aged cheese crisped on one side of it and a red powder down the center of the other.  The whole thing tasted of those little black bits near the crust on a slice pie.

This was served with garlicky cracked green olives with their stone inside.

Capuchino de sopa de cebolla con espuma de queso idazábal
A beef-based onion soup complete with crouton, topped with a foam of the basque cheese idazábal. A rich soup loaded with caramelized onions, leavened by the lightness of foam rather than a tired old gratin.

Esférico dry martini
A sphere of gin floating in tonic water. So really it was a gin and tonic, but a very cool way to consume one nonetheless.

Espárrago verde y blanco en ensalada con yogur al cominoy aceite curry
Thinly shaved white and green asparagus woven to form a nest around greens that had toasted, chopped cashew nuts tossed through. Set on top of this was a bread crisp studded with Iberian ham, and accompanying were cubes of mint gelatin, yogurt and curry oil.  The curry oil was a nice trick. Although the new cuisine knows no boundaries as far as ingredients go, seldom does a dish commit to tasting outside the norms accepted by Haute Cuisine. With its play between the strongly Indian curry flavors of the oil and the tempering effect of the yogurt and nuts, it was great for its confidence, boldness and harmony.

Langostino con agridulce de naranja y ensalada de grotes
Steamed shrimp in an orange sweet-and-sour soup, topped with a crisp speckled with powdered nori, and accompanied by a sprout and herb salad that included a chiffonade of basil. All together it tasted somewhere between Thai sweet-and-sour shrimp and Chinese egg noodles in duck sauce, with the benefit of the contrast of the slightly bitter sprouts. It had all the good flavors of well made American Chinese food without any of the oil/cornstarch heaviness.

Chipirones en su tinta con arroz suflado
My rudimentary food Spanish translates this into something like inky rice with baby squid. What was served was seared hake with powdered nori, a ball of bok choi, and scallions, with a bonito broth poured over it tableside. I am not sure if the surprise of our visit caused the substitution or not but either way we were happy for it. The broth was very aroma-driven, the nori contributed its vegetal bitterness, and the fish was rather straightforward.  Wound into the bok choi ball, though, were the flavors of ginger, soy, mirin, and miso so the more you opened it the more the broth assumed these flavors and the more complex the dish became.

Cochinillo confitado con salsa de mile y romero
A boned suckling pig saddle, warm cabbage slaw studded with Iberian ham, and a fried nest of potato strands. All this was in a honey sauce with a snowy pile of maldon sea salt on the pork. The sauce was nowhere near as sweet as the name sounds and, if it threatened, the crunchy pyramids of salt and a green chili, tomato and herb salsa tamed it well. The potatoes were thin and crisp and the cabbage had a substantial bite. Both served as counterpoints to show just how tender the pig was.

Granizado de té lima-japonesa son espuma de gin fizz
I have to love a chef who works gin into two out of nine courses. Similar flavors that amused us lead us into dessert. A concoction of Japanese green tea, lime ice and a gin fizz foam, it reminded me that I don't drink gin fizzes because of their sweetness. I totally understand the choice as a bridge to dessert, especially in light of the gin-and-tonic amuse. Sadly, in its execution it was a little saccharinely sweet for my palate.

Remolacha efervescente, cremoso de mango y helado de leche merengada
A soup of beet root poached in red wine with orange, cinnamon and lemon zest accompanied by cinnamon, lemon zest, and mango cream and topped with a beet root/caramel crisp. The beet soup was lightened by a gingery effervescance, as if hit with a last minute touch of Jamaican ginger beer.

Golosinas
Sesame brittle and Bailey's marshmallows made for the most accommodating petit fours yet. 

Dassa Bassa's drinks list is amazing; they have five kinds of natural water and five kinds of sparkling water, they have dessert wines, imported wines, all of Spain broken down by its sections and D.O.s, aparetivos and more. Not overwhelmingly large, it has depth in every section. But since the menu was paired to a wine, and very well so I might add, that's the way we happily went.

I went to Dassa Bassa because I was told Darrio was one of the new guys at the forefront of La Cucina Nuevo and indeed I think he is. Take into account the lengths he went to accommodate an American couple he had never met, seen, heard of, or even had an inkling to believe was telling the truth about a supposed reservation.

While sitting in the bar I picked up a current issue of Food & Wine Magazine someone had left and found Dassa Bassa listed as one of the "must go" Madrid places, on their list of 365 international restaurants. When I congratulated the chef he had no idea what I was talking about, and when I showed him he proudly displayed it to the couple of tables with folks that were obviously friends, after bringing it into the kitchen.

Like most practitioners of the modern cuisine, Darrio has a great touch and vision of how to play with the tools current cooking technology affords him. In his execution, Darrio seems to prefer reinterpreting to decomposing. Rather than remake a dish in an entirely new way by putting different versions of base parts through a technology blender and wowing, he seems to be looking abroad for inspiration and creating Spanish versions of the dishes. The pork saddle was definitely born of German preparations, the asparagus Indian, and the shrimp Chinese, but rather than trying to make German, Indian, Chinese, or even British (if you count the gin) dishes with ingredients from those cultures that aren't available at their best in Spain, he is working Spanish ingredients and techniques into them.

It is worth mentioning that our dinner was about 60% cheaper than all the other places we went in Spain while being of comparable quality, so it comes in as a super value. On one experience, I can decidedly claim that Dassa Bassa has a young, energetic, creative, humble chef offering inspired international cuisine at a very fair cost, who takes making people happy as his primary aim. So I guess you can say I strongly recommend it. 

Can Fabes: 264 rolexilian stars

It's about a half-hour drive north from Barcelona to Sant Celoni, but it is a move from one of Europe's most metropolitan cities to one of its familiar, charming, small ones. A recognizable city plan; houses, shops, and domiciles that butt right up against narrow streets, built to consolidate advancing forces, then group them in squares with high sides easy to take advantage from. Upon entering these little hamlets you realize they have planned to have the upper hand on tourists for far longer than there have been cars, tires for cars, companies to make tires for cars, or books to guide people between the couple of these bergs where a hometown boy has set up a restaurant significant enough to merit taking a break from wearing down your tires just long enough to have a meal.

The boy from Sant Celoni is Santi Santamari and his restaurant is Can Fabes. Attached to a hotel, it is Europe's smallest Relais & Chateaux and the first Catalonian restaurant to receive three rosettes from Michelin. That's right, at the same time Ferran was taking the helm at El Bulli Santi was setting up a small fine dining outpost in a small town that would take all the accolades the French have to offer.

The last sign before getting off highway C-33 lets you know that France is a little less than 120km away. However sitting in Can Fabes, you could have traveled far past that border. That is not to say that the food is French -- the ingredients and flavors are decidedly rooted in Catalonia. The technique, however, emphatically is. Santi has taken the classic French belief that there is no such thing as too luxuriant to new levels at his little place in the north.

It is a sedate room, almost a study in negative space, entirely done in flat black. There are translucent ochre accents throughout it -- in the water glasses, the partition around the staircase to the tasting room/wine cellar, and the dividing wall to the open kitchen. It approaches almost a Spanish Zen in its ability to be a room for fine dining yet not really by affect so much as by tasteful little touches like the small, individual, representational sculptures that adorn each table where flowers might have been.

The Chef’s Menu was a surprise, and the list at the end was only available in Spanish. For wine, not knowing what the food would be, I deferred to the sommelier who brought me a Fino for an aperitif. Next was the house white made of chardonnay under a private label from a one-hectare plot they have in the Pendes. With notes of ginger and clove, it was wonderfully spicy yet subdued enough for the food. A glass of 150 Barrels Red, by Gamez-Alba followed. A blend of temprenillo and merlot ironically not as woody as the name would suggest, it was juicy, fruity and again good food wine with enough flavor to stand up, but not so much that the food was pushed down.

There was only a Spanish language copy of the menu available, the bold italics are excerpted from it.

Menú Santi Santamaria

Amuses
Octopus (pressed and coated in a gelatin reminiscent of bacon), mackerel (raw, with a piece of fish liver set on top), almond cream (sandwiched in buttered, toasted phyllo), baby pig belly (slow roasted with a sweet and sour sauce), mini-octopus (wrapped in phyllo and seared), onion confit and lardo (a piece of apple base topped with onion confit and toasted sesame, wrapped in lardo). A terrific thing happens when a guy from the tapas culture takes on an amuse. Many small and variant things take you in divergent directions, prepping you for just about anything.

Cabra de mar con crema de hierbas
Rice-pasta wrap enveloping crab and sweet onion on a pool of herb cream and olive oil. The filling was very deeply flavored of the sea with the onions and crab playing sweet notes. I assume that the crab's (or a lobster or langoustine's for that matter) tamale was used to flavor it. The best part about seafood on the Mediterranean is how the cuisine plays up the fact that the sea is a "fishy" thing and makes no apologies for that. This seafood tastes briny and deep while obviously fresh, even in this lighter dish.

Ensalada de angulas con aceite de guindilla y ajo
Baby eels with cream of soft garlic. A fried parsley leaf and toasted garlic chip were set on a loose pile of baby eels bound with a wilted scallion green. There was roasted garlic cream on the plate and tiny chopped chives were interspersed throughout the eels. I have to learn more about the seasons of the Mediterranean; if these little guys are a spring thing, spring is the time to come. Their chew is not unlike perfectly al dente semolina pasta and their taste is of sea water.

Colminillas y espárragos con foie-gras
Wild asparagus, cultivated asparagus, and white asparagus, all steamed, and served with seared foie gras, morels, butter and sea salt. This was the Frenchest of dishes. As if it weren't rich enough, any chance asparagus tips had at bringing a little chlorophyll bitterness to the dish was handily beaten back with butter. Lest you think this is a bad thing, this dish tasted of foie, butter, sea salt, asparagus, and roasted morels, and what it lacked in highs and lows it made up for in decadent richness.

Pulpitos con Macedonia de verduras, tocino y botifarra
Baby octopus, zucchini, carrots, braised bacon, fingerling potatoes and black sausage. Throughout Spain you will find flavors of the sea and the land being combined in dishes. Their common ground seems to be levels of salt. Rich sausage, seared pig belly, and baby octopus all share a salinity that, if not necessarily made for each other, can be easily brought together as Santi does here with that best friend of salt, fresh butter.

Langosta con habas y guisantes
Langosta and baby favas with pig ears, pig mouth and seared fennel. Sliced, seared hearts of fennel rested under an enormous bisected langoustine so perfectly sliced that you had exactly half of the liver and the rest of the tamale intact. Over this, a ragu of pigs ears and other facial parts cooked with butter lent a soft richness to the dish. Toasted pine nuts, baby favas, and spring peas added a fresh sweetness and yet another layer of texture to the already fleshy bite of the langosta and the pliable chew of the pig.

Sant Pedro con alcachofas

John Dory with artichokes and chives. I am learning that the great chefs of Spain use chives like some American chefs use parsley. I would say it appeared in three out of every four dishes, chopped very finely as a garnish. Otherwise, this was a pretty straight-forward seared skin-on piece of a fish fillet on braised baby artichokes, sauced with what seemed to be the sauté pan remnants with some of the artichoke braising liquid monte au beurre.

Pato de sangre con escalonias y su jugo

Roast strangled duck with roasted vegetables. A beautifully roasted duck was presented whole and carved tableside, then served with roasted white asparagus, pearl onions and apricot. Rare and all the more gamey for having been strangled to preserve the blood in the meat rather than let it bleed out, there were large crystals of grey salt on the crunchy skin. Anything more would have distracted. Brillat Severin said it best: "any one can learn to cook, you must be born to roast."

Formatges
For the cheese service, a fromagiere showed up with an eight-foot black cheese cart with about twenty cheeses on it. They were described as mild or pungent, by region, and by their constituent milks. We faithfully put ourselves in the fromagiere's hands to make us a good mix favoring Spain but not at the cost of anything genius. We each ended up with four cheeses different from each other's, presented from delicate to strongest. On my plate, in the role of strongest was a mixed sheep and cow's milk blue that was dark yellow in color and described as "similar to cabrales." Once we had eaten the other seven we dug in with the sherry our waiter had given us and had another of those better-than-the-sum-of-its-parts food and wine moments. Sweet with salty, bracingly astringent with comfortingly sweet, pungent farm valley with sun drenched mountain top raisins. Perfect.

Ralladura de moras
Strawberry granita with fruit marmalade, apples, whipped marscapone, pear, and applesauce. This was a perfect follow-up for the cheeses, lush with the beauty of the fresh whipped cream, light with the flavors of ripe strawberries, better for the contrast the applesauce layer being warm added, with all this goodness sitting atop soft cubes of ripe pear. I find the best deserts are the simple ones, playing with natural sweetness, exactly like this.

Buñuelos de chocolate

Coconut ice cream with chocolate-stuffed doughnut holes. Five beautiful blonde orbs fresh from the fryer, filled completely with molten dark chocolate. The coconut ice cream accompanying these dark chocolate nuggets was served atop chopped hazelnuts, because sometimes you feel like a...

Petits Fours
Anise-flavored marshmallow, key lime pie with a very buttery crust, chocolate spearmint truffle, almond pound cake with raspberry, white chocolate curry truffle, mince pie, and chocolate almond torte 

Having only eaten one of the chocolate-filled munchkins, I explained the need to taste each petit four in case one was a gem (they were all great) but I truly felt terrible when a small glass with whipped cream and toffee sauce showed up and I couldn't help finishing it. Heck, it tasted like a Werther's without requiring all that bothersome masticating.

A robust man with one of the most pleased visages I have seen, Santi seemed most happy when he showed up halfway through the meal to ask if everything was ok. I am suspicious he has never heard anything less than very good. The truth is, Santi's cuisine is like a beautiful gold watch. It may not be exactly your style, but there is beauty in a classic gold watch you can't help but appreciate for its excellence of style, precision and opulence. If you are a classicist that sees beauty in such things, you should go see what happens in the hands of this gifted Spanish artisan. If you are a devout acolyte of the new school who only appreciates such things as timeless, but for another time, this is still a level worth checking out.

LaBroche: 734 bichromatillian stars

Walk past the concierge desk at the Hotel Occidental Miguel Angel in Madrid and make a left, then make your next left through the glass door, the one just past the shoe shine stand, and you will find yourself in La Broche, Sergei Arola's restaurant. Through this simple glass door you walk from the dark reds and polished wood of a classic old world hotel into the sleek white space of a modern fine dining restaurant.

There is something about a well-executed theme that makes you realize how thin the line is between a graceful aesthetic and disaster. La Broche has such a theme. Most things in the room are white and trapezoidal. There are sleek low white flat box-shaped furniture pieces dividing the dining room, the tables are squares draped in white linen, the chairs are white and square-backed and seated, even the windows are large white framed squares with flat, square, sheer, white, curtains. Besides flat white wood there is also some glass. The wine room is a large glass box around a rectangular column in which the wine is held.

What isn't a parrelelogram is a perfect flat circle -- the plates, two of the tables, even the flat white walls have small circles recessed in them in a rectangular pattern below knee level, as does the ceiling. It is truly captivating. If there was a single imbalance in the décor it was that, with the sun filling the flat white windows, the spotlights on the tables were turned up, creating a hot bright spot in the center of each table. This room lives at such a zenith level that you can notice things like this.

The only things not flat and white or glass in the room are the black-clad servers -- the gentlemen in suits and the ladies in pants and black leather waist jackets. The effect is somehow reminiscent of the matrix, if the matrix had been populated with an extraordinarily attentive and talented wait-staff as opposed to deadpan actors. The attentiveness of the servers is worth mentioning. I do not know what accolades La Broche has received from the local or international press (it was recommended by a friend) but I suspect it is close to but not at the top, creating a charming eagerness in the service unmatched by the comfortably-settled, awarded places I visited in the region. Try as I might, I could not empty a water glass. When Wife retired to the restroom, one server ushered her to the door back to the hotel lobby and opened it while another changed her linen. While never intrusive, not a single trick was missed or even delayed.

At some point after you pull your menu from the flat white box sitting on the table at your place, but before you order, the focus moves from aesthetic to food. Except for those moments between courses when you realize that the sculpture in a square recession in the wall is of the sacred heart, or you think “wow” that in spite of the language barrier you have a good comprehension of what you are being presented with and everything you could possibly need is provided, you concentration is absorbed with the exceptional food.

Before making a decision on the menu we were presented with a dish of impossibly thin bread crisps and three accoutrements for dipping: an aioli, salted tomatoes in their water and a very grassy olive oil, and guacamole.

Once we had committed to the Chef's Grand Tasting Menu, the bread service arrived. On a plate was a soft whole grain bread, dry white bread toasts, a pot of sweet cream butter, and three versions of a fine grain salt – pink pepper, coffee, and a Himalayan salt (white with pink specks). Part of this service included a choice of four olive oils. We went with the house olive oil (medium-bodied) and one noted as strong called Picual. I went through a step-by-step process, tasting the bread, then bread and lipid, then bread, lipid and salt. My favorite combination ended up being the strong Picual oil with the pink pepper salt.

Having opted to receive English language menus at the end of our meal we did not know what we would be eating so I asked the sommelier to provide glasses of wine. First was  white, a Sauvignon Blanc-Verdeho blend by Brada from Rueda. The second was red, a Granacha-Syrah from Ribera del Duero. Both were simple, with food friendly acids, and both were good at adding a component to the dishes' flavors without getting in the way. With dessert we had a Domaine Des Baumard, Coteaux du Layon that was wonderful.

Following in bold italics are the menus headings; in italics are the descriptions from the English menu.

Arola's Moment
Selection of classical tapas to start the menu following by our spirit Arola's concept

Tapas: cornmeal-dusted baby squid, fried and served with black (squid ink) aioli; potato confit, cylinders of new potato poached in olive oil with a depression in the top holding a little green garlic and a dollop of crème fraiche; creamed mushroom shot, hot mushroom soup topped with a froth of mushroom cream; and spicy baked cod brandade with toasted pine nuts and raisins.

To start...
Crepe rice filled with roes of sturgeon calyx caviar and an olive oil frosting
A sheet of rice-paper wrapped around sturgeon caviar to form a cannelloni with micro greens and the tiniest mirepoix I've ever seen – carrot, celery and chive (playing the role of onion) – on top. The frosting was olive oil which had been poured onto a negative degree fryer and scraped off, with its shavings collected in a Chinese soup spoon, then dusted over the top of the cannelloni tableside.

Radish from Loire coated with herring "gazpacho"
A canelle of bread ice cream was topped with thinly sliced radish and baby watercress, over which a pickled herring cream was poured tableside. A decomposition of the tastes of afternoon tea sandwiches, clever for touches like a smooth frozen ingredient being the bread, and the piquantness of pickled herring being softened by cream, with the work of tearing it taken out of the equation.

Roast beef and side order of sprouts & vegetables with hints of béarnaise sauce
Roast beef, beautifully rare and sliced inconceivably thin, on roasted baby vegetables with rosemary oil-fortified pan gravy and béarnaise air. These days it is very in vogue to be over foams, airs, and the like. To people who claim to be so, I offer this dish. All the flavors, sensations and reminiscence of a decadent roast beef dinner, yet light enough to fit in the middle of a lunch as a part of progression in tasting.

Sea Urchin with algae cream, boletus powdering and a mint pea sphere
A Mediterranean sea urchin, darker and far more intensely flavored than its Pacific brethren, sat in a pool of creamed nori with a shaved mushroom giving a fleshy bite to it. Set atop all this was a bright green puree of spring peas and mint contained in an alginate pill. All together it offered the taste of a sunny day sitting on a jetty at low tide, of drying seaweed, evaporating sea water on black rocks, and light green air blowing off the shore.

From the Sea and Mountain...
Homemade gnocchi with "Thassos" olives, red prawn & "Marcona" almonds soup
Black olive gnocchi in Marcona almond soup, with seared red shrimp and breadcrumbs. The black olive gnocchi felt like marzipan and the almond soup tasted somewhat like an un-sweet version of the treat. Then there was sort of a saffrony-paprika flavor to the shrimp that permeated the whole thing, keeping it safely savory and wholly Mediterranean.

Rock mullet with broad bean "Iberian" lasagna, peas and black pudding
Seared mullet filets on top of a mixture of peas, baby favas and diced blood sausage which had been made into an "Iberian" lasagna (with thin strips of the fat from cured Iberian pigs acting as the layered pasta sheets) accompanied by a pan sauce from the fish's cooking built with lobster stock. The strips of Iberian ham fat, about an inch and a half long and an eighth of an inch wide, all but melted from the dish’s heat. They added a fascinating body, tying together a dish that played with the lighter side of textures while combing flavors rooted in the land and pulled from the sea.

Veal sweetbread with asparagus and caper cream based on a Bernard Pacaud classic
Roasted veal sweetbread sauced with demi-glace on pared, poached baby asparagus tips with a champagne caper air bridging the gap between the sweet rich earthy flavors and the light green astringent ones.

Before the dessert...
Little plate of cheese with nuts compote & P.X. syrup
A cow's milk cheese from Mallorca with almond zest, a dot of reduced Pedro Ximenez, a nut compote, and a twist of black pepper

Sweet Cooking...
Coconut cloud, marscapone cheese, and toffee cream
Shaved, toasted coconut dusted on coconut foam enveloping marscapone cheese set atop toffee cream, with a tiny little dusting of powdered anise seed on the rim of the plate

"Mojito" kumquat
Kumquat custard thinned with lime oil and rum, topped with egg-white froth that had been touched with a torch flame, and a micro mint leaf.

Chocolate scented and chili pepper olive farmhouse bread based on a "chocolate with bread" concept
Two rectangular logs of chocolate mousse with notes of capsicum studded with chocolate-covered puffs and topped with tomato sorbet and a micro-cilantro leaf

petit-fours
corn-chip dust in a chocolate cone, violet-flavored marshmallow, chocolate with coffee cream and raspberry, strawberry cookie, orange jelly, chocolate with nut-cream filling, lemon crunch (as if the astronaut version of lemon sorbet),  white chocolate and black olive lollipop

There is no chef involved in fine dining today anywhere in the world who is not borrowing some techniques from the new school. The point at which a chef becomes a practitioner of the new cuisine, as opposed to one using the new technologies to round out and advance traditional cuisine, is to be found in the lightness of this meal. Very satisfying and pleasing to the palate, Arola's dishes presented challenging and successful reinterpretations of the expected. Rather than depending on traditional conveyances of flavor (fat), textures, temperatures and primacy are played with here providing a wonderful dining experience without being cripplingly heavy. The interest is more in stimulating your five senses, taste being primary, than in making you feel you got your money’s worth by stimulating the nerves in your belly that sense your belt.

Immediately after this meal I got in a car to drive six plus hours from Madrid to Barcelona. Rather than feeling weighted down and forced to recline and contemplate a meal of this length and range, I was stimulated and excited by it. I spent every second of the drive thinking about the components of each course, loving the bitter, the sweet, the salty, the rich, the tart, the light, the heavy, the presupposed and the realized, each presenting a new experience to be enjoyed. Even when the inspiration was a boring old roast beef with vegetables, gravy and béarnaise, in Arola’s hands it was creative, beautiful, textured and, of course what matters most, delicious to eat.

Balzac: 762 honorellian stars

Spain is the birthplace of the modern cuisine; at this point the avant gardists have spread their fingers far and wide here and it is almost easier for a person doing a gastro-tour to find yogurt espuma than fine food born of the local flavors, coaxed and accentuated by the hands of a confident expert.

Wife and I came to Spain for the food, maybe a museum or two, but really mostly the food, the new food, the creative and the daring. But first it only made sense to have a truly well made, classic meal stemming from the flavors of the region. Only with a good sounding board would the plays involved in the new cuisine be able to make their appropriate impact.