Mimolet, Girona

September 3rd, 2009. 1:30 PM

Girona has a lot going for it - the medieval walled section aside, there are plenty of interesting-looking restaurants and shops! I decided this made sense after I learned one critical fact: Girona is actually the 'budget' airport of Barcelona, meaning if you take a RyanAir flight from London to Barcelona, you could well end up in Girona. There must be plenty of tourists saying "Well, let's 'ave a look, as long as we're here." The preserved sections, including the lovely views of buildings along the river, can't hurt either.

Mimolet was...across from our hotel. And we liked the cut of its jib. Kinda minimal, kinda brown.

Kinda contorted.

Seriously, finding a restaurant like this in the medieval quarter of a smallish Spanish city? Seemed like a find.

The potato chips by the left foot were stale.

Without video, you can't tell that this wall changed color slowly. But you can see the clean internal style and also another of those artist's models on the other table.

I'd like to say this was pea soup; it certainly included cockles and a drizzle of oil on the top. I'd also like to say I tried it, but I have no memory of the taste. Ah well.

This was sold as a typical dish; certainly I think it looks like fried eggs with chorizo. Come to think of it, the chorizo may actually have been blood sausage. I remember this somewhat fondly because of the skillet.

But I remember this most fondly because it was my starter...sweet corn, soft cheese and pieces of cherry...

In cherry soup! I saw this on the a ala carte menu and managed to get it included in the quite reasonable prix fixe lunch (EUR 26, I think, with a bunch of options per course). While it was in no way the equal of the previous night's cherries with smoked eel at Can Roca, it was in many ways a refreshing and tasty treat for a hot summer day. I would eat this all summer long if I could get cherries in quantity at price.

My fish. I really wasn't that happy with him. Two whole fillets that were a bit strong to my tastes, competently cooked but not fully boned, astride a fortress of vegetables that were in many respects raw. And not in an agreeable way (onion, heated through but still aggressively sharp in smell and taste).

Duck confit was much better. On apples, I think.

Getting fresh cheese with berries is always a nice idea, don't you agree? You see it so rarely in Japan or America, but it's a very light and pleasant way to enjoy the synergy of several sour things. And I love berries.

However I ordered this cylinder, which I remember as being frozen coconut mousse with pineapple compote. And it was good. An odd sort of dry texture to the mousse that I quite liked.

Were you to be in Girona you could be much worse than this place. But you might also enjoy freestyling some of the places tucked under dark arcades; there were a few Basque family-style places that looked quite interesting, whereas this food would be competently offered in many cities. In truth it seemed a little pale in comparison to the previous two nights (El Bulli and Can Roca), which is hardly fair.

Strangely, no cheese course.

++972 20 21 24

La Vienesa, Girona

September 3rd, 2009. 10 AM.

On our morning in Girona, we had a few more hours to walk around and feel medieval. The old areas are really nice - cleaner than those in Barcelona and targeting a more sedate tourist (no Irish bars, for example). Breakfast in Europe is a challenge to me, and usually comes down to bread and maybe a coffee...

As it did on this day, but fortunately from this very pretty shop. It must have been one of the nicest facades in the town, so don't get the idea that it's all this way.

There are a curious number of bakeries in Spain; more, it seems to me, than Paris. Based on what we ate, I don't get the sense that they have the same focus on quality or variety. I'd certainly like to do a more detailed study...

As mentioned a few days ago, Estrella's low-cal beer-like product is called FREE. Damm! It's still hard for me not to chuckle over this. Maybe by the time I'm 40 I'll be able to stop laughing at things like this.

Anyway, this was a pastry stop, followed by more walking, after we which we came upon the shop we really should have gone to in the first place.

Situated on a larger square in the old section, La Vienesa has a big, modern Italianate doorway that's out of keeping with the surroundings. Quite grand and luxurious feeling, when combined with the window displays it seemed like a place where I really wanted to eat and regretted already having had some pastry. I have a feeling the name is a Catalan version of 'Viennoiserie', or pastries, but I'm not going to check. What do they call Viennoiserie in Vienna? Heck, they don't even call Vienna Vienna in Vienna.

Look how nice! The window display is pastry presented like high-end chocolate. Looking at the poster for Xuixos, we realized we hadn't eaten anything of the genus 'fried dough' yet (e.g., churros), but this remained a small fail for the whole trip. Xuixos actually look more like elongated filled donuts, and as with all sugar-coated, cream-filled, deep fried products that I didn't eat, I'm sorry that I didn't eat some.

Also in the window was a small animatronic diorama relating the parable of Jesus with the wood and chocolate - see how the chocolate bits look like curls of wood falling from the bench, just like Jesus done it? This is cool in its own way but much less amusing than the shop down the street which had in its window a long line of figurines that looked for all the world like a miniature Klan rally, although with more purple, blue and black and robes than you ordinarily get (those being generally reserved for officers like the Klaliff and Klutz).

Inside there were all sorts of treats; I remain unsure what these jelly fruits were (and have failed at using the interwebz to locate info). They seem like candied fruit, but are too regular in shape and color. You'd think marzipan, but they're a bit clear...I'd like to be enlightened on this one. And I sorta regret not trying them, but we had had some breakfast and were already staring down a lunch reservation.

Remember I only write about places where I ate something, and here the excuse was a cool glass of orxata. I've just learned that this is different from Mexican horchata, which is made from rice - this one's actually made from tigernuts. har har. In any case, it's a lot like drinking sweetened soy milk or rice milk, but without the soy flavor (not that it's a bad flavor). I just hung out at the counter for a couple minutes, pretending I wasn't already full and scared to eat lunch.

Tigernuggetz.

++972 486 046

El Celler de Can Roca, Girona (2/2: Desserts)

September 2, 2009. 11:30 PM

Seriously, I wasn't sure what to expect from desserts at Can Roca. They're known for having cute twists that are more conceptual and could be described as precious, and I wasn't sure how I'd feel about them in practice. But I was hooked immediately, and looking back feel like there's a great overarching intelligence to them, plus some excellent execution hidden in the apparently casual forms.

The first of the menu desserts, Green Chromatism, shows off, yes, the conceptual and precious 'color dessert' theme that Jordi Roca has expounded. But this was a straight-up awesome dessert. Partly sweet, partly palate-cleanser, it mixed sugar and mint in unexpected ways (for example the green 'peas' at the front are candied shells filled with menthol oil (or something), and combined the whole with weird elements - the tangle is shredded cucumber. Just great.

This must be technically precious in some way, but only because I don't know how they did it. It was just great. Double great. It's a big apricot (looks like a nectarine to me) that's somehow frozen and jellified inside while retaining the beautiful exterior.  The menu describes it as 'caramelized', but that word is so overused now (the whole food discourse is practically infused with it, doncha think?), that I'd rather not think of it that way.

A kooky angle because I loved it so much. The popcorn is actually 'vanilla puffs', which I guess is also derived from liquid nitrogen in some way. I can't remember how they tasted (it's now over a month).

I can certainly remember the taste and texture of this though. Awesome, like cold syrup with an intense fruit flavor. Those were the two 'course' desserts, and we moved on to the special orders (one each).

This is Orange Chromatism. Beyond orange and papaya flavors, I'm not at all sure what it was! I like the look though - it's sort of festive-but-precise.

The Lactic Dessert is also an old favorite. This was mainly goat cheese-themed, including whipped cream, cotton candy, more solid textures, and a bit of fruit for contrast (I'd like to say papaya again but can't remember). It's really a 'textural study', I think, with the milk flavor as a constant throughout (I did say the desserts were conceptually precious, didn't I?). Again, I think this is precise execution in a faux-chaotic form (he also made a dessert called Anarchy for a while that was 40+ different elements arranged separately on the plate).

A Trip to Havana might be the most famous dessert, looking as it does like a burning cigar and a mojito chaser. The mojito was very sour and fresh, which was a good thing since the cigar really does have a pile of ashes in front of it. The experience of eating a dessert that tasted like a cigar will stay with me for a long, long time (even though it wasn't my dessert). Interestingly, we tried the 'cigar' by itself and seemed to discover that the tobacco flavor was actually smoked into the ice cream!

Mojito, in loving off-angle close-up.

Finally the dessert that I actually ate - Tresor by Lancome. Finishing off our examples of the famous desert concepts, this is a dessert that 'adapts' a famous fragrance (past targets have included Calvin Klein's Eternity). The idea is to isolate the different scents of the perfume (vanilla, mango...) and then mix them together, but with some thought given to form. This there are fresh fruit bits, sorbet, cream, and gelatin all mixed together. I love how this is complex but not overly fussy - the ingredients are somewhat jumbled, and you don't have the option to carefully eat them one-by-one. To finish off the conceit, they bring you a bit of paper with the actual scent on it. To me, not much resemblance, but I still liked this a lot.

Mignardises are thankfully a bit less extravagant here than at El Bulli; just one each of 5 flavors. Passion fruit, lime, vanilla, palet d'or (choco ganache) and rose. Helpfully labeled! If you can read Catalan.

You can see again how they make some effort to differentiate the textures. You can also see that the vanilla treatment is a thin gummy, which is dangerously reminiscent of the 'vanilla sheets' treatment at El Bulli. In conjunction with the oyster leaves, it made me wonder.

This sure was good. Best meal ever? Maybe, maybe not. But definitely thought-provoking and fascinating while remaining just within the bounds (for me) of the normal dinner course form and the relative comfort it provides. We stood outside in the quiet courtyard for a couple minutes, not at all eager to go back to normal life, until our taxi roared around the corner and we gave in.

I've heard that Spanish restaurants are unforgiving about email (as in, they just don't answer your requests) but I should also point out that ECdCR just hit me back within a day confirming exactly what I asked for (and which of course I mildly messed up on the night). The service in the restaurant was a bit distant, but professional, and even friendly by the end (like when we ran into our waitress outside, in street clothes). I thought the segmentation of the place was weird - from where we sat, you really can't see other customers much, and our table was divided from others on all sides by at least some type of barrier. In retrospect, my memory feels like we had dinner at Can Roca all by ourselves, which just adds to the memory.

Back at the hotel there was a medieval party, and things were already way out of hand among the carvings...

Sure I'd go back! Any time.

+34 972 222 157

El Celler de Can Roca, Girona (1/2: Mains)

September 2nd, 2009. 9:30 PM

El Celler de Can Roca is The 5th Best Restaurant In the World. If you averaged this dinner with last night's, I ate at the 3rd-best restaurant in the world two nights in a row. Can Roca is often mentioned as a place that deserves three stars but is stuck at 2, and the food is creative but tasty, weird but recognizable. Honestly, I was looking forward to this dinner more than El Bulli in some ways, and I wasn't disappointed at all.

The staff were a little disappointed with me, however. Getting too into the spirit of the Spanish late-dining thing, we showed up at 9:30 to find that our reservation had been for 9. Oh well, no harm done. I love the way the restaurant is outside the nice (Medieval, walled) area of Girona and is fairly unobtrusive.

This setting is evidently new; I'm not totally clear on what's what since I've read that they moved but also that the restaurant is next to their Mom's old restaurant. I say 'they' because the Roca brothers run the place - the oldest is the chef, the middle brother the sommelier, and the youngest the dessert chef. 

I liked how dark and quiet it was - no one else coming or going when we got there (and again when we left). Might be because we were later than the approved time!

Inside is similarly modern and airy in a spacey, otherworldly way. This atrium with lit trees is actually glassed in so that some 'outside' is visible from most places inside the restaurant. You'd think this was Scandanavian if it wasn't Spanish.

The wine list is massive - several books presented on a rolling cart - but we went with the pairings and the basic course. We also each got a supplementary dessert - some of the chef's desserts are quite well known, and I guess as a result of requests they just started offering them all the time. Considering how cool they are, the prices of the supplemental desserts are quite reasonable (EUR15, I think) as is the whole experience (considering). I've read that they decided to keep the prices down so that local people could still afford to come for special occasions.

La carte.

As if things weren't weirdly classy enough, the first thing they brought to the table was a tree. This is where I got a big smile on my face and figure that there would be all sorts of interesting stuff happening throughout the dinner. I'd like to think that they just left this for us to explore, but in practice they probably pointed out that it was a little olive tree, and hanging from it were little...

Caramelized olives, good. Black, slightly sweet, some sort of mildly crunchy coating, and most importantly hanging from special serving wires on a tree.

Other nibbles included these sesame crackers, served in a sliced rock (nuts +1, El Bulli flashback and mild fear)...

and fried eel spines. These might seem alien if you didn't live in Japan. As it was, I was a little bored by them.

But not bored enough to skip taking an up-close-and-personal shot. These eels did not give up their lives in vain; they'll reappear shortly in the first proper course.

Finally, a reconstituted frozen cherry that was served hand-to-hand (hence me taking a picture of it hanging. Such a great starter; sweet and tart and refreshing, with a neat texture.

No idea what this was or how it tasted (not on the menu, just a bigger nibble), but this is quite illustrative of their style. Tangles, angles, sauces and lumps. Not the most appetizing descriptors for food.

I believe this was a tuna jelly - like soft gelatin cubes that tasted like cooked tuna. Being a lover of canned tuna, I was a lover of this. Mild fear of Asian (Korean) influence since this came in a metal bowl but all was OK. +1 foam.

If anyone was worried about the food, this is where it stopped. We were all knocked back a bit (OK, a tiny bit, but still) by these pigeon bonbons. Something like pigeon meat and liver encased in a candy-looking shell. Intense and awesome.

NOW we were ready for the first of the 7 courses on the proper menu.

This was, for me, the hands-down winner of the evening. It's always sad to have the best thing first, but this was it. Starting with the basics - smoked eel in cherry soup. Sounds...riiiiight. But the eel was like the most beautiful smoked fish ever (and I love a good smoked whitefish, which I just now realized is probably a silver fish despite the name). The cherries came in at least 3 textures - the dark 'natural' ones (though these may have differed from each other), the lighter-color frozen one (like the earlier nibble; I don't really know if they were reconstituted) and the soup, poured around at the table. Edible flower garnish, other bits for texture...I want to eat this again someday (in fact, the memory of this forced me to order off-menu the next day to get another cherry soup, that one with soft cheese and corn. Not as good. Nothing could be as good.). This is the kind of thing I came here to eat, and it was worth it.

The high point was unfortunately followed by the low point - oysters topped with apple compote, pineapple, ginger, and spices - which included a fair amount of curry or at least cumin. And an oyster leaf, which I promptly ate. It wasn't as good as El Bulli's.

The thing that ruins this dish for me (as well as other reviewers) is the 'champagne'. Note the curved glass dish? It's a cut champagne bottle, and the concept here is a classic 'oysters and champagne'. Good as far as it goes, but the champagne, poured from a champagne bottle onto the dish, is heavily thickened with chemicals to make it gummy and artificial. Sure it holds the bubbles, and sure it looks neat, but the whole thing was to mucus-y for me. And the oyster was too strong too - strong enough that you could actually taste it under all that apple, pineapple, cumin and xantham gum. I'm not saying it was bad or anything, but it wasn't a great oyster.

Well, nuts to that, because we were back on track conceptually and tastefully with this terrific charcoal-grilled sole. The Mediterannean-themed sauces were variously vegetal and nutty (I want to say olive paste, basil, pine nut...), and the idea was to eat one bite with each. Maybe that's a bit of a conceit, but it was certainly varied, and the fish was certainly cooked very nicely. Also, they went to the effort of differentiating the bites of fish. See how in the middle there's a bit of orange garnish, and at the near end a single green leaf for the green sauce?

On top of the last bite you can just see the little 'gem', which from memory was a candy shell filled with olive oil. I could be wrong, but this was a fun way to hit a bit more flavor with a tiny crunch.

I reiterate, certainly cooked very nicely.

This 'Catalan Cod Pot Au Feu' was the second-best savory dish. Not that it had anything to do with pot au feu (and the cod was actually made from soy). I enjoyed this elaborate presentation (the arrangement of the pasta 'casserole' with vegetables especially), and the cooking of the cod was outstanding. I imagine it was sous vide, as the chef is known for that, but the flavor was extraordinary and the texture was a first for me (in a good way; the champagne gum was a first too).

In retrospect, they should lay off on pouring sauces and soups at the table. It's repetitive. But without this they would have no right whatsoever to call it a pot au feu.

And finally, suckling pig - another Catalan staple transformed to their style. I didn't think of it at the time, but maybe this is more directional eating like the fish. You could start with the first bite with just the deliciously crispy-skinned pork, then move on to the watermelon ball with embedded herb, then a bite of green onion, then repeat. In retrospect, I wonder if this is a joke about Chinese duck - served crisp-skinned with red peppers and green onions.

I was more than happy with all this. I can also imagine being happier (especially the oysters, but also the pig to some extent), but the creativity and flavor were well-balanced. I think this was great cooking, within the bounds of normalcy. I was also very surprised that the savory courses were already over, after spending 3+ hours and 25 courses on them the preceding night!

Of course, dessert, is where things got really impressive and weird, so let's not get up from the table for too long...