chez pim

L'Esguard: quite possibly the worst meal of my life

The usual caveats apply and all that, but, in my opinion, I might have finally eaten at what was quite possibly the worst restaurant in the world. Not that I wasn't forewarned; I should have taken note when Rafael Garcia Santos, the One Man "Michelin Guide" of Spain, contorted his face into something quite indescribable when I told him we were going to eat at l'Esguard. I should have listened to many other concerned souls who pointed out that Roses—and the legendary elBulli—was really not that much farther from Barcelona. One person pulled out a mobile and offered to get us a reservation, even.

Alas, I was determined, pigheaded, I should say. I had already been to elBulli, but was yet to try l'Esguard. We were sticking with our plan, we would not be swayed by anyone, not even the lot of them. Our resolve was, sadly, resolute.

You could hardly blame us. The chef, Miguel Sanchez Romera, has a back-story that is more than intriguing: a brain surgeon by day, and an haute cuisine chef by night. Ok, it's more like two and four days a week, respectively, but you get my drift. Quite an iconoclast, Sanchez Romera famously denounced the inclusion of his restaurant in the Michelin Guide for Spain. Whether he had done that pre or post the not-so-favorable mention in said guide is up for question, however.

I knew things began southwards not long after we entered the beautifully restored 16th century building. Lining the walls of the reception room were photographs of the food. Beautiful yet strangely sterile, they were blown up, spotlighted, and posed as if to demand no less than worship from the unsuspecting diners passing through the corridor.

Next thing we know they'll have a blog too

Remember that superlative Asador called Etxebarri I wrote about last year? That amazing restaurant where the chef makes his own charcoal and grills everything, even oysters like the ones in the picture above - and they were grilled out of the shell! That little place has been enjoying very good press lately, the chef, Bittor Arguinzoniz, was voted best chef of Spain in 2006, the restaurant was featured in Men's Vogue, Bon Appetit, Food&Wine, and many other publications.

Well, I just found out - thanks to Chez Pim's commenter Karin - that they now have their own website. That's very cool. You should go check them out.

I took a great trip down memory lane going back to my original post on this restaurant, looking at the amazing parade of dishes coming out of that marvelous kitchen. I suddenly realized it's been far too long. I am overdue for another meal. Soon. I hope.

More tapas action, this time Pamplona

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Here are some photos from another tapas crawl, this time Pamplona. Admittedly it wasn't such a successful one, so I'm afraid I might not have much to tell. It was something of a surprise, actually, since Pamplona is practically a stone's throw from San Sebastian, which has long ago staked the claim as the birthplace of tapas.

I should also admit though that we didn't give the town much of a chance. We didn't set out on the crawl until well after ten, which would have been a great time to begin had we been in San Sebastian or Barcelona, but, as it turns out, the denizens of Pamplona go to bed much earlier than their compatriots. We stopped first at a 'nouveau' tapas bar called Gaucho. The fares didn't look so good, but the bar came with such a good recommendation that we decided to pick a few things to try. We should have listened to our eyes and nose, actually, as we were even less impressed after tasting them.

Having consoled ourselves properly with a sherry and a beer or two, we set out to Calle San Nicolas to find other recommended places. Unfortunately, we found one place after another closed, or in the process of closing. The few remaining places were sparsely populated, and the food didn't look so good.

Rias de Galicia

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What does it tell you when you sit down to dinner at a restaurant and, a few minutes later, one of the most famous chefs in the world comes in and sit down at the next table? It says this is gonna be good, this time at least.

No, this wasn't at some fancy do. It wasn't planned, even. It was at a random restaurant, on a random night, entirely by accident.

Well, I supposed it's not so random. The town was Barcelona. The night was Monday, when most other places are closed. And the place was arguably the best seafood restaurant in town. The chef wasn't random either. Half of you probably guessed who it was already. Yes, none other than Ferran Adrià.

And, no, I'm not about to recount a seafood dinner with spherical langouste or pulpito espuma -not that oyster dirt wouldn't be fun once in a while, I guess. But you won't find any modern wizardry or technique here. No Centrifuge. No chemical additives. Nor will you find italics or "quotation marks" on the menu, I promise you.

This place is simple, supremely simple, and brilliantly so. It's called Rias de Galicia. I first thought it meant the joy of Galicia or some such approximation. Me no speako Espagnol. Happily Wikipedia (and my friend Pedro) rescued me from saying such outlandish a thing on my blog for all to see. In fact, the rias of Galicia were once river valley and estuaries that are now covered by the risen seawater. It's that special geographic characteristic of the Galician coast -where the Cantabrian sea meets the vast Atlantic ocean- that makes it such a fertile area for seafood.

Paco Meralgo – comer algo, get it?

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Never mind. I didn't get it either. It took our friend the Silly Disciple to point out the pun, and then David to translate it. I can be that thick sometimes. You still didn't get it? What's Google Language Tools for?

Paco Meralgo is a tapas bar in a town full of tapas bars, Barcelona. With a roster of names like Pinotxo and Quim in the Boqueria market and the world famous –you either love it or hate it- Cal Pep, just to name a few, it's easy for yet another tapas bar to get lost in the fray. Paco Meralgo distinguish themselves with not only good tapas fares –easy enough to find in this town- but by opening every day of the week. Now that's something you don't find every day. Ha ha –I'm just so full of puns today. Even more amazing is that they somehow manage to have fresh seafoods even on Sundays and Mondays. Never mind what that Bourdain told you. It's really quite safe to eat seafood at Paco Meralgo even on those days. The quality is evident enough in the photos above, so if you didn't believe me you could see for yourself.

How to order coffee in Spain

While I'm not much of a fan of coffee in France, I love coffee in Spain. I particularly adore it when a matronly waitress comes to my breakfast table with two giant, steaming pots, one filled with dark coffee and the other hot milk, and then performs a delicate balancing –and dangerous- act of pouring both at once into a waiting coffee cup. I wince every time, but I've yet to see a spill. Quite extraordinary really! That particular style of coffee is called Café con Leche, coffee with milk, quite likely the most popular breakfast beverage in Spain.

My other favorite –especially to drink in the afternoon- has a bit less milk, and is called Café Cortado. It's basically an espresso cut with just a little bit of milk. Even better than Café Cortado is Carajillo, espresso spiked with liquor (often brandy or whiskey), which comes in quite handy after a long and full night of tapas crawling.

The best meal and the worst meal

...of this trip. One of them is perhaps the ---- meal ever. Can you tell which one is which? Extra kudos for anyone who could guess the restaurant names too.

Brilliant dessert idea: Chocolate mousse and basil gelee

This cute little dessert came at the end of our nice lunch at Rodero in Pamplona. More on the lunch itself later -I hope- but I want to show you this ingenious idea while I'm still on the road. It's a silky chocolate mousse, topped with cold gélée of basil. It's an unusual combination, I know, but it worked so beautifully.

I'm sure this can be translated easily enough for a home kitchen. It might not be as refined as the version you see here, but the concept is really quite simple. Just make a bitter chocolate mousse, then add to that a purée of basil mixed with a little bit of gelatin for the thicker texture. I'll try it as soon as I get back from this trip.

Cheers <waving> from Denia.

Not a bad way to start

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This is about as good as it gets: Josélito ham. Enough said.

Dead fish

I've been looking through the photos I took while in San Sebastian, and found a few rather macabre shots from the Pescaderia or the old fish market in town. I thought it would be fun to share them.

Elkano, simply, from the sea

When asked where the beautiful Turbot on our plate had come from, our waiter simply gestured toward to sea just beyond the windows. "Everything we serve here come from right there", he said. Elkano is that kind of restaurant, where deceptively simple technique gives way to the superlative freshness of the local ingredients. And that's precisely why we had gone there in the first place.

We had arrived only a few hours prior, a flight from Paris to Biarritz, on the French side of the Basque country, then an hour or so drive to San Sebastian. After a brief rest at the hotel, our friend Mikael joined us for the drive to Guetaria, for dinner at the famous seafood house Elkano. And so began our saga of driving –or getting lost, rather- in the maze that's the highways and byways of Donostia.

By the time we arrived at the restaurant it was far too close to midnight, having gone over 40km the wrong direction and back again. We rehearsed the starving children look with each other in the car, hoping to be pathetic enough that they would serve us still, despite the hours. Happily, we once again underestimated how late people ate in Spain. Not only that they took us in without complaint, two more tables arrived even later than we did, and the restaurant seated them without missing a beat.

We took a quick glance through the menu, though it was just for show. We knew what we had come all that way for, and it's the Turbot. That majestic fish, whose sweet, succulent flesh and gelatinous bones are considered by many a great chef to be the very finest specimen of fish in the world.

We told our nice waiter that we were there for the Turbot. Yes, we came all the way out here for the Turbot so could we PLEASE have a Turbot, and might we have it NOW?

Etxebarri: excellence personified

The place that made perhaps the biggest impression on me on this last trip to Europe –on yet another a pilgrimage to many starry restaurants- was, surprisingly, a kitchen without even a star to its name. This restaurant, called Etxebarri, which simply means 'new house' in Basque, was the very definition of the phrase 'middle of nowhere', and serves up the kind of strikingly personal cuisine that makes one sit up and take notice.

A friend had warned us that the normally useful directions from Via Michelin were incorrect, and gave us instead a tattered treasure map with pencil markings on the roads where we were supposed to turn. We had a better idea though, or at least we thought we had one. We had a GPS in our rental car, whom we dubbed Hal II, and for whom we lavished blind faith. Need I say that our better idea turned out to be hardly better than nothing at all?

Driving in and around San Sebastian is quite non-trivial. Many of the major arteries in and out of the main city overlap each other, with varyingly named motorways sharing the same actual road. Signs on the roadside look at times like a long series of coded messages. Adding insult to injury, everything is labeled in both Castellano (standard Spanish) and Euskara (Basque). Not that I would ever begrudge a people so proud of their heritage, but, speaking neither Basque nor Spanish, I found myself in a constant state of confusion in the world full of math equations in place of a road sign!

After an action-filled drive from San Sebastian (ahem, Donostia), we finally made our way to a little town called Axpe, where Etxebarri locates. The restaurant is in an unbelievably beautiful setting, in a village seemingly comprised of only a few traditional stone buildings, set against a dramatic hillside. The picture doesn't do it justice at all.

We came all the way here in seach of the distinct cuisine of the chef, Victor Arguinzoniz, the renown grill master of the region. To say that grilling is his passion would be an understatement. Not only that every dish out of his kitchen is grilled, but he makes his own charcoal, and even invented his own oven and grilling contraptions to take it to a whole other level.

It's the kind of highly personalized cuisine that could be confounding to some. Michelin, who is unusually generous in this area –San Sebastian has the highest ratio of Michelin star per capita- gives him no star at all. I'm not sure if it was because they couldn't understand him, or perhaps simply couldn't find him.

Yet another whatzit

Continuing on my eat-odd-looking-yet-delicious-food trip, lunch today included this whatzit as the premier bites in the series of amuses bouches. I suppose it wouldn't hurt to tell you it's at the lovely Mugaritz. Can you tell what they were?

I'll give you another clue, they were actually a lot more traditional than you imagine. A similar taste can easily be found at any tapas bar in Spain. Speaking of which, I'll leave you to your fancy while I'm off pinching pintxos. I'm in San Sebastian after all. Click on the photo to see the rest of the meal. Ta.

How to wake up properly in Spain

A Cafe Cortado and a Rosquilla, that's how.

Alkimia

In a chemically induced insomnia tonight, poor little me. I decided to make a good use out of my half awaken state by uploading a bunch more food porn from my last trip to Barcelona on my Flickr. These photos are from a lovely little place called Alkimia -strangely fitting name for my state tonight. Also another set from Gaig.

Eye candy, El Bulli in pictures

Haven't got time to write up that intriguing meal properly yet, so here are the photos for your pleasure for now. I'll tell more about the meal soon.

bon appetit,
Pim