Spain and Portugal for Visitors

Posted by : John Ross on Apr 11, 2006 - 02:10 PM FoodAndDrink

El Bulli, the Michelin 3-star restaurant of famed avant-garde Catalan chef Ferrán Adrià, has been voted into top place in Restaurant magazine's annual list of The World's 50 Best Restaurants. No fewer than six Spanish restaurants, three Catalan and three Basque, are on the list, confirming Spain's position as a new gastronomic superpower. El Bulli frequently heads this kind of ranking, and it is notoriously difficult to get a table there. It is, for example, fully booked for the entire 2006 April to September season, which at least gives customers time to save up: the bill is likely to come to €200 a head. Read on.

El Bulli is no stranger to this kind of recognition. It headed the first edition of the same list in 2002 and has never been out of the top three.

Ferrán Adrià is considered by many the best chef in the world, and he is one of the leading personalities in the Molecular Gastronomy movement, the principles of which are:
* Investigating culinary and gastronomical proverbs, sayings, old wives tales
* Exploring the recipes
* Introducing new tools, ingredients and methods into the kitchen
* Inventing new dishes
* Using molecular gastronomy to help the general public understand the contribution of science to society.

Ferrán Adrià and his team spend the six months of the year when El Bulli is closed researching, experimenting and preparing the coming season's menu.

Apart from its geological-time-scale wating lists and innovative use of technology such as liquid nitrogen, El Bulli is known for its playful approach to food. Components are wrapped in each other so that suprising tastes and textures emerge when the food is bitten or dissolves in the mouth, diners are encouraged or obliged to ingest their courses in unprecedented ways, and it is apparently not uncommon for people to burst out laughing as they eat.

The other five Spanish restaurants on the list are, in ascending order:
Martin Berasategui, in Lasarte-Oria, Guipuzcoa (10 km from Donostia-San Sebastian)
El Celler de Can Roca, in the city of Girona
El Raco de Can Fabes, Sant Celoni, Girona
Mugaritz, Errenteria, Guipuzcoa
Arzak, Donostia-San Sebastian, Guipuzcoa