Two toothpicks...........

There are several very renowned restaurants in Barcelona but almost every one of the really interesting ones has some kind of connection with El Bulli.  Before it closed on July 30, 2011 El Bulli was regarded as the ‘world’s best restaurant’.  Quite an achievement and interesting enough it lost money.  It was a very unique place to be certain, located in a town called Roses in Catalonia it was only open from June 15 to December 20 each year and all of the bookings were taken in a single day for the year.  The chef Ferran Adria is known as ‘the most imaginative generator of haute cuisine on the plant’.

Sue will never forgive herself that she somehow never managed to eat at El Bulli before it closed.  Her pain only worsened when she learned that I had managed to get the very last reservation for the summer for Judy and me to Tickets in August.  Tickets opened in March of this year and is Chef Adria’s new restaurant here in Barcelona. 

We had learned of another new restaurant here in Barcelona that had been opened by a chef that had worked at El Bulli for seven years, Albert Raurich called Dos Palillos (two toothpicks).  Everything we could learn about this restaurant was very intriguing.  Their webpage introduces the restaurant as follows:

Asia and Spain, two different cultures that both use sticks to eat with.  Oriental people use chopsticks as tongs to pick up small portions of food.  In the bars in Spain the tooth pick is the king of the tapas. They are different in shape but similar in their use. They symbolize the journey from the plate to the mouth. Two pure and basic utensils which are primitive and minimal in design yet modern at the same time. This is both a coincidence and a good excuse to combine two gastronomic cultures: Asia and Spain.  The aim of this new concept is to blend the philosophy of Spanish tapas with the tapas of Asian gastronomy.

The only problem we had was they too were booked for dinner for the entire summer.  However they are also open for lunch on a first come first served basis.  Well Sue was not going to miss out again so even though the restaurant didn’t open until 1:30pm we were at the front door at 12:07pm.  The outside the building like many here in Barcelona looks old and pretty unimpressive.  Except that right in the fron there is this bright red sliding door marked ‘chef’s entrance’, not the standard ‘back door’ they usually have to slip in and out of but bright red and right in the front.  One after another we watched the chefs arriving to work as we waited to put them to work.  We also had the opportunity to move out of the way so that the cleaning woman could mop the street in front of the restaurant before it opened!!

There are so many unique and intriguing things about this restaurant that I don’t know where to start.  It is small and has only counter space, no tables.  It has the only color scheme an Asian Spanish restaurant could have of red and black but what is different is that the red is not a loud red but a softer, pinkish metal red, very effective.  As you enter through the front door the first counter you come to is fairly uninteresting but if you are lucky enough as we were to be seated in the back room the counter outlines the chef’s cooking space and there are a million things going on to hold your interest here. 

Clearly Sue and I have had many opportunities to sit at counters with the chef’s working nearby and watch them prepare our meals but somehow this was amazingly different.  This was art and the chefs were artists.  In fact the chef working right in front of us, Vincerg Pays was so beautiful in his movements that he was mesmerizing and we simply could not take our eyes off of him.   There are no waiters in this restaurant you are served by the chefs, all of them with excellent English and very sexy accents.

The chefs must be hired not only for their culinary skills but also their charm.  They are engaging and cheerful, informative and personable.  Even the ‘background’ guy stopped by to let us smell the Kefir line leaves and explained that he uses these leaves to season the rice water.  The entire operation was precision with attention paid to every detail.  The tone used by the chef’s to speak to each other was soft and gentle, almost caressing.  This was quickly becoming more than just a dining experience!!!

Every day they prepare a ‘taster menu’ and that is what we selected.  It included pork wontons with the most incredible sweet and sour sauce ever, a very strange but tasty medium boiled egg with spices, melt in your mouth tuna with rice wrapped in seaweed, and chicken in plum sauce, with the deepest, darkest, tastiest strawberry ice cream in the world sever with the slightest amount of spice.  Everything was delicate and elegant and blew your socks off!!

I’m going to be talking about this restaurant for a long time!!