The one hour train ride took us out of bustling Barcelona, across small town countryside to Girona, an attractive provincial town of 90,000 with mature neighborhoods and ample squares surrounded by cafes and restaurants. After walking through the streets for an hour or so, we found a taxi and drove across town to the restaurant. The Rocca brothers own several very successful restaurants in Barcelona proper. El Celler is their 3 Michelin star country kitchen, in the European tradition of travelling far for the perfect meal. There was nothing “country” about the setting of El Celler. Behind a wooden fence and door we walked into a sleek lobby with granite, marble, steel and glass. More like a high end health spa than a country inn.
The dining room was flush with natural light streaming in from the large floor to ceiling windows and the skylights. A central courtyard defined the center of the room, a triangular glass enclosure with three white-barked tree trunks rising to the sky. All the lines were clean and symmetrical; a serving station stood next to each table and a dedicated waiter ministered to our needs during the meal. As we sat, the waiter appeared with an unopened bottle of El Celler Cava for our consideration. It seemed too hot and too early for alcohol on an empty stomach; also I have grown weary of restaurant offerings that come without a price and a menu and I declined in favor of cold bubbly water which was arrived promptly and kept coming throughout the meal. The other two diners also did not go for the Cava. In retrospect, this was part of the amuse-bouche and was gratis for the table.
Joe asked for the wine list and in rolled a large book stand with two oversized tomes one for white and one for red wines. We have never seen the likes of this wine list in all our prior adventures in good dining. Even more unexpected was the large variety of wines offered at incredibly modest prices. We ended up tasting a bottle of Zarate El Palomar 2006 and a bottle of Baron de Lay 2007 F. Monasterio both delightful. I don’t recall if the pre-lunch freebies started coming before or after we selected the first wine; the parade was as delicious as it was spectacular. The waiter brought to the table a small bonsai tree; hanging from its branches were caramelized green olives stuffed with white anchovies “take it with your hand” he said, how clever! This was followed by a “bellini bombon” with a cocoa butter shell filled with Campari and grapefruit. A white porcelain platter adorned with seaweed sprigs was topped with skinned, filleted and grilled anchovies, lightly crispy and salty and playfully delicious the “anchovy bones”. The next sampling was labeled a chicken cracker, the least interesting of the procession. An “essence” of Russian salad was perhaps the most molecular taste the ingredients reduced to their gustatory essence (this potato salad appears to be a regional preference because we ran into it at the first luncheonette we lunched the very first day desperate for calories and a place to sit out of the sun). The “calamar adaptation” was a thimbleful of calamari carpachio and micro corn also sitting pretty on a clean porcelain platter; one mouthful of light pleasure.
Already this was more than a normal lunch in calories and taste if not in volume and we had not yet tackled the menu. As the appetizers ended, so did our white wine; transitioning to the main courses also meant moving to more classic flavors and ingredients. The bottle of red that followed proved immensely satisfying with a deep, rich personality so much better suited to the line-up of the meats that came to the table. As is our tradition, we order different things and rotate the plates around so everyone can have a taste of all the dishes.
So, here is the meal:
Truffled brioche and pot-au-feu broth
Timbale of apple and duck liver with vanilla oil
European lobster parmentier with black truffle mushrooms
Sierra Mayor suckling pig, grilled baby onions, melon and beet root
Steak Tartare with mustard ice cream consisting of spiced tomato, caper compote, pickles and lemon, hazelnut praline, meat béarnaise sauce, Oloroso-sherry raisin, chives, Sichuan pepper, Pimenton de La Vera, smoked paprika and curry all minced together and served as a log topped with mustard ice cream and mustard leaves; what a hamburger!!
Warm duck liver with roses, lychees and Gewurztraminer sorbet; a sensational composite
Oysters with Cava, ginger, pineapple, lemon confit and spices
And the grand prize of the meal: lightly smoked pigeon with anchovies, truffle and blackberries
Each dish was balanced, surprising and harmonious despite the often disparate contents
The milk desert was a diaphanous symphony in white: ice-cream, foam and flan. Following desert, came the après-bouche tray of sweets with three each little chocolate bombons of praline, palet d’or, Yuzu, Mont-Blanc and raspberry drops of chocolate goodness.
We lingered a bit longer with coffee and the remainder of our wine and rolled out into the humid afternoon sun blissfully full and in no condition to handle anything beyond a taxi ride to the station and the digestive one return train trip back to Barcelona. It was a long satisfying day, our last in Spain. We walked off the lunch slowly strolling down the Rambla, looking and taking a last set of pictures in the street market and selecting for dinner a prosciutto baguette from Mark Bittman’s “best sandwich in the world” eatery.
There are memorable dining experiences that linger and perhaps expand in significance over the years.
Sometimes it is the element of the “first”: for us, Le Negre with the theatricality of the room, the Versaillean lard sculptures in the shape of each course; for Jonathan, L’Arpege with the maple syrup in the eggshell and the ethereal asparagus soup. Sometimes it is the magic of the setting and the moment: “L’Hostelerie de Beaumaniere” with the Provencal room with Jean Cocteau menu cover and the perfect moonlight under the giant bauxite rocks of Les Beaux, or the rooftop terrace of the medieval castle in San Gimigniano with the succulent suckling pig. Other times it is the absolutely unexpected circumstance like picking mussels off the rock and making an omelet on the roadside in the north of Italy.
And, invariably, some memories come together around one food. For us it has been pigeon: first on a dusty, sun-baked rooftop in Luxor, then in a cavernous old cathedral-turned-restaurant in Assissi, years later in small Italian towns or Saint-Emilion and most recently in Brussels at Come-chez-Soi. The pigeon we had in Girona stood exceedingly well to the memories of meals past and was the best, if not the most molecular or creative of the dishes we had that day. Then, there are the ratings of restaurants: who has how many stars and how well do they deserve the accolade. To what extent is the honor related to an ethnocentric predilection or a temporal food-faddism. We have our list of starred meals over the years. El Celler de Can Rocca clearly well deserves their stars and stripes.
