EL BULLI BULLIES MY TUM!

Last year, I went with my wonderful UK publisher Geoff Duffield and his wife Sarah and we ate all 38 course. This time they gave us 41 courses! There is no menu, dish after dish just keeps on coming, some one-bite sized, some two-bites and some much larger… You are given choices – last year Geoff and my Helen opted to have the alternative to the “oysters with raw, marinated rabbit brains” – somewhat wisely, I decided after my first bite (although two days after our return, Sunday Times food critic AA Gill rated this particular dish as a masterpiece!) This year all except me opted out of the “monkfish livers with sake infused grapes” – they weren’t as bad as the rabbit brains, which I can still taste a year on, but I would definitely add them to my “If I could live my life over again I would do everything exactly the same except I wouldn’t have eaten the…..” list!!!

Getting a table at fabled El Bulli is hard. There is only one sitting at day, in the evenings, only 54 covers and they only open five months a year – the rest of the time Ferran is travelling and working on his creative ideas. If they took all the advance reservations they are asked for they would be full until 2060! Instead, they operate a lottery system. Yet, despite the place is wonderfully unstuffy. A high-tech kitchen with 70 chefs (!) is in contrast to the almost rustic, homely, country-house feel of the dining area. 45 waiters look after the 54 diners, but far from being stuffy and precious as they are in so many lesser establishments I’ve been to, here the waiters are charming and fun. It is almost more like being in a theatre, than in a restaurant – and for sure it is a virtuouso performance by all the team. We sat down at 7.50pm, and got up from the table at 1.40 am and during this entire time there had not been a gap of more than a minute or two between courses arriving. None of us could believe the time, it felt like we had been just a couple of hours!

One surprise was the bill. 230 Euro per head for food. Expensive, yes, but I’ve paid similar money, and even more, in some supposedly top-ranked English, French and American restaurants for – in some cases – rubbish by comparison. But the biggest surprise of all was the wine bill. El Bulli boasts two of the very best sommeliers on the planet. Unlike many I can think of who will do all they can to entice you into buying something at several hundred pounds a bottle, these ones here seem to be on a mission to show what bargains are to be found! On Tuesday I told the sommelier I wanted top quality whites and red. The wines were stunning, perfectly matched to the food, and all from within Spain. I didn’t look at the prices until the end. The first white was 50 Euro, the second 38 Euro and the red was 48 Euro. Food is one of my interests and passions. There are many restaurants I’ve eaten at where the bill was a quarter of the price of El Bulli and I’ve felt ripped off. If this place charged doubled what it had, it would still have been, in my view, a bargain. Have a look at the photos of each of the courses, and you’ll start to see why! Bon appetit!