On the waterfront: Sitges 

My discovery of Catalan cooking dates to an almost comically unsuccessful stint as an English teacher in Barcelona in the mid-eighties. I had a gap between two jobs in New York and a close friend’s brother, who was then living in Barcelona, told us a school there was looking for two native English speakers to run English conversation classes. My pal had a two-month hole in his schedule, too, so we applied and were hired despite the fact that neither of us had any teaching experience. The school specialized in teaching business English to executives, so reporting to work on our first morning on two hours of sleep and with nearly medical hangovers, we discovered that we were expected to wear jackets and ties at the school–a problem, since neither of us had brought either, and that there were two classes, one for men and one for women. It seemed a no-brainer to me that the women would be easier and more fun to teach than the men, and since my friend came to the same conclusion, we flipped a coin, and I lost.

There was an open communicating door between the two classrooms, so I could see and hear what my friend was up to, and I knew that things weren’t going very well when I heard him pose the following question to his ladies: “Do you like birds#8221; Silence was the appropriate response to this gambit, and silence was what he got. Meanwhile, my besuited men emitted a pleasant fugue of Puig Agua Lavanda and were shy and very polite. I explained, with major omissions, who I was and where I was from, and offered up that this was my first visit to Barcelona, a city I found very beautiful. Murmur of appreciation. Then I asked them what I should see in their city while I was there. A few murmured responses–Sagrada Familia, etc. Next I heard myself saying, “Do you like to barbecue in Catalunya#8221; My friend next door whopped with laughter at this one, but until you’ve tried you’d striking up a conversation with a room full of total strangers in dark suits old enough to be your father, I’d suggest you hold your fire. To my great surprise, someone raised his hand. “We do like to barbecue, and right now is the season of the calçots,” said a good-looking older man in the front row. Calçots “Special onions of the springtime.” Now someone else joined in. “We make them grilled and mother (sic) them with romesco.” Romesco (a delicious Catalan mortar-made sauce of almonds, peppers, garlic, olive oil and sometimes tomatoes) But how to mother them “You roll the onion in the sauce like a baby.” But of course you’d never smother a baby.

Soon we were well out of the gate, since I’d inadvertently found a subject that impassioned this room full of accountants, copy writers and lawyers. They told me where to go to eat calçots, which are indeed delicious, and they became my tutors in one of the Mediterranean’s great kitchens, since they’d come to our morning classes with restaurant recommendations written down on little scraps of paper and deliver oral recipes for their favorite dishes. Meanwhile, next door, I was still hearing things like, “Do you like cats or dogs?, which was almost the equivalent of a phrase from a German-English phrasebook my grandmother owned, which had became a family joke: “Excuse me, Madame, but there’s a cinder in your hat.”

Some years later, my fledgling knowledge of Catalan cooking got a big boost when I met Marimar Torres, the California winemaker from the distinguished Vilafranca de Penedes wine family, while I was doing a story on her family for a nice and now sadly defunct wine-country living magazine based in Napa, California. She cooked a superb lunch for me at her family’s house in Sitges and gave me a copy of her wonderful cookbook, Catalan Country Cooking, which I worked my way through in my kitchen in Paris over the course of the following year.

Despite my best efforts, however, many of the dishes in this book taste much better in situ, because the ingredients they require are not easy to find in Paris, so I always keenly look forward to my trips to Catalunya for the chance to eat its wonderful food.

Unsurprisingly, it’s not always easy to find really good and authentic cooking in the more tourist-oriented beach towns along the Catalan coast, and this is why I was so looking forward to dinner with friends at the restaurant Mare Nostrum in Sitges the other night. This table had come highly recommended by several of the delightful people at the terrific Pares Balta winery in Vilafranca de Penedes and had also been confided to me by the butcher where I shop when Bruno and I are on holiday by the seaside. The egg lady in the market had mentioned it, too, so when we decided to meet our South African pals for dinner, we booked here.

Arriving, it was a jaunty looking place with a taut white awning equipped with ceiling fans sheltering a terrace with well-spaced tables mostly occupied by handsomely groomed Catalan couples and families–the sartorial reflex to a certain relaxed formality in Spain is a wonderful visual tonic, and the welcome was warm. Sliced salami and good warm bread with a bottle of excellent olive oil arrived immediately, and I instantly had the sense of being in a very well-run restaurant with a sincere desire to please. Bruno and I try to eat our arroz (rice) dishes or fideus (short vermicelli) dishes at noon, but the South Africans had just arrived in Spain, so we agreed to throw the dice for rice, which was the only way to decide which one we’d eat, since everyone wanted something different, they’re served for a minimum of two, and they’re even better when made for four.

First, though, some nibbles, and they were wonderful–a mix of tender battered baby squid and flash-fried pimientos de padron, those delicious little green peppers from Galicia that you eat whole, and some delicate, perfectly fried and surprisingly airy salt-cod fritters. With a bottle of chilled 100% xarel lo (local cepage) from nearby Vilafranca de Penedes, the meal was off to an excellent start.

The rice dish was outstanding, too. Cooked in fish stock, the short grain rice from Valencia was still al dente and was an unctuous casserole generously garnished with tender baby artichoke hearts, squid, peas, and peppers, with two rather overcooked prawns on the edge of the plate for decoration. Unlike many Catalan rice dishes, this one came without aioli, but it was so richly flavored and even a little sweet from the artichokes that aioli would have been gilding the lily. Next week when I’m back in woefully rainy Paris, I know this dish will come to mind someday when I’m holding a dripping umbrella in a crowded Metro car, because for me, the best souvenirs you can take home from any holiday are always gastronomic.

After we’d finished slices of homemade fig tart, one of the charming owners of this restaurant served us complimentary shots of some local firewater that went down easily after such a hefty feed, and we learned that this restaurant opened in 1950 and is now run by the third generation of the Marti family, who have an exceptional gift for hospitality. This is the seaside restaurant you always hope you’ll find while you’re on holiday, so special thanks to Maxime Bazart for the wonderful recommendation.

Now if only I could break Bruno of his penchant for elaborate post-dinner cocktails…. But then again, he probably wanted to fling my snifter of very good brandy over the railing, too, and happily we were walking home.

Passeig de la Ribera 60, Sitges, Tel. (34) 93-894-3393, www.restaurantemarenostrum.com, Closed Wednesdays, Average a la carte 50 Euros.

The post POSTCARD FROM CATALUNYA–Mare Nostrum, Sitges–Very Good Catalan Seafood Cooking, B+ appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

Atrium lounge at Mandarin Oriental, Barcelona

For many years I lived in the rue du Bac in the old stables at the head of the courtyard of the building next door to the Chapelle de la Medaille Miraculeuse (Chapelle of the Miraculous Medallion, so named because a nun named Catherine Labouré who once lived in the convent here claimed to have been given a miracle-working gold medallion by the Virgin in 1830). On summer mornings, I often woke to the other worldly sound of the nuns singing, but the only real miracle that befell me while in the vicinity was when chef Claude Colliot opened his charming little restaurant La Bamboche around the corner from me in the rue de Babylone in 1998. At the time, there was almost no where really good to eat within an easy leg of my front door, so these two terra-cotta washed dining rooms came as a god send. Colliot’s charming wife ran the dining room, and he sent out excellent and very imaginative contemporary French dishes.

As time went by, though, Le Bamboche became so popular with visiting and resident Americans that I grew a bit shy of the place, and then Colliot moved on to run an unlovely restaurant called L’Orenoc at the Merdien hotel at the Porte Maillot, not a part of the world I find my way to very often. He seemed very out of his element there, the dining room was an awkward corporate space, and I ate there twice with no memory of anything I’d eaten a few days later.

So I was heartened to hear Colliot had gone out on his own again with an eponymous table (Claude Colliot restaurant) in a somewhat unlikely location, the space most recently occupied by Le Dos de Baleine in the Marais. (Why unlikely Though they’re some good restaurants in the Marais, this neck of the woods doesn’t have the same bourgeois ballast as the rue de Babylone–aside from a couple of types from the Centre Pompidou, it’s hard to imagine who the lunch clientele will be).

Bref, I came for dinner with my friend David, and both of us immediately liked the the good-looking dining room–exposed stone walls, stylish comfortable modern chairs and hip light fixtures, even a little counter for solo diners (which won’t work unless they put a mirror up, since no one eating serious food on a stool on their own wants to stare at a blank wall).

And then the meal started, and quite well, since the service here is outstanding. A promising wine list added to our anticipation, too–good wines, most of them bio or biodynamique–at good prices, and the smart and appreciated detail of filtered water, flat or fizzy, instead of bottled, were also encouraging. Then our first courses arrived, and converation stalled as we worked very hard to understand them. My grilled scallops on a spear of lemon grass also came with an egg yolk, some Microplane grated carrot slaw, and a dab of fish (anchovy, I think) paste. The scallops were cooked pellucid and lovely, but aside from the inevitable pleasure of dipping almost anything in egg yolk, the arcane constellation of flavors on my plate never made sense. Ditto David’s “Crelice” (whatever that may be–why restaurants practice high-fallutin’ menu poetry never ceases to amaze me–wouldn’t it have been easier for all involved to say that it was a foie gras mousse?). “I’d love to go into the kitchen and fix this,” David said after we’d both agreed that it needed salt, and then, what, maybe cumin seeds?

Fried slices of sweetbread with pedigreed Joel Thiebault carrots and another Microplane slaw (ginger, this time), renewed my confusion. I know Colliot can cook, and well, but these dishes were like mathematical equations that didn’t add up, and unlike another chef who likes parsing out individual taste, Pieter Nielssen at La Gazzetta, there was no tenderness, no desire to please in any of these dishes. Instead this was decent but head-strong and very cerebral cooking that wasn’t working very hard to make people happy.

When I talked to another friend about Colliot’s food the next day, she described it as “‘Kneel at my altar, if you must cooking,’ ” and I tend to agree, since the ultimate example of same was a very disappointing “larme de chocolat” (chocolate tear) where the chef had attempted to decline the natural tastes of chocolate with black olive tapenade and candied hazelnuts. Not unpleasant, but a good snap shot of why the heart’s always more important than the head in really good cooking–you can be as creative as you want, but the ultimate goal should always has be to make people wildly, wildly happy, not to cook for your friends or critics.

So would I go again Yes, I’ll try Colliot another time–he’s a good cook, but I just hope he retrieves his desire to please his customers as much as he did at La Bamboche.

———————

Still don’t know what you’re going to do for the holidays Why not run away from it all and spend them in Barcelona, a city I’ve been head over heels in love with ever since I first visited and worked as an English conversation teacher in the early 1980s. I lived in a tiny studio in the Barri Gothic with regularly backed up drains, but when I had plumbing problems, I run away from home and spend all afternoon in a beach restaurant in Barceloneta eating fideo (vermicelli noodles) cooked with fish broth and squid’s ink, garnished with fried squid and garlic mayonnaise–bliss!

That rundown, seat-of-the-pants Barcelona vanished a while back, but I still jump at any opportunity to visit the city, and so this weekend, I came down to write on various things for various people and ended up at the wooden counter of Koy Shunka, the new Barri Gotic sushi bar that’s the sister of Shunka, Ferran Adria’s long-running favorite.

I got there around 1.30pm, early for Saturday lunch in Barcelona, and settled into a seat at the sushi bar where one of the most charming sushi chefs I’ve ever watched or talked to (yes, yes, I know–that’s part of their job, too) wielded a knife in a way that gave me goose bumps. After Manilla clams steamed in sake, he went to work on some Torro (fatty tuna belly) to create a dish garnished with sea urchin and almost invisible ribbons of Nori (seaweed) that I’ll honesty never forget. Jesus was it good, as were four grilled shrimp from Palamos on a bed of rock salt, and a Chef’s Special Roll of salmon, tuna, and avocado.

This was easily the best Japanese food I’d eaten since a trip to Tokyo four years ago, and it made me yearn for Japan again as soon as possible. My local consolation–I got to go back to my room in the breathtakingly elegant new Barcelona Mandarin Oriental and jive on the same wonderful aesthetic I’d just eaten, but in Hispano Zen visual terms. Hats off to Patricia Urquiola for the full bore chic of this place, which has a superb location on the Passeig de Gracias.

Oh, and I bought Pimeton, or smoked paprika powder, strong and soft, at the Santa Catarina mercat, so stay out of my way les douaniers!

Claude Colliot Restaurant, 40 rue des Blancs Manteaux, 4th, 01.42.71.55.45, Metro: Hotel de Ville, Avg 50 Euros. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Koy Shunka, Calle Copons 7, Barcelona, Tel. 34 934 127 939, Tasting menu 68 Euros,

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