Frustratingly, it’s my third visit and still it is virtually empty. It doesn’t deserve to be; the food is consistently great and generous to a fault. We were full after starters, blatant gluttons through mains, and barely had room to trough our way through dessert, but research is research, right?
What chef Carme Marsá does so well is to use her knowledge of ingredients, and an instinctive what-works-with-what, to come up with creative dishes that inspire you to go away and get cooking. She’s not about wowing with showy scientific techniques, but more a champion for local and seasonal ingredients. If Carme Ruscalleda is Catalunya’s Alice Waters, then Marsá must surely be Barcelona’s Angela Hartnett.
We lift off with an amuse-bouche of sweet carrot purée with pinhead-sized croutons that crunch seductively against the pillowy sweetness of the vegetable. A lozenge of slow-baked osso bucco in a sticky red-wine reduction melts away the minute it touches your tongue and both promise great things to come.
Pumpkin purée with a wedge of roasted sweet potato topped with a slice of pink and tender foie is the perfect restaurant dish to emulate at home, although the mixed salad is rather ordinary and unexciting. We follow with traditional coca (the Catalan answer to pizza) draped with piquillo peppers and slices of tender boiled octopus, a dollop of some parsley-infused mayonnaise on the side.
We also have pickled mackerel with candied lemons and hearty Perol sausages, which is an extraordinary pairing and possibly one of the most original contemporary interpretations of mar i muntanya that I’ve seen. Less successful is the turbot on egg noodles with coconut broth. It’s not that it’s bad, because the turbot itself is delicately flavoured and perfectly cooked, but somehow the noodles and coconut seem wrong in the context. It’s veering too close to Asia in a restaurant that seems to have roots firmly in the Mediterranean.
July 1, 2009
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