So first, let me say how much I like the design. It could easily seem overblown or overdone, yet somehow it manages to stay warm and comfortable, the top spot being a place at the bar. What is rather overblown is the value placed on some of the ingredients, which, frankly, has gotten rather out of hand, but we’ll get to that shortly.

Like Joel Robuchon’s L’Atelier (Paris, and now London too) the menu is comprised of small raciones, with no starters or main courses as such. The idea being that you order, say, three each and share. It is also full of product and location specific references that you could only possibly understand as a dedicated foodie who’s lived and eaten in Catalunya for the last 20 years. But there is something rewarding in feeling that you’re tucking deep into the culinary heart of a nation.

Escudella barrejada, for example, is a rib-sticking Catalan stew pot of mixed meats and vegetables, rice and fideus. Bread and thyme soup, is another hearty winter-warmer from a remote village. El catxoflino paid homage to the Xicra Restaurant on the Costa Brava, though I can’t for the life of me remember what it is; perhaps because by then I’d been all consumed by the idea of an Olot potato costing m13.

The ‘patatas de Olot’, it turns out, are two wafer-thin slices of waxy potato sandwiched together by a thin scraping of minced pork spiked with pimentón. Next they are dipped in batter not dissimilar to the kind of thing you get in Chinese takeaways, and fried. As a snack they’re not bad, but at more than €2 each (we have six) they seem downright criminal.

It takes a while to get over this, and an age to decide what to have on a menu that, to its credit, reads especially well: there is Penedès cock with prunes and pine nuts, pickled rabbit with oregano and rosemary, salt cod with tripe and chickpeas, even ‘sausage and mash’, described rather memorably on the English menu as ‘trusty sausages in hash’.

But we go for suquet, which boasts two glossy hunks of hake and three miniscule mussels bobbing about on a sauce richly layered with garlic and saffron flavours. There’s excellent bread from Christian Escribà—best known for his ‘Candy Glam Rings’—to mop it up too, but again, at €26, it’s just a little bit hard to swallow, nicely done though it is.