Mercer Restaurant
German-born, but Catalan-raised Harry Wieding recently took over the kitchen of the Mercer Hotel Barcelona (a five-star property in the heart of the city’s Gothic Quarter, set within the original Roman wall of Barcino), and immediately made changes to the menu of his predecessor, Michelin-starred Italian chef Giuseppe Iannotti. Having grown up in Blanes, the "Gateway to the Costa Brava," chef Wieding loves local, seasonal ingredients—especially from the sea—as well as local wine. Inspired by the primal, grill-only cooking techniques made famous by chef Victor Arguinzoniz at his Basque restaurant Etxebarri, chef Wieding quickly began cooking as many dishes as possible over olive and cherry wood coals. With the help of stainless steel pots, which he has drilled with holes, delicate foods like oysters and sea urchins can be gently cooked over a smoky fire without them falling apart or being over done. To get an extra kick of smoke, numerous dishes are also finished with a light brushing of house-smoked sunflower oil.
Chef Wieding’s menu is engineered to orbit around an axis of Catalan staples like asparagus, peas, sea urchin, foie gras and prawns, and the restaurant’s 130-bottle wine list is now much more locally focused. However, the introduction of ingredients like ginger, wasabi, pickles, lime and tempura batter, while somewhat predictable in the current climate of Barcelona fine dining, added elements of surprise to dishes that appeared quite straightforward at first glance. Simple bites like the raw turnip slices garnished with a paste of anchovy and wasabi were unexpectedly pleasant and showed an understanding of how to control understated flavors.
Our meal began with an assortment of snacks; the turnip slices were accompanied by green and tangy pickled radish fruit that popped in my mouth as I separated the tiny pods from their stems, as well as room-temperature slices of roasted duck breast topped with dollops of anchovy-rich Café de Paris butter sauce and lime zest, and a little ceramic bowl from which a few crispy stems of tempura asparagus sprouted. Of all these first flavors, the pickled radish fruit—my first experience with this siliqua (the young seed pod of the radish)—was the most unusual.
Next came a parmentier of potato with smoked trout roe and fennel. I enjoyed the smoky, briny flavor of the roe, and the fennel added a subtle herbal complexity to the dish, but the potato fell somewhere between a purée and a foam, and could have been a bit lighter and more emulsified, in my opinion.
The parmentier was followed by a single, plump, fried oyster, bristling with crispy panko bread crumbs and surrounded by dots of salty-sweet eel sauce (and more Café de Paris sauce), and draped in fine filaments of candied lime peel. This dish had a mild flavor but was without a fault and disappeared in one delicious, juicy bite.
Following suit with the rest of the city, beautiful spring peas from the Maresme (just north of Barcelona) made several appearances here, both on the set menu and the à la carte. Ours were served as a vivid green, naturally sweet and silky smooth purée, studded with vibrant orange sea urchin roe bathed in the previously-mentioned smoked sunflower oil. I love all of these ingredients, but the normally undisguisable taste of uni was a bit overshadowed by the mouth-filling flavor of tender baby peas at the height of freshness.
After the pea purée came my favorite dish of the evening, and perhaps the most simple: a heaping bowl of smoked mussels, cooked over hot coals and then lightly steamed, sprinkled with a pinch of chopped chives and plenty of slightly piquant espelette pepper. Also drizzled with a bit of the smoked oil, these were a joy to eat, especially as there was plenty of crusty sourdough bread on hand to soak up the leftover cooking liquid, which tasted of a seaside campfire (if such a thing could be tasted).
To round out the savory portion of the meal, a perfectly-cooked breast of Berguedà chicken was served with roasted morel mushrooms, baby broad beans and rigatoni stuffed with chicken rillette. I thought that the chicken itself was superb, but I almost would have preferred the rillette spread on a toasted croûton with a few drops of olive oil to add some fat to it and another textural dynamic to the dish.
Dessert was wonderful—a perfect, light-yet-fulfilling end to the meal. Ripe and sweet strawberries were served with an aromatic veil of rose water and accompanied by a rich sheep’s milk ice cream with a crunchy bit of crumble underneath. The final petit fours and assorted cookies and gelées were faultless, as was the coffee, sending us off with an all-around elegant experience that, for €75 per person, is certainly recommendable to anyone looking for a special, modern fine dining meal with exceptional service that doesn’t come with a three-month waiting list or a significantly higher price tag.