SERVING UP A 21ST-CENTURY FAIRY-TALE FEAST: BARCELONA’S DISFRUTAR
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By Cristina Slattery
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team of sixty dedicated to preparing tasting menus for forty to forty-five diners: “it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” a winemaker in Conca de Barbera, a denomination an hour or so away from Barcelona by car, tells me when I mention that I’m going to dine at Disfrutar. This winemaker adds that she and her friends go to Compartir, Disfrutar’s sister restaurant, every summer. (Compartir is located north of Barcelona in the beach town of Cadaques on the Costa Brava.) The Barcelona restaurant, Disfrutar is the number 5 restaurant in the world this year according to World’s 50 Best, and I avoid eating more than breakfast the day I am to go there so that I will be able to fully enjoy the Meal. I speak with Oriol Castro and Eduard Xatruch, two of the three El Bullitrained chefs who own Disfrutar and Compartir (which mean “to enjoy” and “to share,” respectively), before dining at the restaurant that has a colorful, but somewhat inconspicuous exterior. (The third owner, Mateu Casanas, is away at the time of my visit.) “We wanted to start with modern cuisine,” Castro explains, when Disfrutar opened in 2014 in Barcelona’s midtown – a grid of streets designed in the 1850s when the city was growing rapidly – and called the Eixample. Even though they had worked under world-renowned chef, Ferran Adria, at El Bulli, a mecca of creative cuisine and molecular gastronomy, for eighteen years together, their initial ambitions for this new restaurant in Barcelona were more modest. (El Bulli, which closed in 2011, and was located north of Barcelona on the Costa Brava, was named the best restaurant in the world five times by World’s 50 Best; reservations sold out each year within one day for the six-month
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season.) However, as Disfrutar gained recognition within Barcelona’s restaurant scene, the chefs began innovating more and more and also hired a larger team. New techniques were developed by the chefs and the expanded team. For instance, there’s now a table downstairs that two to four people can reserve and where VIPs such as the NBA’s Pau Gasol have dined, which is unlike any other table in the world. This unique setting, where the table changes over the course of the meal and where different textures and sensations are a key element of the experience, has been the site of marriage proposals and other important moments that diners remember forever. “Change is very important,” Castro maintains, and emphasizes how the team continues to experiment – and even did so during the Covid lockdowns that happened twice in Spain. (Disfrutar and Compartir’s staff were all retained during the pandemic.) Xatruch shows me a catalog of photos and recipes that they have kept each year since Disfrutar opened. “We share freely” with others in the industry, he says, “because everyone copies nowadays with Instagram and [similar] tools.” Creativity, he explains, “is all around you…you see products in the market, for example, and get ideas.” Disfrutar is located across from the Mercat del Ninot, its stalls filled with fresh produce such as rossinyols, a type of mushroom that is found in the Pyrenees and can only be foraged by hand. (The chefs use this mushroom to add sweet notes to some dishes when it is in season.) “Will someone who likes traditional Catalan cuisine enjoy the food at