Bo.Tic, Corçà

You will probably be aware that Catalonia has well more than its fair share of influential restaurants, a tradition that runs from El Bulli through Can Roca and Disfrutar and has fanned out in all kinds of interesting ways across all levels of the culinary scene, from the most high-falutin' multi- Michelin-starred temple of gastronomy to the small-town seafood grill. In fact, you're far more likely to see the words "Ex El Bulli" on a chef's bio in this part of the world than a mention of any culinary school, a result partly of the myth-like status that place in Roses holds over the collective mind of the area but also because Ferran Adrià used to get through junior staff like most kitchens get through blue roll.

Albert Sastregener of Bo.tic is that rarest of rare Spanish head chefs - he's never worked at El Bulli (or even claimed to - which is even more unusual) or done time at Can Roca. He did, admittedly, have Joan Roca as a teacher for some of his time at the Escola d’Hostaleria in Girona but most of his culinary style was borne of working in resolutely Catalan kitchens in places like Mas Pau in Palau-sator, or La Cuina de Can Pipes in Palafrugell, restaurants open all year round that seamlessly switch to catering largely to discerning locals when the tourist seasons fade. It's restaurants like these that form the backbone of the Catalan food identity, serving dishes like braised pork cheek, botifarra (Catalan sausage) and aioli, grilled sardines, xiperones (fried baby squid) all alongside never-less-than-perfect-anywhere patates fregides. To this day I do not know why every single restaurant in the north east of Spain is a master of fried potatoes. They just are.

Anyway, back in Corçà, a sleepy little town near Girona, while a dangerously dark sky was threatening to unleash all hell outside, our lunch was about to begin. First was a bit of tableside theatre - posh "Bloody Mary's", involving a tomato-vodka consommé, a peeled and frozen cherry tomato and a celery mousse squirted out of an espuma gun. The flavours from the tomato and celery were bold and clean, and I'm never not impressed by anything built tableside (which must be quite a stress for the server given the number of things that could go wrong) - I just would have liked a bit more of a burn from the alcohol. Mind you given that this was the first element out of a few dozen to come over a long lunch, perhaps they knew exactly what they were doing.

As mentioned, Sastregener is a resolutely and proudly Catalan chef, and so it would make sense that even in this grandest of fine dining surroundings he would want to showcase everything that makes this part of the world such a joy to eat in, albeit in a format suitable to a €300+ a head tasting menu. So what followed for the next 15 or so dizzying minutes was a collection of dramatically presented morsels that attempted to tell the story of Catalan cuisine one bitesize burst of flavour at a time. So here we have a little mussel escabeche presented in a hard shell-shaped cracker (rather too close to eating actual mussel shell for my liking, but the flavours were great); "Peanut", a kind of freeze-dried and reconstituted peanut biscuit which had a fantastic texture and rich, satisfying savoury flavour; a cute square of L'Escala anchovy on a pillow-shaped cracker filled with tomato and topped with some kind of fish roe; a wonderful ball of potato and onion omelette which was soft and warm and comforting; and a piece of very lightly battered squid standing in for that staple of Spanish childhood, calamares a la Romana.

We continued with another set of canapés laid out on the branches of a metal tree, because why not. Here is a grilled leek buñuelo (doughnut) topped with romesco sauce, a nod towards the traditional Catalan calçotada winter feast; a dainty cup of melon juice and "sea ham" (dried tuna belly) which I'm not sure is very Catalan (though could be wrong) but had that nice nostalgic 70s throwback vibe; octopus salpicón (salad) in a glossy, richly-seafoody mousse on a salty cracker; chunks of white prawns from Palamós in a clear seafood aspic which tasted sweet and garlicky; a completely brilliant foie gras and corn nut candyfloss creation which melted in the mouth releasing buttery, meaty flavours so utterly moreish I could have easily made myself sick on these if there was enough available to hand; and finally a shot of tomato, basil and parmesan, kind of a liquid salad which also worked incredibly well.

Then a serving called "roasts" which involved bitesize versions of three more famous Catalan dishes - "Cannelloni", slow cooked beef mince draped in luxurious béchamel; "Suquet", basically a Catalan bouillabaisse containing chunks of fresh fish and seafood in a salty, thick, deeply satisfying broth; and "Senyoret" rice, a bitesize paella full of yet more beguiling seafood flavours.

Incredibly there was still one more round of snacks to go before the main menu began, and they conspired to be some of my favourite of all. Pigeon, slow cooked in a red wine sauce and served inside a folded crepe was the only taste of wild game that day, and didn't disappoint - the flavour was intense, and the glossy texture coated the mouth satisfyingly; wagyu beef buñuelos had more intensely rich flavours in the sauce, the result I'm sure of many hours' work reducing and improving; and best of all a mushroom and truffle xuixo, which we were instructed to bite into from one side to stop the thing splitting and ejecting the contents all over the table and ourselves. The xuixo in particular was an incredible thing - delicate enough to break apart with the softest bite and releasing a heady mix of sweet pastry and truffle-spiked dairy, it was a genuine highlight amongst highlights.

So far, then, so good. But perhaps I should insert a little bit of reality into proceedings by talking about the way Bo.tic handle their bread course. Because for reasons best known to them, at Bo.tic, bread is charged extra. I'll repeat that in case you think maybe you've misunderstood - at this two Michelin-starred restaurant, despite punters paying on average €300+ for their lunch and sometimes quite a bit more, they've decided that bread is such a wilful extravagance that it requires a supplement. Now if I was generous I could give them the benefit of the doubt and suggest that perhaps in the recent past the kitchens wanted to spread their bready wings a bit and offer two or three options, and too many people were just going for all at once and filling up too much too early in the meal. Maybe this happened. But honestly, guys, it's just bread - let people order too much if they want, and suck it up. Charging extra for something that in most restaurants is just part of the furniture just looks like profiteering.

Anyway, after a nibble on a bit of sourdough with Brittany butter (perfectly nice, €11.40) we were finally at the first of the starters. White crab, encased in a lovely translucently light tube of pasta, was dotted with various vegetable emulsions (green bean, carrot) and cute little nubbins of pickled chilli. Vaguely unadventurous set of flavours perhaps but nonetheless very enjoyable, and gorgeous to look at.

White shrimp from Palamós formed the centrepiece of the next dish, perhaps slightly cured but perhaps completely raw, it was hard to tell but didn't matter - being some of the finest seafood in the world you really do not need to muck about with these things. They were topped with little blobs of mousse made (presumably) from the heads and shells, and surrounded by a smooth, glossy herb emulsion. I'm such a fan of Palamós prawns that I ended up eating them on a number of occasions throughout this trip, and I never got bored of them. These were great.

Although the bewildering number of snacks at the start of the meal was designed as a Catalan Cuisine 101 course in local food appreciation, there was still room for more nostalgia in the main courses. This "gyoza" bared more than a passing resemblance to little squid empanada things they used to serve at a little local favourite spot in L'Escala in the late 80s, with that same heady mix of seafood, tomato and olives in the filling. Admittedly in Hostel La Vinya in 1989 they didn't serve spiralised squid meat masquerading as tagliolini or serve it with a jet-black sauce made from squid ink, but the basic premise was the same.

"Turbot and prawn" had lots of really nice things going on. Continuing the running theme of tomato-seafood bisque this dish had some nice bouncy prawn and a meaty chunk of turbot in another rich, salty sauce. Also in the sauce were clever little 'gnocchi' made out of more Palamós prawn and the whole thing was topped with clouds of foam made from turbot and fennel. On the side was a little rice cracker containing yet more raw prawns and bisque which made a very satisfying little mouthful.

The final savoury course was lamb - squares of grilled terrine that dissolved very pleasantly into crispy/chewy layers in the mouth, dressed in a garlic-rosemary-butter sauce and surrounded by a ring of what I think was some kind of thick potato purée. The lamb and the sauce were lovely and had they stopped there I think I would have had a better time, because the potato was very strange - a big, cold, congealed ring of bland potato which lifted up rather disconcertingly off the plate as one piece, like a big grey flappy bangle. But I liked the little pillows of pommes soufflées (not easy things to make) and a bitesize lamb and cheese bread thing served on its own glass plinth was very enjoyable, so overall it wasn't a disaster, just a rare misstep.

A palate cleanser came in the form of citrus sorbet, lime pound cake and jelly, topped with yoghurt and ginger emulsion and little shots of frozen basil and ginger. I loved everything about this - partly because by this stage in what had been quite an intensely savoury meal I was absolutely ready for a bit of summer fruit. But it was also quite brilliant, a collection of textures and flavours that worked absolutely perfectly together to become better than the sum of their parts, and I wish it could have lasted forever.

And if anything the next dessert was even better - a shockingly powerfully flavoured cherry sorbet with chunks of peach, pears and orange variously as coulis, jelly and emulsion and topped with frozen 'tears' of raspberry. Look if you have access to some of the best fruit on the planet why not just use everything all at once - especially when the result is as good as this. Like the dish before I polished it all off in record time and wished I could have had more. A lot more.

The final sweet was perhaps more technically impressive than overtly enjoyable - a water-based dark chocolate mousse next to a branded coffee and chocolate biscuit. Perfectly nice but not particularly memorable, at least not compared to the fireworks that had come before.

And of course Bo.tic couldn't let it finish there, so petits fours came in the form of these pretty little things, our favourites being the raspberry meringue bites at the top of the "tree" and the rich, creamy (and very delicate, you really had to rush them into your mouth before they fell apart in your fingers) Crema Catalana 'eggs' just beneath. Like much of what had come before they were technically brilliant, showstopping to look at and very easy to enjoy.

And we did enjoy Bo.tic - it's really hard not to be charmed by a place like this, where in a bright, beautifully designed dining room, enthusiastic and experienced staff serve intelligent and attractive dishes made from the best ingredients the region can offer. Even a scary moment when all the mobile phones in the room simultaneously squealed out a flash flood warning didn't seem to break their stride - front of house acted like it happened all the time, which perhaps it does - and although we didn't feel brave enough to take up their offer of interrupting kitchen staff with queries about our food whenever the fancy took us ("honestly they won't mind!") it was nice that the offer was there. The atmosphere of the place was easy, and pleasant, and very much designed to give everyone the best possible time.

It's just that for this amount of money - especially in Spain where food and drink is noticeably cheaper than most of the rest of Europe - I just think we needed a bit, well, more. I don't mean physically more food - there was plenty of that - but a bit more innovation, a bit more spark and fire, a few more surprises. I don't think it's too unfair to compare this meal to a similarly-priced lunch at Can Roca a few years back where a couple of the dishes - the white asparagus Vienetta and the prawn dish - made such an impression on me at the time I can still taste them if I close my eyes and think back. Plenty of the dishes at Bo.tic were very good, and one or two were excellent, but none were at that level. And Can Roca didn't charge extra for bread.

Still, it was more than worth the journey to this little Baix Empordà town and if nothing else our meal - particularly the first few courses of it - was a reminder that Catalan food can shine no matter what the format. Yes you can go and spend €300+ on dainty little reconstructions of classic dishes served in spectacular surroundings, and you can enjoy that very much. Or alternatively you could stop at the nearest roadside joint hung with woodsmoke and get a plate of galta de porc amb patates fregides flung at you by a bloke in a string vest, pay €7 for it and go home just as happy. Both approaches are valid, and both only exist because the surrounding ecosystem of food-savvy and discerning customers, either local or visiting, is there to support them. So really, I suppose the point I'm trying to make is that we should be happy for all kinds of restaurants, at all budgets and for all occasions. Where would we be without them?

7/10

El Molí de l’Escala, L'Escala

I have eaten at El Moli a number of times over the 40 or so years I and my family have been visiting this part of the world. The first couple of visits were pre-blog and pre-camera phone and I don't remember much about it other than being sat in those same ancient vaulted rooms (some parts of the building are 12th century) and being bitten by mosquitos. I went back with a couple of friends in 2007 and had a dreadful meal - it's possible that the food had been terrible on previous visits and I just had lower standards, or maybe we were just unlucky this time, but you can read about how awful it was here. Decades passed - understandably - before I was willing to give it another shot, but in October last year I had a genuinely lovely meal of interesting seafood and seasonal home-grown veg (El Moli have their own kitchen garden nearby) but thanks to a suspiciously cheap SD card reader picked up on the streets of Girona, managed to lose all my photos and so couldn't write it up.

So here we are - finally - with a working SD card reader, an early summer reservation in this grand old building on the outskirts of town, and a table for fully 13 of us for a birthday celebration lunch. Eating somewhere like El Moli is a joy when there's a lot of you - most of the dishes are designed to be shared anyway, and though I'd like to think I'd have a decent bash at polishing off an entire fried fish by myself, it's a lot more fun when you can try smaller bits of a greater variety of weird and wonderful seafood.

Before that though, the snacks. L'Escala is famous for its anchovies, and so you'd expect one of the town's leading restaurants to showcase these lovely salty little fellows in various different ways. So here is gorgeous crusty homemade anchovy sourdough served with anchovy butter...

...anchovy-stuffed olives which had a brilliant balance of soft savouriness and saline punch...

...and anchovy and truffle seaweed crackers, possibly the most distressingly addictive snack I've come across in the last few years. Even a couple of under 10s on our table who usually eat little else other than white bread and chocolate managed to gobble a number of these down, a testament to their universal appeal.

From the starters proper, first to arrive were smoked sardines, something that had become a bit of a theme of the trip thanks to the discovery of a place in town that made their own using north Atlantic fish. I'm not sure where El Moli source theirs, but they were still very nice, accompanied by green beans and a gentle herby vinaigrette.

White asparagus, carefully grilled to get a few dainty char marks but not so much to make them tough or dry, were served in another light vinaigrette which made the most of the veg. El Moli do have a slight tendency to add one or two more ingredients than strictly necessary to a plate - the usual Spanish style is to have the main item and nothing more - but this dish was a model of restraint, and all the better for it.

White prawns next, from Llançà, a little fishing town just around the coast near the French border. Dressed simply with olive oil and salt - which is all they needed really - I'll forgive them the slightly redundant sprig of frisée lettuce on top partly because it was nice and crunchy and fresh and also because it soaked up the leftover dressing very well.

I've never had grouper before in any form and though this arrangement of sashimi was perfectly pleasant, I'm not entirely sure there was enough flavour in the raw product to justify serving it raw. That said, I don't know where else you can get grouper sashimi so life experience ticked off there.

There was one other starter-sized portion I unfortunately didn't get a photo of - a plate of sea cucumbers, dressed in nothing more than garlic and oil, which were beautifully cooked and a real treat. Again, the joy of eating seafood in Spain is not only that the variety of stuff available is that much wider, is that it's always served at very reasonable prices - this €38 dish would, if you ever even saw it available, be at least double that in London.

Now it was time for the larger plates, but not before one of the more excruciating moments I've ever been through in a restaurant. We had, during ordering earlier, enquired about the smallest available Cap de Creus spiny lobster, a rare and expensive beastie with a short season, hand caught in the waters around Roses bay. We were told initially that they had a 300g specimen, which at €18/100g mean that we could have a taste of this delicacy for €54 - punchy, but not ridiculous. However, they later realised that the smallest lobster they had was in fact 700g (and brought it out still kicking to show us), meaning a significantly more damaging outlay of €126, so we reluctantly turned it down.

Unfortunately, somewhere along the way our reluctant rejection was misinterpreted as a reluctant agreement and so it was with no small amount of horror that we found ourselves being presented with said lobster, now expertly grilled and ready to eat, and had to go through the agonising experience of explaining that in fact we didn't want it and sorry if we weren't clear earlier.

Now, two things to say about this. Firstly, the staff couldn't have been nicer about the whole thing and swiftly and graciously took the lobster back kitchen-side, presumably to make for some rather more extravagant than normal staff dinner. So they could not have handled the situation any better from that point of view. And secondly, although you'd be tempted to blame such lack of communication on the language barrier, I can promise you that our waiter spoke better English than most front of house in London, so that wasn't the issue either. It was just one of those things, an unfortunate combination of us (probably) not quite rejecting the thing as forcefully as we could and them misreading our English politeness incorrectly, which if it had been an extra portion of chips or a plate of croquetas would have been unfortunate, but regarding a €126 serving of some of the Costa Brava's finest seafood became something else entirely.

Anyway, I'm happy to say that the mains we did order were definitely worth our while. Scorpionfish came whole-roasted, boasting a lovely crisp salty skin and bright white, meaty flesh inside, alongside some more grilled vegetables from the kitchen garden. This was partly ordered out of curiosity as I don't think I'd ever tried scorpionfish before, but it was a lovely thing indeed, rather reminiscent of hake in texture.

And it wasn't all about the seafood - this is a 500g "Txogitxu" Txuleton on the bone for an astonishingly reasonable €37.50 - bargains are to be found in all corners of a Spanish restaurant menu. The Txogitxu website proudly states they specialise in "Fat old cows", which can be both an amusing turn of phrase and completely true at the same time.

We had all the desserts, too - well, apart from the Recuit goats cheese and honey which had run out. Torrija is a kind of Spanish French toast, buttery and crunchy on the outside and complimented by a rich homemade ice cream...

...Mille-fuille of seasonal citrus fruit was gorgeous to look out and incredibly easy to eat, with layers of lemon curd binding together delicate flakes of pastry. We probably should have ordered two of these, it disappeared so quickly...

...Basque-style cheesecake, of which we did order two, which had a fantastic creamy flavour and texture topped with sugared hazelnuts...

...chocolate mousse with toasted "garam bread" (fortunately not nearly as weird as it sounds) with olive oil and salt...

...and a strawberry pavlova hiding under a blanket of mousse-like meringue which was full of the joys of summer.

There was also a cheese course, all excellent needless to say, but don't ask me to tell you what they were because I forgot to make a note and they were all super-local varieties that you probably wouldn't see outside of this corner of Spain even if you looked for them.

By this point, aided by a couple of bottles of nice cava (a ludicrously reasonable €20 each) and a glass of treacly Pedro Ximines, we had largely put the Unfortunate Lobster Incident behind us and were further cheered by a bill of €522.30 - pretty good indeed for 11 people. Admittedly the under 10s mainly ate chicken fingers and bread (as well as those puffed seaweed snacks) but a couple of the older kids had oysters and roast hake and chips, and there was definitely plenty of food and drink for everyone. So when I say the spend per head was only just over €47, well, I'm only stretching the truth slightly.

The point is, I can recommend El Moli de l'Escala with endless enthusiasm. Their style of food and service is unpretentious but considered, rarely overcomplicated and always bursting with flavour and charm. They offer a range of exciting and unusual seafood throughout the year (if you ever see Palamos prawns, get them - this applies to any other restaurant too) at prices that feel moderate bordering on bargainous. And when Incidents arise, they handle them with grace and charm. I do hope they found a willing customer (internal or otherwise) for that Cap de Creus lobster. And either way, I hope this post serves as enough of a thank-you.

8/10