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
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