- Rating: 17.5/20
- Address: Carrer Nou, 10, 08395 Sant Pol de Mar, Barcelona, Spain
- Phone: +34 937 60 06 62
- Price per pax: ~€193 ($254 at 1 EUR = 1.31 USD)
- Value: 2.5/5
- Dining time: 180 minutes
- Chef: Carme Ruscadella
- Style: Creative Catalan
- Michelin Stars: 3
SURREALISM. Surrealism is alive and well in Catalonia, only domesticated on a plate at Sant Pau. The kitchen of Carme Ruscadella cooks in a whimsical way that echoes her great Catalan artistic predecessors, but through the necessary precision to maintain 3 Michelin stars forestalling the excesses of Dali, a fascination with communicating geometrical shapes evoking Miro but departing from his primodial soup aesthetic with its liking for geometric precision.
THE ROOTS OF SURREALISM at my meal at Sant Pau:
- Fusion: (a Dali-esque technique recalling his 3-dimensional works like Lobster Telephone): “Padrón and rice croquette” Two typical Catalan tapas, the padron pepper and the croquette, were fused into a padron croquette. Seductively mute and provocative, a recently-birthed Venus.
- Whimsical descriptions: “Lobster pizza: raw and cooked vegetables, creamy mozzarella”: Lobster “pizza”, overflowing a dough base, had none of the flat pizza geometry, instead forming a tower of ingredients. To describe it as “pizza” was accurate in the technical sense that there was dough underneath, and in the sense that the flavors were broadly what we’d recognise as margherita pizza. The description was off-beat. It was quite a change from my last major meal at Asador Etxebarri, where all the dish descriptions were literal and minimalist (mirroring the food). It was as whimsical as Mugaritz, but the dish descriptions at Mugaritz were literal, minimalist, and the surprise came from the menu description itself: “7 Spice Rattle”; “”Fifth Quarter Octopus”. For “Lobster Pizza”, the description was doubly absurd – firstly, no one does a lobster pizza; secondly, that wasn’t a lobster pizza.
- Atypical Geometric Constructions: “Gambes on Sailor’s Toast: tribute to the local sailors cuisine”: Instead of serving the dish with prawns on top, the bread is served with prawns wrapped around it.
- Chimera: The Dragon at the end, was a chimera of 7 different textures, each sheet whimsically sculpted to resemble dragon-parts.
*(My favorite Food-Text Interplay at Per Se is the clever linguistic pun – “pearls” in “oysters and pearls” being tapioca pearls)
A MEAL AT SANT PAU AS FOOD
As a meal for showcasing artistic vision, Sant Pau is first-class. But tastewise, much of the meal was merely pleasant, with nothing that remains as a strong impression two months later. It is not the case at Sant Pau that dishes are composed to be eye-candy without having a strong taste-backbone – frequently the more visually stunning dishes were the ones that tasted better. Instead, the clunkers were dishes like “John dory and curry: courgette, eringui and potatoes”, and “Vegetal Dim Sum”, dishes in the International Style that tasted pleasant and were precisely executed, but seemed at Sant Pau to lack fireworks in both aesthetics and tastiness.
As a diner my overall impression was that, besides the stupendously delicious bread, every morsel of food at Sant Pau, taste-wise, was precisely calculated to be pleasant. The strongest impressions I carry are the riot of colours and the geometric precision of the dishes – a vibrant surreal feast for the eyes, the literal feast more muted. On the whole, I found Sant Pau worth the trip, there was a sense of play and mischief here I haven’t found elsewhere.
Sant Pau bakes some of the best bread that I have had. Crusty (+++) , and full of browned flavor, it was among the top 2-3 on the monthlong Europe trip I’ve been chronicling, if not actually the top. I could not resist asking for more, and more, crusty bits (5/5)
- Tomato and strawberry velvet, manzanilla, quinoa (4.25/5)
- tomato/strawberry, gazpacho, manzanilla sherry, and black quinoa, served in a cocktail glass
- Padrón and rice croquette (4.5/5)
- Two typical Catalan tapas, the padron pepper and the croquette, were fused into a padron croquette. Seductively mute and provocative, a recently-birthed Venus with a bit of cheese inside the padron pepper. Why isn’t this combination more popular? Delicious.
- Vegetal Dim Sum (4/5)
- Chive dumpling, with a hint of Chinese ginger (a la xiaolongbao sauce), with a nice sour tomato-ish sauce.
- Norway lobster and coconut gnocchi: in tempura with shiso sauce (4.5/5)
- The gnocchi, gelled as if agarified, a translucent sauce with a pesto-like sauce made of Shiso.
- This was a good dish, the langoustines (they described it as “langoustines” when serving the dish) nicely seasoned, though it had less of the firm bite of the ones at Ledoyen.
- Lobster pizza: raw and cooked vegetables, creamy mozzarella (4.5/5)
- Basil, mozzarella, tomato, squash blossom. As mentioned, it was superficially plausible to be served a lobster pizza, but the full effect of surprise was completed only when seeing the dish, since it had undergone at least one reimagining.
- The tastes, while good, was no more than exactly a “lobster pizza”, which did not fire my culinary imagination beyond comfort food. The bread was a robust biscuit cracker.
- Miso and foie cubes: champignons, vegetables, umeboshi, lemon (4.25/5)
- Seared foie, green peas, crisp champignons.
- The miso was given a bit of sausage-y, unctuous meatiness from the foie.
- Gambes on Sailor’s Toast: tribute to the local sailors cuisine (4.25/5)
- The prawns were savory, a seafood toast an intense taste of seafood stew. It brought me to the docks of Sant Pol.
- John dory and curry: courgette, eringui and potatoes (3.75/5)
- Fried john dory, curry, salty courgette, slice of juicy eryngii mushroom (king trumpet mushroom)
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleurotus_eryngii
- Pirinese foal loin, black garlic, banana: medium-rare roasted (4.5/5)
- Horse meat (why not?) with banana, a surprisingly good accompaniment with savory black garlic soil.
- However, the meat was tender and relatively flavorless, unsurprising since it was a young foal. (veal often suffers from the same problem, the lack of distinctive taste of the meat) It was prepared well though.
- Cheese for June – “Núm. 30 Second Series”: Serrat Gros, 3 combination with gamatxa wine and almonds
- PRIMER JUEGO: Con cerezas bañadas en garnacha de Allela y almendras
- SEGUNDO JUEGO: Dos cordones, de mazapán con garnacha y de queso
- TERCER JUGEO: Macaron de almendra y garnacha relleno de queso
- Serrat Gros: Queso artesano y de pastor (Ossera, Alt Urgell). Elaborado con leche cruda de cabras de raza alpina. Coagulación láctica, pasta blanda, piel enmohecida. Madurado en cava durante 8 semanas.
- The first (undressed cheese) was notable for good cherries, juicy without being cloyingly sweet (4/5)
- The second, with marzipan in a spiral was okay.(3.5/5)
- The third, a raspberry macaron had good fruit flavor, contrasting with the cheese well (4.5/5)
- Pre Dessert: Calisay passion (4.5/5)
- Passionfruit sorbet and Calysay, the tropical fruit liqueur, a refreshing trope.
- Cube: berries, shiso ice cream (3.75/5)
- While I admire the Mondrian-esque construction, the shiso gelatin with raspberry, coconut, and a solid pillar of apple (I suspect this is important in its structural integrity) was taste-wise nothing special
- Tender almonds kiss, sea water (4.75/5)
- The simplest dish, and the best (for some reason, the simplicity recalls a magical dessert of coconut and carrot at Asta in Boston)
- Almond cream, fleur de sel, olive oil (fruity and green), with seawater-vanilla ice cream. Dotted with fresh almonds. Superb.
- Raisin tomatoes sponge: curd cheese, oregano, ratafía (4.5/5)
- Tremendously sweet tomatoes (that were intensely raisin-ish, without a trace of tartness), with sheep’s milk yoghurt, and coca – a sweet pizza-like pastry. The tomatoes had been oven-roasted, and not one bit of sugar was added – very surprising, given how sweet it was. Ratafia (a sweet liqueur) was in there somewhere (tomatoes?)
- This was a clever dessert-pizza concept dish: the tomatoes functioning more as oversized raisins, the sheep’s milk yoghurt mirroring mozzarella, oregano mirroring basil (for the lobster pizza).
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca_(pastry)
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratafia
- While Googling I also found an advert for a Tomaccio: an intensely sweet raisin tomato: http://www.raker.com/doc/raker.tomaccio.handout.pdf. Was this what I was served?
- Black and Green Olives, Aragón, sevillanas, sweet wine (4/5)
- Olive oils, different types of olives blended with different kinds of chocolates. Minimalist, but I enjoyed the fruity-olive taste with chocolate. Pleasant
- The Dragon (4.25/5)
- White chocolate
- Black chocolate
- Puff pastry, angel hair, pine nuts
- Chocolate cookies
- Lemon cookies
- Licorice and sherbet philo
- Mint brick
- While reposing with a coffee in the garden, I was served the first in Sant Pau’s mythical beasts dessert series: The Dragon
- Limoncello jelly – I was also given a tin to take home. Delicious.
Kenneth Tiong eats 