A New Food Mecca

By Daren Fonda / Sant Celoni

Drive into almost any town in Spain, and you'll see road signs pointing to restaurants and hotels. But if you arrive in Sant Celoni, just north of Barcelona, seeking one of the finest restaurants in the country, you'll be out of luck. The place is tucked away on a narrow street off the main square; most of the townsfolk are familiar with it but may be scant help if your Spanish is so lame that you confuse the words nombre and numero.

The obscurity of Can Fabes seems odd since the restaurant is one of only four in Spain to have earned three Michelin stars and routinely draws an international clientele. Also unusual: chef-owner Santi Santamaria will probably come over to your table and say, "Hola." Not many world-famous chefs do that; most aren't even in their kitchens on a daily basis, since they're too busy empire building. But Santamaria, whose restaurant occupies the first floor of his family's ancestral home, takes an Old World pride in his place--while serving up slick modern dishes like calamari with pumpkin puree and pigeon in phyllo pastry sprinkled with confectioner's sugar.

The new foodie mecca, Spain draws culinary pilgrims the way France did a generation ago. Hit the Basque town of San Sebastian, and you'll be surrounded by restaurants serving inventive, often experimental cuisine: places like Arzak, a three-star Michelin legend, and in the countryside, Etxebarri, where chef Victor Arguinzoniz takes such pride in his grilled meats and fishes that he bakes his own charcoal out of different tree branches every morning in an oxygen-controlled oven. At the Guggenheim in Bilbao, a prodigy named Josean Martinez Alija, 27, is winning accolades for dishes like roasted tomatoes stuffed with baby squid and candied cod in garlic oil. Most famously, there is Ferran Adri`a of El Bulli, two hours north of Barcelona in the seaside town of Roses. A food alchemist, Adri`a has inspired a generation of chefs with his scientific approach to cooking: rendering gelatins out of seaweed powder, combining flavors like salmon and coffee, using nitrous oxide gas to create sauces airier than foam. Unfortunately, Adri`a, 43, closes shop for half the year (to run food experiments in his lab) and can honor just 8,000 of the 100,000 table requests he gets annually.

If you're shut out of El Bulli and stuck in Madrid, don't fret. The city boasts plenty of innovative places. One of them is La Broche in the Miguel Angel hotel, whose executive chef, Sergi Arola, apprenticed with Adri`a. Dining at La Broche is an immersion in formalism. The color scheme of the dining room is sci-fi white, from the rectangular tables to the window blinds. The wait staff is all business (as is most of the clientele). The food, accelerating in flavor and intensity through a meal, seems conjured in Adri`a's lab: breaded fois custard cream with apricot jam, baked skate with clam aioli, smoked beef with "ancient mustard" foam. In cooking as in science, not all lab experiments succeed: an unappealing appetizer of Iberian porkpie with truffled duck liver consisted mostly of morsels of fat. But considering the rich and varied fare dished out, the fact that we didn't feel bloated at the end of this meal counts as a triumph for the chef.

Another excellent, lesser-known jewel in Madrid is a Spanish-Asian fusion place, Nodo. Order a gazpacho here, and you won't get the dressed-up salsa so common in the U.S. Chef Alberto Chicote serves a delicate peach-colored puree, close to a sorbet, poured at the table from an Asian kettle and served in a bowl of ice. The raw tuna tataki in garlic-and-almond sauce featured soft, subtle flavors; a heaping portion of medallions of roast suckling pig, accompanied by caramelized onions, was sweet and succulent.

Dining in Spain isn't always delightful, of course, and visitors who don't venture beyond the hotel and museum districts may wonder what all the fuss is about. Despite our best efforts to find local gems serving traditional Catalan fare, we couldn't shake dishes of gluey paella, watery gazpacho, oversalted cod and lamb scraps advertised as cutlet. In Madrid, where Moroccan food is in vogue, we ordered a salad at a trendy place called Mosaiq and received taco filling. A dollop of wasabi next to a greasy piece of fish was the chef's idea of fusion.

Even at Can Fabes, where we generally enjoyed a stupendous meal, some dishes flopped, such as a cream of potato, cod and truffle soup so rich we could stomach only a few spoonfuls. "I like to highlight the local foods when they come into season," chef Santamaria told us, explaining why so many dishes on our tasting menu featured mushrooms (in the fall). If you go, plan on bringing a hearty appetite, which you may work up just finding the place.