Simple Spanish magic
Margaret Kennedy
Abac restaurant in Barcelona, Spain [©Abac]
It’s not round every corner that you come across a 55 seat restaurant with 14 chefs. But one that’s making the food world sit up at the moment is in Barcelona. Its name, Abac.
Food lovers from around the world are rating this as one of their finest dining experiences. It’s not just about the food, more of that below, but dining here is an occasion that itself seems to define seamless and pleasing and flawless.
Part of a 15 room boutique hotel of the same name, the serene Abac restaurant is decorated in shades of earth-toned pastels and gives on to an internal garden of tranquillity and beauty.
Complementing the setting are intangibles such as the spaciousness and privacy created by the placement of tables, the anticipation of discovering what the day’s menu will hold - no two are ever the same, the ideal timing of courses, and retiring to the bar for a digestivo.
The inspiration behind all this is chef Xavier Pellicer, an elegant, genial Catalan who greets his guests at the end of their visit and perhaps shows them around the premises.
Xavier Pellicer chose cooking as his trade at the tender age of 13. He grew up with fine food, with a Catalan father and French mother, and early in his career moved among Michelin starred restaurants of Europe, finally arriving at Abac in 1999 and earning his own stars, two in the last 10 years.
He visited Australia for the first time in July to man the pans at the Brisbane Hilton Masterclass Weekend. It was an unforgettable session.
The ingredients themselves give no hint as to how they’ll be transformed by two careful hands and a refined mind. You can buy them all at your local greengrocer and butcher: green beans, asparagus, brown onions, eggs, vanilla pod, racks of lamb. Or just about all. The black truffle might take a bit of snuffling out, but with our tumescent truffle industry gleefully supplying the European market when the Perigord beauties are off season, even a truffle’s not impossible to find.
But this selection of everyday foods may be out of reach for the home kitchen. The produce may be simple, but it’s paddock fresh. Each truffle at Abac - and they use lots - is routinely selected by Pellicer himself, as part of preparing the day’s menu that starts from scratch each day.
We know all about fine eggs - organic, free range - but Pellicer requires the hen’s first eggs - virgin pullet eggs - of precisely 40 grams.
And the milk-fed lamb will be younger than we can easily get it in Australia without actually owning the flock. Pellicer works directly with producers. His baby rack is vacuum sealed and slow-cooked in a bath of gently moving water at a low constant temperature. Also in the bag is a little sunflower oil, salt and pepper and the magic ingredient of a vanilla bean. Vanilla, which as we know marries well with milk, marries equally well with delicate milk-fed lamb.
The truffled potato omelette, a signature dish, was one of his demonstrations. It was mesmerising to witness the transformation of a large potato into one long continuous sheet that looked like a metre-long sheet of lasagne. For this you need a Japanese turning slicer, a rotary device that makes light work of the volumetric conversion from lump to ribbon.
But the visual delight was Pellicer’s zucchini wrapped bon bons of red mullet (rouget in Europe) with tomato jelly glaze, garlanded with a deconstructed salad of asparagus tips, edible flowers, confit tomato pieces and green beans. Seeing was desiring.
Xavier Pellicer, a calm, handsome man with a twinkle in his eye, speaks in a mellifluous basso profundo. He’s cuisine’s Placido Domingo. Lucky Barcelona.
Spain remains the world driver of fine cuisine, with Catalonia and the Basque region, especially, being heaven for food lovers. As at Abac, where passion, beauty and science combine, so too at elBulli, Mugaritz (in San Sebastian) and elsewhere. These places are good for your spirit too, because it seems that you leave feeling not just replete, but lastingly happier.
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