THE FIVE BEST RESTAURANTS IN THE WORLD
(The Long Version)
ElBulli, The Fat Duck, Noma, Mugaritz, El Celler de Can Roca. It's a menu that would have any food fan celebrating but how do the five best restaurants in the world stack up side by side? Masterchef critic Matt Preston hit the road across Europe to find out.
The initial plan was so simple. Reward myself for surviving my first season of MasterChef, and for signing off on the manuscript for Cravat-a-licious (a collection of my least worst writing from the last ten years), by popping around the world to eat at the five best restaurants on the planet as named by “Restaurant” magazine. This influential list is compiled from the votes of hundreds of leading foodies, critics and chefs each year. The 2009 list has three places in Spain, one in Denmark and one in London at the top making it a fun jaunt.
The idea, so robust in its conception, was that by seeing the world's top five in rapid succession I could reach some ringing conclusions about the nature of modern cuisine, which place really was “the best”,whether the list was totally bogus, and whether these gastro-temples were really worth the money.
Ah yes, money. First up can I advise you that losing all your credit cards the day before you set offon the world's most expensive dining trip is not recommended. Especially if it also means having to cancel all the cards your traveling partner holds as well. There is however a certain sense of abandon about getting on the plane with just a pocketful of coins and blind faith in the global banking system (that has not exactly bolstered confidence by its performance in the last 12 months). Somehow, surely, those new cards would find us in Europe so we could pay bills that could push $2000 a meal. The worry is that the first stop is likely to be the most expensive too.
EL BULLI
El Bulli (pronounced “L Boo-Yee”) dominates the top position in most listsof the world's best restaurants, and has held top spot in the“Restaurant” list for the last four years (2009, 2008, 2007, 2006).
Even in the strangely self-obsessed world of top chefs, this ranking is seldom railed against by Ferran Adria's peers; a tacit agreement perhaps that he is that rare thing someone who has inspired a paradigm shift in fine dining, a sort of Mozart of the kitchen. For, of the other restaurants in the top five, two are run by disciples who cite time cooking at El Bulli as the ignition for their careers and ideas, and the other two share Adria's principles of innovation; that using food as more than just nourishment but as an invocation of memory to create a connection between chef and diner at a far deeper and more fundamental level. The woman I love snorts at this as pretension and good marketing but I liken it to how when we eat our grandmother's food we are tasting not just the ingredients but our history, our heritage,our relationship with her, and everything that happened every other time we ate it. This only lessened the eye-rolling a little.
Ferran Adria's cooking is built around the chef's desire to present familiar flavours in new and unfamiliar ways. To achieve this, the restaurant is shut for the months of the European winter while Adria retires to his workshop cum laboratory to imagine up new ideas and techniques to achieve a menu that alters radically each season. The question is whether the result is actually dinner, or just culinary high wire antics aimed at impressing through their very newness and innovation.The question is, “Is El Bulli yummy?”
Adria's restaurant is a nondescript three hour drive east along the coast from Barcelona. There is a strange “butterflies in hobnail boots” sense of anticipation clattering round my gut as we drive in to Roses, the seaside town closest to El Bulli. Roses is the most unlikely neighbour for the world's most out-there restaurant. The crescent of coarse yellow sand is crusted with layer upon layer of fading five story family hotels and the beach is packed with kiddies, solid-calved old ladies paddling in black and elderly blokes in budgie smugglers preening. It all looks like a scene from one of those lurid Technicolor travelogues of the some long lost era. The esplanade is lined with cheap cafés that smell of frying and stale beer.
Our hotel is pure Roses too - a one star at the wrong end of the beach with matchstick furniture and cheap framed prints of fading fishing boats. It is the only place in town with rooms left though. Note to self: next time you get a booking at El Bulli in December book the hotel room then rather than waiting until Spain's peak season of August!
I have wanted to eat at El Bulli ever since I started writing about food and restaurants ten year's back. So much so that when my booking and my role on MasterChef were confirmed on the same day, it was the table for four that I rang friends and colleagues to boast about. It is one of the great contemporary culinary myths that in the three days in October that El Bulli accepts bookings, they receive two million emails chasing just 8000 seats for dinner. Ignoring the rather geek-boy concerns about how big their server must be to handle that much traffic, getting a table here is harder than any other restaurant in the world and prized accordingly. The woman I love is just concerned that the food is going to be just plain weird.
I suppose this is how players must feel before a Grand Final. It is seven hours before dinner so we potter on the beach, try to siesta, and generally mope around until its time to get ready. My wife and I sit around in the rickety hotel bar waiting for my friend and Sydney Good Food Guide editor Joanna Saville and her sister to arrive. Then we can leave. I'm nervous like before a first date - appropriately a pimple pops up on my forehead that afternoon.
After a search for spot cream - how do you say “Clearasil” in Catalan? - and a check for aftershave levels, four of us cram into a little local taxi to wend 20 minutes up and away over the headlands towards a far sleepier tourist cove that was once best known a scuba diving location.There, clinging to one side is the low-rise adobe home that houses El Bulli. That busy but goat-track-narrow road of precipitous drops and views over a shimmering crystalline Med helps distance the tat of Roses, building the anticipation with every hairpin turn. It was to this coast that Dali fled the world and it's fitting that it now provides a home to the chef with a similar twisted modern bent to his mien.
There's a strange trill that shimmers across all of us aswe turn into the drive past a long scree of artfully piled stones but the welcome overwhelms any initial trepidation. When in Australia a the culmination of his world book tour Ferran Adria was tired and quite distracted. Here he is animated, relaxed and his tan face wrinkles in a smile as we walk into his kitchen. In his chef's jacket and apron, Adria is nuggety. He's wearing jeans and a white chef's jacket. This kitchen tour seems to be part of most people's experience of eating at a top modern Spanish place but he has a smart celebrity's knack of making everyone feel special.
It's strange, finally, to be somewhere with someone that is so much in their place. We stand in front of the giant bronze bull's head that has fooled some - yup that's my hand sneaking up embarrassedly - into thinking that the restaurant is named after it rather than the previous owner's obsession with bulldogs. Adria demands pictures. He crosses his arms over his belly and laughs as I do the same “It's a good way to hide the stomach,” he observes in a mix of Catalan and pigeon English.
His modern kitchen, that has the sleek lines of an art gallery, is full of an army of 45 young chefs. Adria's fame and Spain's culinary training regime,which includes mandatory work experience, means the place is full o fchefs earning little more than knowledge and the honour of working in the best restaurant in the world. This system of apprenticeship allows some top Spanish restaurants like El Bulli to run ratios of chefs to customers that bubble around one to one!
A meal at El Bulli starts with snacks on the small terrace that overlooks the rough bay of Caja Monjoi and the path that leads around it. Every so often families in bikinis, boardies and sarongs traipse past on their way back from the beach and look in. This, and the sort of country pub, wood-beamed dining rooms full of bulldog figurines and what could pass as the dodgiest paintings from a Rotary Art Show, makes El Bulli seem like a surprisingly un-elitist spot. It is a world away from the gilt,snootiness, and champagne-chariots of many French three Michelin star places.
“Snacks” - it is such prosaic term for the creations that arrive first; glassy wafers flavoured with vanilla or with sweet tart pineapple studded with unlikely success by the salt-bitter contrast of black olive pieces. Then there are crazy salty candy shells that crack sweetly and send shivers down the spine as a filling of intense buttery liquid peanut splashes across your palate. After these faux peanuts more oral fireworks come with his famous olives. These virtual olives are prima facie evidence of Adria's love of deconstructing food to re engineer the flavour in different ways. Here a smooth pliable dusky-green jelly-skin holds the olive-flavoured juice. Bite and it explodes splattering intense olive liquor across your mouth.
We drink a bottle of elite Kripta cava (Spanish wine made in the champagne manner). It is so fine - elusive and bright at first, more mellow and toasty as it sits in the glass - that it could make a Reims widow nervous, and we “snack-on”. Odd delicate crackers of Japanese intent; sticks of sugar cane soaked with the flavours of mojito and caipirinha cocktails that you suck; fat half cherries coated in the flavour of salty sour Japanese plum. These ooze a combination of cherry juice and plum wine so much so that after my second one it looks like I've been hit with a spray of bullets - spreading bright red splotches across my cream jacket.
It's a disaster spotted across the terrace by maitre d' Luis Garcia. When a similar thing happened at a very glitzy three star in Paris - yes, it's amazing that I ever put on weight judging by how little food actually makes it to my mouth - a flock of waiters in tails descended and fussed over me in that “look at the gauche Australian” sort of a way that they must be taught in waiter school on the same day they learn “putting down Americans the de Gaulle way”. Here however Garcia sidles up and diffuses any embarrassment with a matter of fact demand for the jacket. This response breaks any remaining tension at being here.
So now in to one of the two beamed dining rooms for the dinner proper; the atmosphere is “library reading room” thanks to no music. The only sounds are people going“mmmmmmm”, people going “hmmmmmm?” and waiters issuing instructions on how each course should be approached. For each one of these little edible tableaux comes with terse bullet points on how to eat it perhaps as an insurance against customer breaking a tooth on the fluid-lined sculptures that act as plates here: “eat this in one bite”, “suck the flower but don't eat it”, “eat this leaf”, “two bites but don't eat the leaf”.
For chapter after chapter this epic goes on with the sort of breathless enthusiasm of a small child showing off all his new Christmas presents. It's a relentless assault, Adria's current culinary obsessions with Japan, with the soy bean, with sesame seeds and with the pine becoming increasingly clear as the meal progresses. There's a plate containing over a dozen different expression of the soy bean from sprouts and slimy fermented Japanese natto to miso, soy and what tastes like milky bean curd skin. While young pine needles come candied, pine milk is used to partner gin in a cocktail and you re-acquaint yourself with pine-nuts in little gel packets that you dip in a sort of sweet pine resin tea and then pop into your mouth. The packets dissolve on your tongue to deliver a pine nut praline, a pine nut butter and a pine nut oil. Wow!
These obsessions make for a slightly unbalanced meal. Some dishes are wonderful; bursting with flavour and turning your tongue inside out with unexpected textures and combination like little parmesan gel ravioli with coffee grains, a fat scampi that's raw at one end and golden-fried at the other, or a plate of “mimetic almonds”.Here a wedge of black olive dusted apricot sits amongst young green almond kernels, toasted almonds and various other similarly shaped“expressions of almondiness” with different textures such as the almond jellies, and even what the waiter confirms are the occasional apricot kernels.
Other jaw dropping moments revolve as much around the produce sourced as the techniques. A strange raw little leaf, Dutch-grown and dotted with dew drops of vinegar, tastes uncannily like oysters; petals from a rose imported from Ecuador fool you into thinking that they are artichoke leaves thanks to an artichoke vinaigrette. “Here, nothing is as it seems,” says the waiter who clears the plates as if quoting an El Bulli motto.
More perplexing is a giant hollow egg of frozen coconut cream where you eat the sweet shell sprinkled with curry powder. It's one of many examples of how Adria likes people to eat their fingers rather than cutlery and also how modern Spanish restaurants, like the French, struggle with the use of unfamiliar spices. The curry powder has a raw spice taste.
Overall the menu of 39 courses or tastes starts sweet and ends exploring iodine-like flavours in dishes like sliced almost raw tasting kidney and a mix of green tea, caviar and rather wibbly-wobbly heat-wilted tendrils of sea anemones that look like some phaser-blasted alien from Star Trek. Interesting maybe but both are distinctly un-yummy. They are not alone. There are other dishes that don't ring any bells for our party, like raw cockles with fennel and the flavour of yuzu, slabs of cooked jamon fat with abalone and poppy little sprigs of what we take as seaweed, and that plate of soy which seems far less exotic when viewed from an Australian rather than Spanish perspective.
This is El Bulli's first season after the departure of Ferran's brother and muse, Albert, from the long-held roll of pastry chef. Compared to the rest of the menu, for me desserts lacked lunacy, cohesion and the same breathless over-excitement. Even if entrees and snacks like the pineapple and olive “hankerchief” or a ice-cold (rather than iced) coconut sponge (made from what tasted like flavoured and foamed cocoa butter set with cold rather than heat into an “Aero” like texture) continue Adria's aim of blurring the lines between the sweet and savoury worlds. The most spectacular looking dessert - called “roots”because it looks like bonsai-sized tree roots in soil - is a jumble of chocolate and a Japanese citrus called yuzu never quite gels for me.
In the end El Bulli comes across like the culinary equivalent of the Paris catwalks with a new collection of dishes each year. While you might appreciate the cutting edge nature of what you see, nothing is turning up on your high street anytime soon. For example only now, almost three years after their debut at El Bulli, are Adria inventions like the foam-gun aerated sponge creeping on to Aussie fine dining menus.
This reckless desire to re-invent his menu every year is really what makes El Bulli special but it also ensures that it will reflect Adria's sometimes outlandish current culinary obsessions. You could also argue that his menu of 39 tastes could do with some serious culling to cutout dud dishes but in a way this would be self-defeating because you learn as much about Adria's approach to food from the mis-steps as the winning dishes.
What really makes eating here so fascinating fora foodie is that Adria sets the trends with his new techniques and ideas and you get to see them first. It's certainly not the décor!
At the end of the meal, El Bulli's irrepressible maitre d' Luis Garciareturns with my jacket, spotless. It's a little thing; another justification of El Bulli's status although it has to be admitted that a meal here is still largely about Adria's food - whether it is yummy or not.
EL CELLER DE CAN ROCA
El Celler de Can Roca is an hour back towards Barcelona in a quiet residential suburb of Girona. It's an unlikely place to find the fifth best restaurant in the world. Run by the three Roca Brothers it is in a fine contemporary triangular space of light, glass and wood with a wide light well filled a small grove of trees as its centre. It is the smartest dining space of the top five, which isn't saying much given the cramped English cottage of The Fat Duck, the kitsch of El Bulli and rugged warehouse feel of Copenhagen's Noma.
Can Roca has however always struck meas whiffing slightly of pretension with little brother Jordi famed for making desserts modeled of famous perfumes and big brother Joan distilling the flavour of autumnal earth to use in dishes! Strangely once there however it turns out to be the most conventional of the five. It's as if mum, who still runs the Roca family's traditional place up the road, has ambled down and delivered a few swifts clips with a wooden spoon across the thighs to knock some sense into her boys. Not that there is anything mundane about charcoal grilled candied eggplant as a dessert, or a sealed omelette unexpectedly gushing a smoky Herring caviar-spotted cream when burst.
After snacks like black sesame crackers or wonderful candy-crusted black olives madeusing - shock horror - real olives, the 11 course menu at Can Roca delivers the most compelling “lick-the-plate” moments of the trip for the woman I love. Whether it's a slice of sole or an amazingly life-like apricot that actually turns out to be a sugar ball filled with apricot ice cream, this is food that delivers the essence of these flavours as well as maintaining the integrity of the produce it aims to represent. The fish is especially fine, partnered by five splotches of restrained gel-like purees of green olive, fennel, orange, bergamot and pine nut. Each subtly changed the perceive flavour of the fish without overwhelming it.
The woman I Iove is in heaven. She also remarks that visiting the kitchens here you see real food breads coming out of the oven, sausages of goose meat being sliced something that she missed at El Bulli.
Can Roca is also home to the most consistently impressive wine and food matches thanks to middle brother Josep's encyclopedic cellar. These start with an 2005 Fleurie paired with a similarly cherry-stained almond gazpacho floating with delicate flanks of salmon-pink eel. Reds from the revered Priorat region west of Barcelona provide a crescendo paired with a goose sausage and again with the most spectacular idea of crispy and slightly fatty lamb skin sandwiching cubes of bread soaked with the sweet tang of ripe tomato.This play on the Catalans' traditional love of bread rubbed with tomato is one of my OMG moments.
Two Catalan places and now - after a short flurry of tapas, Picasso and Gaudi in Barcelona - we fly north to Euskadia and the almost grand English seaside town of Donostia - San Sebastian. Here Basque chefs like Juan Mari Arzak and Pedro Subijana birthed modern Spanish cookery and for the last ten years Andoni Adurizhas plied his trade in a converted farmhouse in the hills above city as the standard bearer of a new generation.
MUGARITZ
Mugaritz,ranked at fourth place in the Top Five, is lionized as this great rustic restaurant where the chefs tend the gardens, using tweezers to pick herbs and edible flowers that adorn almost every dish. So it's a surprise to find it surrounded by a car park that is many times bigger than the restaurant's vegetable plot.
Inside the big dining room is sparsely scattered with tables of which not all are full on this Saturday night. This is put down to the last night of a Basque pride festival in San Sebastian and a soccer match between local heroes Real Sociedad and the might of the re-invigorated Real Madrid. This has seen the streets round the soccer stadium turned into a sea of blue and white stripes; the air thick with the sounds of chanting and the parping of jaunty brass bands.
Arriving at 9pm everything at Mugaritz in the green hills about the town is far, far quieter. In fact it looked like the restaurant might be even emptier than that but the diners here arrive very late by Australian standards. They are an eclectic mix of foodie tourists, genuflecting young chefs from across Europe and far less of the posh perma-tanned blazer-wearing types seenat Can Roca and El Bulli.
With pitchfork iconography on the walls and smooth wooden axe-handles that hold the obliquely writtenmenu, the intention is clearly to anchor the rustic notion that, whileAduriz might have started as a modernist disciple of Adria, he is nowmore closely a follower of the land and the sea that surrounds him.
The 11 course menu they prepare for us skips across some of Aduriz's greatest hits. Tiny feather-weight gnocchi made with kudzu starch and flavored with tangy local Idiazabal cheese float in a pristine porkbroth. They follow a busy jumble of sprouts, greens and flower petalsdressed with nutty brown butter and with a thin milky soup that tastes of Emmental cheese.
Flowers, wild greens and herbs seem to be everywhere. A miniscule dice of squid and carrots in a squid broth comes strewn with delicate white carrot blossoms. I didn't ever know carrots flowered. That garden bowl is loaded with different basils and the surprisingly sweet petals of lily and marigold amongst the buds. Later a fillet of mild white bonito tuna, from the Bay of Biscay that snuggles in to Spain's northern shores, comes with strands of succulent samphire and something called sea chamomile. This love of edible flowers and foraged wild ingredients is something Aduriz shares withhis Scandinavian counterpart, Rene Redzepi at Noma who sits above himin the Top Five.
Local fish like that bonito abound. There's turbot served with the fat peeled stalks of an English cottage garden herb called borage. The Basques also love - in the way that some Cantonese value fish cheeks - kokotxa which are fish throats, or lowerjaws - often of hake. Here Aduriz presents a kokotxa of salt cod whichhas all the salty funkiness of the dried fish but in a silken slip that resembles milk skin. It needs more sweetness from an acacia honey that's used as a counterpoint on the dish but it is a fine example one of Aduriz's mantras - so often couched as a question. What can we say with as few elements as possible ?
The guys at Mugaritz also loves a gag. To start the meal a bowl of warm stones is presented. Some are actually potatoes covered in a grey edible clay. A whole battery of alarm bells go off as you bite into one. Your fingers and your teethboth convinced by the feel that this is a little rock. It is the first in a number of provocative gags that Aduriz plays on the diner. The meal ends with a piece of blackened veal that looks like it has spent 3 hours too long on the BBQ but which is actually dyed to look burnt but is pink when cut and fine to eat. Then after a selection of palate-warmers, what looks like a beef carpaccio arrives but the meat is very sweet under a rubble of walnuts and salty parmesan-like hard cheese grains (Idiazabal). It is another joke. It's not beef at all but watermelon dehydrated until it is the colour and texture of sliced fillet. After the mandatory trip to the kitchen to meet the chefs, maitre d' Jose Ramon Calvo riffs, “We are a terrible restaurant we serve our guests stones and burnt meat!”
The funniest joke of all however is not culinary at all. It's the two envelopes every diner finds at their place asking them to choose whether they want to “rebel”or “submit” with their choice of menu and that the kitchen will then give them either 150 minutes of embarrassment and submission or of discovery and contemplation. Making the choice provokes conversationand engagement with the coming meal - only all reviews of the restaurant begin by debating this conundrum - but Andoni is playing with their heads. I ask Josera how the two menus differ, “They don't!” smiles Jose.
It is just another example of that provoke and joke philosophy; the real question is however whether the choice made impacts on how the menu is perceived differently by either group ofdiners.
Veg quota for the week met at Mugaritz we fill the next day eating achingly fresh fish adorned with little more than a rough emulsion of oil and vinegar or lemon at two of Josera and Andoni's favourite local traditional restaurants. Hake throats, fat clams and wood roasted turbot at Kai-pe overlooking the little fishing port down the coast at Getaria, and at La Rampa on the quay in Donostia-San Sebastian. Here it is kiss-sweet calamari and grilled groper while none other that Pedro Subijana sits at the table behind us. Behind us in the old town lines of giant two-storey figurines dance and twirl through the narrow streets of the old town fanning the last embers of that Basque week
NOMANext is Noma; number three in the list and the fastest rising top restaurant over the last three years.Stopping only in Bilbao to get a headful of fireworks, the giant silvercurls of the Guggenheim and a famous local cocktail of coke and red wine called “kalimotxo” at the Aste Nagusia Basque street festival (where everyone wears scarves round their necks and dances in the street; it's my kind of Festival!), we fly to Copenhagen from the beautifully stark and sleek-lined modern Bilbao airport.
Judgingby the global column inches, Denmark is famous for three things these days - design, Princess Mary and their thriving restaurant scene which likes to boast of having as many Michelin stars as Rome or Madrid. As Arne Jacobsen is to Danish design, so Danish-Macedonian chef Rene Redzepi has become to a re-emerging Scandinavian culinary culture.
This has been a huge year for Redzepi. He might have missed out on his third Michelin star but promotion to third spot in Restaurant's World's 50 Best list was a more highly prized honour.
Redzepi is a rare culinary inspiration. Smart Danish restaurant kitchens used to be a culinary colony of France but Redzepi's Noma has lead a revolution elevating traditional Danish ideas and Scandinavian ingredients to never before seen heights - but setting them against the modern ideas sparked by Redzepi's time at El Bulli. Razor clams, black lobster,sweet little shrimp, a whole manner of berries, flowers and wild greens seldom seen outside the North, star. There's even musk ox. This weird hairy goat of a beast has been sourced from the former Viking colony of Greenland.
Redzepi's stark restaurant sits in an old maritime warehouse on the other side of the water from Copenhagen's famous Nyhavn wharf. It's an unadorned space of beams, bare boards and distressed wooden pillars. Some of the wooden chairs are draped with animal pelts but a meal here is as fresh as the spring breeze off the Køge Bugt. Pickling, icing and just using ingredients fresh ensure seating here is a light experience; as does Redzepi's strong focus on acidity whether provided by green strawberries, lemony wood sorrel, tangy white currants or vinegars. The ingredients are always king in dishes that are less complicated than the Spanish places but which taste no less complex.
Here too there are jokes and theatre. Alarge warm rock is brought to the table dotted with a malt-dusted oyster cream and one incredibly - to the point of being buttery - soft langoustine. Baby radishes and carrots come in a flower pot embedded in what looks like earth. This is actually an herb cream covered with athick layer of rye, malt and beer. There is something rather fun about tugging these veg out of the “ground” by their green tops and the way the cream resists you pull the way the earth does.
The opening bars of the meal are the presentation of a battered old biscuit tin.What's inside are a million miles from a traditional Danish konditori -a creamy foie gras biscuit topped with a dehydrated berry powder of no little intensity. Yet another OMG moment of which there are many in this meal. The main theatre however is the way that the chef themselves often brings dishes to the table and explain them.
Outside the warehouse, it's a warm day in Copenhagen, the sky is impossibly blue and the sun is glinting off the water and spot lighting the multi coloured C18th warehouses that line Nyhavn. It's a perfect backdrop to tackle a lunch that starts with that biscuit tin and a selection of more rustic flavours. These include a soft- yoked quail's egg that been smoked with hay that arrives in a still smoking straw nest, a homage to crisp bread with wafers of crispy dry chicken skin and equally crisp rye bread sandwiching a broad bean paste, and artisan Danish bread. This comes with a funky goat butter and a little pot oflard crusted with a crumble of potato and pork crackling. Damn it's good in a “rolling-in-the-trough” sort of a way.
On the more avant-garde or expensive side there are teeny tiles raw squid served with a green strawberry ice, cream and a dill oil, those sweet raw shrimps that come under a seaweed veil with beets and wild beach side rhubarbs; and black lobster served with tangy currants (red and white), rose petals and a peeled and cooked cos lettuce root.
With touches like this root, Redzepi has rather lifted Andoni Aduriz's mantle as king of veg. He too also cherishes local flowers or foraged hedgerow and foreshore ingredients. At Mugaritz the chef's talk in awe of Redzepi's five foragers who keep the restaurant supplied with wildberries, grasses and flowers. Beet slices are paired with the sourness of gooseberry and some little white flowers that have a metallic heat similar to Sichuan pepper. While in two other dishes scurvy flowers feature. These little lilac blooms are so named because the seafaring Danes used them centuries back on long sea voyages to stop their teeth dropping out. They jewel a crisp bread dusted with a vinegar powder, and a cheese foam with is matched to the flavours of apple, whitecurrant, celery, spinach and herbs. Another veg dish is a hymn of praise to the onions. These comes out as a riot of textures and flavours - sharp and pickled, sweet, unctuous and slow cooked, hot and raw and a little trendily - the juice set into pearls or tears. Simple but impeccable, intelligent and quite delicious.
The “scraped beef” which is a sort of steak tartare made using an old traditional Scandinavian shaving technique is a long-running favorite at Noma. You eat it scooped up with your fingers along with springs of mouth-puckering lemony wood sorrel and a smear of a tarragon emulsion and roast juniper dust.
The arrival later in the meal of a leather sheathed hunting knife signals a return to more meat. Pulling it from its tight leather scabbard feels like a suitably Joms viking-like to do before falling on a chunk of musk ox (think somewhere between gamey venison or roo in texture and taste). This arrives garlanded with garlic flowers, sweet mellow roasted garlic puree, milk skin (which is exactly that - the skin skimmed from cooked milk), roasty-charred leek and zucchini plus some little bobbly seed clusters that provide acidity. I ask if these are traditional accompaniments to musk ox and the waiter laughs, “I have been here five years and I am still trying to work that out! Everything here could be traditional or it could be a 'Rene' tradition. He does like to twist tradition!”
There are misses here however like a pedestrian cheese course of a sort of fluffy cheese bavarois with cucumber and lemon verbena leaves and meringue or a nondescript ball of shreddedcrab flesh that sits in a loose head cold of jellied stock and peppery foraged greens they call “sea mustard”.
What is especially nicea bout Noma however is that there is little on the menu that is there to be wacky for wacky's sake. Well, OK the combination of blueberries, a bright green and icy pine-flavoured granita, and ice creams or pine and blueberry pine is a bit like falling first into a snow drift in a German blueberry forest but the pairing of ice powders and ice creamsin the flavours of walnut and blackberry is on far, far safer ground.
While no little effort is put into the wine list - our meal was matched with wines solely sourced from vineyards in the Loire - wine is just not a Danish thing. (It's a story for another place but Redzepi has however just made a white wine using sauvignon, riesling and other locally grown fruit with a couple of friends. It's named after his daughter and isn't at all bad, if a little spritzy). As Mr Carlsberg likes to tell us Denmark is about beer. Hence the recommended aperitif here is glass of Noma's own ale brewed by a local craft operation using birch sap instead of water which they like to think accounts for its silkiness.While dotting the menu are suggestions of refreshing juices rather than wine to pair with dishes. Perhaps a beet juice flavoured with a little almondy woodruff (but not so much as it'll make you trippy), or the brilliant mango-orange of pressed sea-buckthorn berries which have twelve times the vitamin C of oranges and a flavour that is somewhere between passion fruit and guava. It's strangely better than wine with a bowl of differently and lightly pickled strips of beet, turnip,cauliflower and zucchini with drops of bone marrow with hot browned butter. The juice's pep cuts against richness of the marrow and butter.The taste of green, in the form of pure celery or cucumber juices, sitson neighbouring tables. This is the course, along with the cherry gazpacho, that I most often find myself daydreaming about.
This Noma lunch is a more of a complete meal than the stunner that I had here back in June. This might be because this time I'm sharing it with the woman I love, it might be that Redzepi is constantly tuning its pitch, or it might be one other major change - the number of Australians now in the kitchen at Noma since Redzepi's visit in March 2009.
Since Redzepi's inspiring visit to Australia Noma has been bombarded with requests to come there to work. While Redzepi had an Aussie sous chef until last year, subsequently Ayhan Erkoc from The Manse in Adelaide, Tasmanian chef Luke Burgess and Aaron Turner (from Loam in Victoria) have all passed through the doors. When I was there Josh Lewis who runs Vue de monde's restaurant in Oman was taking a turn in the kitchen alongside chefs from Quay and Tetsuya. It all makes the experience oddly familiar - especially when Lewis and another Danish-born Vue de monde alumnus bring dishes to the table.
While we don't feel heavy after this epic procession of courses, for dinner we can stomach no more than that other Danish tradition; a hot dog from one of the city's sausage vans. It's processed and fatty and almost the antithesis of the meal at Noma. Yes, obviously I enjoyed it too!
THE FAT DUCKThis mere 18cm long dinner was a wise idea given the final furlongs of the trip approaching. The next day we faced dinner at The Waterside Inn which is Britain's longest running three-star restaurant (and not even in Restaurant's Top 100 anymore, let alone their Top 50), followed by lunch at The Fat Duck which conveniently is in the same quaint little village on the upper reaches of the Thames.
Bray - for that is the name of the village - is only a 15 minute drive up the motorwayfrom Heathrow airport. We again arrive with time to spare so we walk down the river and study one of Isambard Kingdom Brunel's most beautiful feats of engineering. His railway bridge over the Thames at Maidenhead has impossibly wide, flat and elegant arches. Dinner at the Waterside Inn is similarly classic; grouse, soufflés and impeccable silver service (complete with birds carved at the table and choreographed silver cloche reveals). It's also quiet raucous as groups concentrate of catching up, and couples on holding hands, without the gobsmacking, and gob-shutting, awe of reaching a site of culinary pilgrimage oft found at the other culinary shrines.
We sleep in.Then have breakfast in bed trying to stint on the Viennoiserie in fairness to our final meal on the trail for the world's best restaurant. Currently I'm with the list ranking while the woman I love has Can Roca first, Noma second, Mugaritz a close third and El Bulli in fifth because she's suspects that The Fat Duck has to be less weird and more delicious that Adria's place.
The Fat Duck has perennially been Robin to El Bulli's Batman. While it headed the list in 2005 - the last restaurant to do so before El Bulli's current domination - for the last four years chef Heston Blumenthal has had to be content with second place to his Catalan friend.
If Ferran Adria is the technician and visionary of this culinary modernism then Blumenthal is the showman. While Aduriz and Redzepi might make wry jokes it's as if Blumenthal is after belly laughs. It is something that he achieved on my first visit when we discovered that what was sprinkled from a fine silver bowl over the root vegetable crumble served with guinea fowl was actually popping candy! A second visit was marred by aloof French service and equally uptight English diners which made the experience more stuffy and reverential rather than joyous. From our previous conversations however I know this has vexed the chef who ideally wants his customers to arrive with a sense of childlike excitement and anticipation. In part this is because he has research that shows that - like field-shot game - less stressed customers taste better.
On this visit everything seems a little changed. The cooking was better and changes in plating of classics like the salmon under a veil of licorice gel has made them less about visual impact and more about making them eat well. The pointillist storm of grapefruit carpels that previously spread across the plate might have looked pretty but were just a pain to eat.
One thing that hasn't changed is a long-running favourite. A layered bowl of crayfish cream, jelly of quail, chicken liver parfait and pea remains a classic journey of different levels of smoothness. This sends your spoon and palate through an ever evolving journey through these strata as the different textures and well-defined by complimentary flavours of saltiness and sweetness ebb and flow against each other with every mouthful. The Sound of the Sea also remains unchanged but still just as delicious. This is Blumenthal's famous evocation of the seaside that comes complete with individual conch housed i-Pod playing a soundtrack of seagull cries and lapping waves; the choice of a rich old riesling as the match managed to unfurl other complexities in both the dish and in the wine.
I'd love to say that the i-Pod dish seems like a sideshow; trying to hard to recreate a beach scape on a plate with oyster foam, tapioca sand and slices of seafood and seaweed and I would have if I hadn't taken my final mouthful. An oily fish - possibly mackerel - leaps up and tastes so shockingly vivid I can only put this down to the mental impact of the soundtrack. It's a slightly unnerving moment but nothing as unnerving as watching as the next door tablefalls silent for 10 minutes while they are hooked up to their i-Pods. These two couples have spent the previous hour playing a game of one-upmanship over who has the most stables on their property. With close packed tables, as there are here, you'd better hope for less dull, self-absorbed people as your neighbours when you go.
The proximity of others also means that you are likely to be watched as you eat, such is the beguiling performances of so many of the dishes. This still seems a little strange and intrusive to me - inspite of the fact that I now do it for a living on TV. This tendency for people to sticky-beak is thanks to how visually arresting so many of The Fat Duck's dishes are. Their famous palate cleanser of green tea and lime meringue “poached”, or more accurately frozen, by bobbing it in steaming liquid nitrogen at the table started this trends a good few years back but recently Blumenthal and his team have amped up the theatricality of his dishes. This reaches it's greatest heights with the new menu. Now that crayfish mousse dish comes with a bed of oak moss to which tendrils of mist-like dry ice cling. Then there's the egg cracked into a copper pot at the table and “scrambled” into an icecream thanks to more liquid nitrogen. The trick is the egg shell has been emptied then and re-filled with an egg and bacon flavoured custard. Even more bamboozling is an accompanying cup of tea that is both hot AND cold.
Or how about a dessert that arrives in a little cast iron pot set in a bowl that's upholstered in red leather like the wingback in some baronial library? Here liquid is poured into the bowl prompting billows of dry ice laden with the aromas of that library - woodsmoke from the fire, leather, etc. As this happens the cast iron pot's lid is lifted to reveal a barley ice cream sitting on top of a compote of fig, apple and dried fruit. This is all then flambéed with whisky. It takes a second to realize what is happening; that those are hot flames licking round the ice cream and yet it isn't melting. Taste a spoonful when inferno dies down and magically the icecream has remained cold but the pot and compote are hot. Now that really scrambles the old noggin and has me questioning whether The Fat Duck is a restaurant or a conjuror's parlour.
Personally Ilove Blumenthal's desire to engender a childlike enjoyment in people eating at The Fat Duck, it makes for an amazingly unusual and memorable experience.
There are also other more traditionally delicious dishes which keeps the wife happy too. Like buttery cubes of roast foiegras set against the relieving bite of a puree of gooseberry, the savoury saltiness of kombu, sesame seeds and a crisp wafer of crab or pigeon matched with “umbles” (as offal used to be called by the Brits) and a perfectly chosen 2002 Le Dome Saint Emilion.
This is one of several new dishes on the menu inspired by Blumenthal's increasing obsession with Britain's culinary past. There's also a sort of slushie made from chocolate and wine and a very pretty Taffety Tart that pairs the flavours of rose and fennel with caramelised apple and crispy pastry. Both take their inspiration from C17th century recipes howevereven such classics aren't safe from Blumenthal's trademark showmanship.
A dish called mock turtle soup might leap up from an 1850 recipe but the actual realization is pure Fat Duck 2009, albeit one that plays on the Alice in Wonderland connection with the mock turtle. A gold-plated bouillon cube in the shape of a pocket watch arrives in a tea cup. Hot water is poured over it from a tea pot as a second reference to the Mad Hatter's tea party. The resulting mushroom, Madeira and beef consommé is wonderfully intense, exact in flavour, and flecked beautifully with gold. This is then poured over a little assembly of compressed slices of ox tongue and lardo, small cubes of pickled cucumber, truffle and turnip, plus a faux poached egg (actually constructed artfully from turnip and swede). A matched glass of Madeirais another example of a vey successful wine marriage.
The meal ends with wine gums set in a historical and geographical context and,just like at the best children's parties where there is a conjuror, every guest leaves with lolly bag full of Fat Duck style sweets. This all combines to ensure memories of this meal linger longer, even if the memory of the flavours aren't quite as vivid. A week after we get back my wife declares she is promoting The Fat Duck to her equal favourite of the five with thanks to that memorable theatre of giving an edge to Blumenthal's largely delicious dishes.
THE VERDICTWhile none of these meals is a cheap experience and El Bulli has become downright expensive inspite of the fact that the wine list in not too terrifying. The fact that I can still clearly remember, name and taste many of 39 teeny courses I had there goes a long way to justifying the $600 a head price tag.
It cost us about $2500 to eat exceptionally well across these five great places - plus another $5000 for travel and accommodation. Over the years I have frittered away much more money on unmemorable meals but that's the thing about eating in great places. They may seem expensive but when they deliver like these five they are more than worth it. After all this is a foodie's trip of a lifetime to rival touring the West Indies with the Australian cricket team or following the Socceroos to the World Cup.
And what of those memories; what are the themes rifting through these five amazing kitchen. Perhaps most important is the love of the “flavour of green”.This expresses itself at El Bulli in a dried chervil powder whisked with water (in the style of Japanese macha green tea powder) to make a strangely unsalty green broth. Or, later in the meal, it reappears as spoonfuls of almost tea-tannic bright green dried mint and grains of brown sugar sent skittering across the thin ice of a bonsai-sized frozen “pond” of water in the simplest of palate cleansers. At Can Rocait's a complex dessert like Jordi Roca's “green chromatism”. At Mugaritz and Noma it manifests as a love of wild greens and the continued interest in fresh herbs and edible flowers.
There also seems to be a decreasing focus on traditional red meat dishes in favour of seafood and vegetables. This may be, in part, because four of the restaurants are so close to the sea and is thus a reflection of the interest in dishes that build notions of “terroir” (or reflect the restaurants' sense of place); albeit in ways that aren't quite as literal as Joan Roca distilling the flavour of the local soil. Some, like Adria and Aduriz, are also starting to explore the notion of iodine as a desirable flavour profile.
But what of this list itself? Is this Top Five the right top five best restaurants in the world? Should Thomas Keller's Per Se or French Laundry still be in there? Yes, for sure. Should Pierre Gagnaire's idiosyncratic and eponymous Parisian gastrodome also have retained a spot in the top five? Almost undoubtedly. And what of those Japanese restaurants that the likes of Ferran Adria cite as their great inspiration? Surely there should be a kaiseki restaurant in there. And you'd also suggest that given that only The Fat Duck and El Bulli have the top ranking of three Michelin stars (Can Roca, Noma and Mugaritz only have two), there are another 88 or so three star restaurants who might suggest they deservea spot as well. The trouble is you can't fit twenty places into a Top Five list!
The reason why El Bulli, The Fat Duck, Noma, Mugaritz and Can Roca make it into this Top Five is simple. A list like this can only ever be a reflection of those that help compile it, and of the restaurants at the time that it was compiled. These things change. Each one of these top five places are classed as “innovative” by the Michelin Guide and casting an eye down the rest of the list in seems like innovation is the key factor in making in to the upper reaches of Restaurant's list. Personally I'd blame all those food writers and chefs, so often obsessed with the shiny and new, who vote!
For me after this trip and some 120 courses across the five restaurants -as well as some significant back-up dining just to set then in context- the realization is that at the top end of the restaurant town there are a lot more delicious places than there are gobsmackingly innovative ones but it is this that those unique places that the Top Five most reflects. As a critic who has eaten at many of these other contenders my feeling is that the order is about right, give or take a Thomas Keller restaurant.
Restaurants are like cravats - your favourite depends on your own mood and your needs at that time rather than which has the prettiest pattern. For me, however thanks to its reckless pursuit of the new El Bulli has to be the leader of the pack. A meal here should be the aspiration of any serious food even if, or perhaps because, you will careen from dishes that plunge you into paroxysms of pleasure to those that might confound or even disgust you- undercooked kidney anyone? It will however never be boring and will always leave you asking why, how and whether this is the future of food. My wife's question is whether you want to engage in an intellectual dialogue with your dinner, or just eat it.
Ask me where I'd like to eat every week for a year however and I'd tell you Noma or Mugaritz. Theirs is the sort of clean, pretty, produce-driven soul food that's easy to digest, served in a relaxed interior free of any pomposity. Ask me where I'd like to have my birthday each year and I'd tell you The Fat Duck given the theatrical wows, intricate experimentation and surprising yumminess - even if, when every dish is put down, you expect the waiters to fling their arms wide and sing out,“ta-daaah!”
Ask me the Woman I Love where she would like to go for dinner and you'd get a very different answer and a very different order to me - but then she's no foodie. For her El Bulli was interesting but never ever as delicious as El Celler de Can Roca which rather throws that list on its head. She'd have Can Roca and The Fat Duck at the top of the list, then Noma, Mugaritz and finally El Bulli but her parameters for enjoying a meal are different to mind and far more purely pleasure driven.
And here's the heart of why eating at five of the world's top restaurants in close succession was so fascinating. It not the fact that they are so different; it how connect with different people in very different ways. Yet it is also these differences that expose the major flaw in any attempt to stratify restaurants. It's always going to be a case of comparing apples to oranges, or in this case comparing flaming sorbets to exploding olives.
EPILOGUEExactly a week later I am sitting in a Pancake Parlour in a suburban shopping centre with half a dozen small children sipping Blue Heavens. Maybe it's not so bad as the four nine year old boys at the table start dissecting their dishes criticising rubbery cheese, a crumbed fish that lacked “crunch in the crumb”, the quintessential wrongness of putting what tastes like a meat spaghetti sauce over a crepe. They also weren't at all impressed with soggy “cottage fries” which don't even look anything like cottages. The pancakes on the other hand get fulsome praise. They are right on every count and I leave thinking that maybe the future audience for restaurants where you intellectually engage with your food rather than just stuff in your face is assured. Assuming we can ban the raw kidney for ever. 
