Dinner at Restaurant Montiel, Barcelona

My Facebook memories this morning were all these photos I took from one of the best meals I have ever eaten, two years ago. On the brink of the global pandemic, Bridget and I were in Barcelona on a vacation we had been planning for over a year.

Montiel is located in El Born, a formerly working-class district that has become very trendy in recent years. We actually had a fairly difficult time finding the restaurant – the Uber driver couldn’t drive onto the street where it is located, and we wandered around for a bit. Once we did find it, we discovered that we were the only booking they had for the entire evening. So we got the complete and undivided attention of the kitchen and the waitstaff for the whole time.

As you may have gathered from what I post here, we are no strangers to fine dining and elevated cuisine, but we were simply blown away by the quality, the presentation, and the amount of food. Food-wise, I would say this meal outshone even our 3-Michelin-star experience in Paris twenty years ago.

My notes on my Facebook posts tell me that the dishes included: French oysters, Mediterranean tuna with tiget milk sorbet and avocado, sauteed mushrooms with egg, potato and truffle in vegetable consomme, red snapper and squid with local fresh peas in a fish broth, ravioli in port reduction sauce with foie gras, slow roasted suckling pig with cauliflower puree and apple-onion chutney, vanilla sorbet with wine-poached pearsand almond cream sauce, and a chocolate sorbet with chocolate ckae, ganache, yuzu cream, passion fruit coulis and fresh raspberries. Honest to god, by the time the desserts came, I was begging “no mas”.

It still amazes both of us that considering the rapidly deteriorating Covid situation and the fact that we were the only guests for the entire evening, that the restaurant didn’t cancel the booking in the first place. Instead, the kitchen prepared this entire meal *just for us*. I cannot say “moltes gràcies” enough to everyone at Montiel for an utterly memorable night.