Our dinner at El Bulli last week was bookended by a few days in Barcelona. This was our first time in the city, and we had a splendid time strolling around, admiring the architecture, dodging pickpockets, and wondering where to eat next.

Our diet over those few days was mostly composed of tapas and pintxos, eaten at casual restaurants. If you are unfamiliar with pintxos (pin-tchos), they are the little morsels of food, plopped on a slice of bread and secured with a toothpick, that you find lined up on the counter at tapas bars. It is originally a Basque concept, but it has spread across other parts of Spain in recent years: you ask for a plate (usually one per party), help yourself to some pintxos, wash them down with a drink, and pay at the end, based on the number of toothpicks you have left on your plate. It is a system based on trust — I wonder how many people walk away with half a dozen toothpicks in the back pocket of their jeans — but it seems to work. As for tapas, they are usually ordered from a menu (or, if there is no menu, with much gesturing and mangling of Catalan and Castillan words), and they are served on small plates that you share with your dining companions. Raçiones are similar to tapas, only they come in larger portions.

One thing you should know if you ever want to visit Barcelona is that you should avoid August if you can: the city is teeming with tourists then (80% of them French), most Barcelonians have understandably fled, and some of the dining destinations that locals favor are closed. Of course, in our case, this time of year wasn’t a personal choice, since the El Bulli reservation was the pivot of our trip; I certainly don’t mean to spit in the proverbial soup, I just thought I would pass on this little piece of advice.

One other thing I strongly recommend is to check the detail of your bill, always: in all restaurants but one, we were charged for more than what we had ordered and eaten. Perhaps this only happens to foreigners, and perhaps this is their way of making up for the disappearing toothpicks, but it was a bit annoying. They never made any difficulty in correcting the mistakes however, so there was no harm done, and we simply got used to the custom.

Without further ado, let me recommend the places we enjoyed the most:

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I remember reading about El Bulli four or five years ago in the French newspaper Le Monde. I remember the yearning, and I remember the pang that followed closely: considering the small number of guests that the restaurant could accommodate each season, the dream seemed out of reach. But a few years later, I learned from a well-informed friend that getting a reservation was a bit like playing the lottery: the odds were low, but it didn’t cost much to try (see below).

And so I played, I won, and this is how Maxence and I found ourselves flying to Barcelona last weekend with three of our friends. My state of mind was a mix of excitement and circumspection: few restaurants have gotten as much press as this one, and I knew that the actual experience could fall short of my expectations. Fortunately, there was no need to brace myself for disappointment. The evening that we spent at El Bulli was every bit as extraordinary, surreal, and more important, joyful, as I’d hoped it to be.

We arrived at the restaurant in early evening, after a short curvy ride up and down the mountain road that leads to Cala Montjoi, and offers a striking view out to sea. A tiny parking lot, a small (and a bit scruffy) beach, a handsome tiled-roof house — we walked up the stairs and were greeted by the staff, who gave us a short tour of the kitchen and led us to our table by the window, nicely isolated from the rest of the room: the arrival of each dish offers a bit of a dramatic thrill, so we were happy not to get any spoilers from the other tables.

The tasting menu, which changes slightly every day, unfolds in three acts and thirty-five dishes: small snacks that you eat with your fingers, larger-sized tapas to be eaten with a fork and spoon (no knife, ever), and desserts. It is a fast-paced dining rollercoaster, with explosive flavors and textural surprises that await you at every turn — it is thus a good idea to take a break on the terrace every now and then. Each dish, or group of dishes, is brought to the table by a small squadron of waiters dressed in black, and while you are busy taking pictures of the new UFO that has just landed, the head waiter explains what it is (in our case, in excellent French), and how to eat it: start with this end or that, gobble it up in just one bite, or hurry before it melts.

There were recurring themes within the meal — seaweed, seeds, Parmesan, Thai flavors, clementine, peach, the cotton candy texture, and Adrià’s famous esferificación technique, in which liquids are trapped in a thin alginate casing that bursts open on your tongue. Not everything was successful, and not everything sent shivers of pure pleasure down your spine: some of the flavors were quite strong, and it took stamina to take them all in with fresh taste buds. But every single item managed to amaze and entertain, making the whole experience quite dazzling, both on an intellectual and sensory level.

And now, for your entertainment, let me offer a photographic account of the menu we were served (those with asterisks are the ones I enjoyed the most):

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Fiadone can be described as the Corsican cheesecake. Crustless and no more than an inch in thickness, it is prepared with one of the most famous specialties from l’Ile de Beauté, a fresh cheese called brocciu (I am told that this is pronounced “brooch”, not “bro-choo”), made with sheep’s milk and/or goat’s milk. Like all fresh cheeses, good artisanal specimens are instantly recognizable by their faint aromas of barn and hay, and brocciu in particular has a slightly curdled texture that makes it most pleasing.

Some cheese shops in Paris sell brocciu (sometimes labeled as brousse), but as these things go, I am sure the cream of the crop stays on the island. I shall have to go there and see for myself: Corsica is very high on my list of dream destinations, but the list gets longer by the year (I don’t understand: shouldn’t it get shorter, as I tick places off of it?).

Most of the fiadone recipes I’ve seen call for citrus zest and eau-de-vie (a spirit distilled from fruit juices) as a flavoring, but I have recently acquired a teeny bottle of violet essence from Christine Ferber’s shop — I was disillusioned to find out that this was the secret to her spectacular raspberry and violet jam, but laying my hands on the stuff made up for it — and I used it in the fiadone I made yesterday: we were celebrating my neighbor Patricia’s birthday, who loves cheesecakes and violets. This essence is astoundingly concentrated, and three drops were plenty to give the cake the flowery, acidulated tingle I wanted it to have, without drawing too much attention from the rounded cheese flavor.

I have seen some online debate about whether the egg whites should be beaten or simply added with the yolks to the batter, but I like the lightly moussy texture that beaten egg whites add to the cake, so this is the option I chose. Besides, my stand mixer gets upset if I don’t take it for a ride from time to time.

And if you don’t have access to Corsican brocciu, fret not: I have discussed the matter with my friend Estérelle, and we’ve reached the conclusion that you can substitute good ricotta, good cottage cheese, or a mix of the two. Just don’t call it a fiadone in front of a Corsican or it might get ugly.

Unrelated note: Not to brag or anything, but I thought I should let you know that I am leaving this weekend for Barcelona, to spend a few days in the city and have dinner at El Bulli. I hope I survive the gastronomic shock, the nitrogen lamb’s brain sorbet, and the taxi drive back down the mountain — wish me luck.

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Last time I mentioned my book was two months ago, when I wrote to say I had completed and delivered the manuscript. But what happens once the bird leaves the nest? The process is no doubt different from one publisher to the next and from one book to the next, but what I can offer is a glimpse into what the past few weeks have held for me.

First of all, a bit of waiting for the editor to share an overall impression. In my case, the wait was short, and the overall impression — deep sigh of relief — positive. A couple of weeks later, I received a printed version of the manuscript with my editor’s notes and corrections. I wasn’t too worried about grammar or spelling mistakes, having submitted it to three different and equally trusted readers, but there were a few things here and there. There were suggestions of cuts, too, since the manuscript was running quite long. Total word count isn’t very relevant for a cookbook — the lists of ingredients throw it off — and I knew what the target page count was, but this differs from the word processor page count, when you factor in the final layout of the book and the photography, boxed paragraphs, chapter headers, etc.

Cuts are painful, and I don’t mean just the paper cuts that you get on your fingers from handling the printed manuscript, although these are worth mentioning too. I was just reading Stephen King’s excellent memoir/essay On Writing, and he introduced me to the famous “Kill your darlings” advice. Whoever wrote it first (the quote is variously attributed to Faulkner, Hemingway, and Quiller-Couch) certainly hit the nail on the head, and it does make it a little easier to handle the word processor chainsaw if you can imagine yourself as a character in a horror flick. Or, for those really hard-to-kill darlings, if you think of it not so much as murdering them, but as wrapping them up in tissue paper and storing them in a wooden chest for future use.

But pruning and streamlining are very good things for any piece of writing, and although I don’t think I would have much enjoyed his company at a dinner party, William Strunk Jr. also comes to the rescue with his “Omit needless words” advice — as you can see, I’ve been reading my share of books on the writer’s craft.

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