My Usual Table: A Life in Restaurants

by Colman Andrews

  ONE OF THE RESTAURATEURS I had gotten to know in Los Angeles, through various culinary events, was Jean Leon, whose La Scala in Beverly Hills had fed movie stars and politicians for decades. Jean’s name sounded French, but he was Spanish, and it wasn’t his real name anyway. He’d been born Ceferino Carrión in Santander, in Cantabria, and renamed himself when he’d emigrated to America. La Scala wasn’t a Spanish place. When Jean set up shop, in 1956, “Spanish” meant Mexican to Southern California restaurant goers, so he made the quite sensible decision to serve Italian food.

  Jean loved good wine, and after he’d become successful, he started thinking about running his own vineyard. Good California wine land was already getting expensive, but Spain was still a bargain. In 1961, having lived in Barcelona briefly before coming to the United States, he decided to buy a 350-acre plot of good grape-growing real estate in the Penedès, about twenty miles west of the city. The Penedès is Spain’s capital of sparkling wine, or cava, and the principal grapes there at the time were the local white varieties on which cava was traditionally based, xarel.lo, parellada, and macabeu. Jean broke the rules, planting cabernet and merlot from Bordeaux (including grafts from Château Lafite Rothschild and Château La Lagune) and chardonnay from Burgundy. He also built his own small winery and, to the surprise of many locals, began producing excellent wine. (The Jean Leon label still exists, but is now owned by the massive Torres company.)

  When I signed my contract to write a book about Catalan cuisine, Jean was one of the first people I told, and he became my real entrée into the world of Catalan food and drink. He asked his winery manager to introduce me to other local winemakers and restaurateurs when I came to Barcelona. He offered me the use of the little house he’d built for himself in his vineyards, equipped with a refrigerator full of wine and a beautiful jamón ibérico resting in a holder on the kitchen counter. Most important of all, Jean put me in touch with his Spanish attorney, a vigorous, intelligent, food-loving Catalan from the Pyrénées named Agustí Jausas. Agustí and his wife, Lluïsa, became my guides, protectors, teachers, and certainly my dining companions (and usually my hosts) for the next three years, and we have been close friends ever since. (Jean ended sadly: He was forced to close La Scala when the lease ran out, and neither the new one he opened a few blocks away nor the various outposts he launched later had the cachet of the original. He retired and, terminally ill, sailed the world alone on his yacht until his death in 1996.)

  Leslie came with me at the start of my first real research trip to Catalonia, and we spent a very pleasant week or so on the Costa Brava and in Barcelona. Then she went home and I got to work. I quickly found myself immersed in a whole new culture, a whole new world. Flavors I’d never imagined became my daily bread, and a language I’d never before heard—vaguely medieval-sounding, I thought, and very different from Castilian Spanish—started singing in my head. The food seemed medieval, too, with its use of “sweet” spices like cinnamon and nutmeg in savory dishes, its combinations of fruit and meat (duck with pears, apples stuffed with ground meat), its big one-pot dishes mixing seafood and poultry and/or meat. It occurred to me that, in a way, this food was probably not dissimilar to what a lot of Europeans ate five or six hundred years earlier.

  Agustí and Lluïsa introduced me to one excellent Barcelona restaurant after another: Petit París, named not for the city but for the street it was on, where a former architect and his wife served modern Catalan food with an emphasis on salt cod, a beloved ingredient in Catalonia (a version with Roquefort sauce and another one, fried, with honey, were particularly good); Els Perols de l’Empordà (the Cooking Pots of the Empordà), which served the exquisite escupinya clams of Minorca and big cauldrons of seafood rice that were as good as anything on the Costa Brava itself; the stylish Florián, where I first ate not only toro de lidia, meat from a bull killed in a local bullfight (the menu helpfully identified the beast by name and breeder and noted the place, date, and hour of his execution and the name of the matador who had dispatched him) but also bull testicles, sliced thinly, breaded, and fried in olive oil with minced garlic and parsley, and pretty delicious; Ca l’Isidre, a clubby, old-style place where the wild mushroom and wild game dishes were some of the best in town (whole cèpes, brushed with foie gras fat and roasted in parchment paper, then sliced and sprinkled with sea salt, remain one of the most memorable dishes I’ve ever had in Barcelona); and many more.

  And they introduced me to Eldorado Petit, which was on another level altogether. The establishment occupied a large house—a villa, really—on a residential street in the Sarrià district in the northwestern corner of the city. The moment I came through the door, I knew that it was my kind of restaurant. It was something about the lighting, the sound level, the pleasant aromas, the confidence of the decor, the warmth of the welcome. Walking into Eldorado Petit for the first time, I felt the way I used to feel walking into Chasen’s or Trader Vic’s or Scandia—that I was in the right place, that everything was going to be fine.

  The dining room was under the command of an impressively mustachioed, genial sprite of a man named Lluís Cruanyas. Since 1942 his father had run a popular tavern called Eldorado in Sant Feliu de Guíxols, a small port and tourist town, once the center of the local cork industry, about fifty miles northeast of Barcelona. It was a place where local fishermen came to play cards, drink, and eat simple fare, like espardenyes, or sea slugs, an ugly and unpopular bycatch that almost no one but they would eat. Lluís worked at Eldorado, gradually introducing some new dishes, and in 1970, at the age of twenty-three, with his father’s blessing, he opened his own restaurant next door. Because it was smaller than the original, he dubbed it Eldorado Petit (“petit” is Catalan as well as French).

  Lluís served an ample menu of mostly traditional dishes, focusing on rice and fideus noodle dishes and on the region’s excellent fish and shellfish—the anchovies caught off Sant Feliu, legendary in Catalonia; the plump red shrimp landed in Palamós, just up the coast; tiny octopuses (popets) and squid (calamarcets) no longer than a joint on your finger; small, sweet Mediterranean sole; fearsome-looking but delicious escúrpora, or scorpion fish, which the French call rascasse and consider essential to bouillabaisse; and dozens of other sea creatures. The restaurant thrived, drawing travelers off the autoroute between France and Barcelona, food lovers who made the pilgrimage up from the Catalan capital for lunch, and, of course, many of the tourists who throng the Costa Brava every year.

  In 1978, buoyed by his success in Sant Feliu and with the financial support of a group of his regular customers, Lluís and his wife, Lolita, opened a second Eldorado Petit, in Barcelona, taking over an existing place called La Martinica. The new restaurant wasn’t the least bit starchy, but it was elegant in an understated way. The walls were a warm pink, the tables were large and set with thick white linens, the light was soft and inviting, some of it radiating from graceful floor lamps on easel-like legs by the top Barcelona designer Jaime Tresserra.

  The food was imaginative, mostly Catalan in inspiration, and dazzling. There were fat Costa Brava shrimp, less than half a day out of the Mediterranean, served in what the menu called the style of Dénia, a coastal town in the Alicante region: very lightly poached in seawater, then immediately chilled between two layers of ice so that they were tepid and still partly translucent, and so full of flavor that they seemed like essence of shrimp. There was a deft elaboration on the traditional Catalan salt cod salad called “esqueixada,” here a dish of paper-thin raw salt cod and white beans garnished amply with fresh angulas, the famous and pricey miniature eels from the Basque Country. There were bright red piquillo peppers, cut to look like flowerpots, with chives growing out of them, filled with scorpion fish mousse; walnut-size whole artichokes sautéed with garlic and baby shrimp; silky vichyssoise-like soup made from fava beans; four-inch-long red mullets dressed with vinegar and shallots; cabbage leaves stuffed with monkfish; black rice, full of cuttlefish; whole turbot roasted on a bed of thin-sliced po
tatoes, which soaked in the fish juices and caramelized on the bottom—just magic. There were also espardenyes, no longer viewed as the cheap throwaway fare of Costa Brava fishermen but as a delicacy among Catalan diners, more expensive per pound in the market than even lobster imported from northern France. Jean Luc Figueras, the restaurant’s excellent chef, usually just browned them quickly in olive oil, with garlic and parsley; they were the texture of firm squid, a little squeaky when you chewed them, and tasted of earth and sea at once.

  My favorite dish was fideus rossejats, “blonded” noodles. These are short, thin lengths of vermicelli-like pasta, sautéed raw in olive oil to a golden brown color, then cooked in concentrated fish stock and served with allioli negat, “drowned” allioli, which means that the emulsion is intentionally broken, yielding thickened, intensely garlicky olive oil to be stirred into the noodles. That’s it. No bits of fish or seafood, no other garnish. Just medium-firm pasta soaked in flavor. I couldn’t imagine any chef in France or the United States having the restraint and the confidence to serve a dish that simple, and indeed, whenever I’ve had a version of fideus rossejats in America, there is always seafood added.

  At Eldorado Petit, more than at any other restaurant in the region, even more than at the Motel Ampurdán, I came to realize how extraordinary the raw materials were in this part of Spain and just how appealing—how varied, how (pardon the expression) “world-class”—Catalan cooking could be. Lluís generously shared many recipes with me, at least some of which ended up in my book, and answered all my questions about sources, cooking methods, and historical background. It was a special treat to go through the Boquería, Barcelona’s fabled main covered market, with him, and watch his eyes light up when he came upon a rare giant Mediterranean turbot at a fish stall (he immediately bought it for the restaurant) or discovered that the first local morels of the season had come in at the famous “products of the forest” stand of Llorenç Petrás.

  On one occasion, Dorothy Kalins and two other editors from Met Home came through Barcelona while I was there, and of course I took them to Eldorado Petit. As we sat soaked in warm light, pampered by the service, drinking bottle after bottle of good Catalan wine and eating one extraordinary dish after another, Dorothy sighed and said, “This is the best restaurant in the world.” I reminded her that the late Roy Andries de Groot had once written an article for Playboy about Troisgros, which he titled “Is This the Best Restaurant in the World?” Well, said Dorothy, maybe Troisgros was then, but Eldorado Petit is now—so I wrote a piece about the restaurant for Met Home with precisely that title, in which I answered my own question affirmatively.

  In 1990, hoping to take advantage of the new interest in Barcelona that had been sparked by the announcement that the 1992 Olympic Games would be held there, Lluís opened an outpost of Eldorado Petit in New York City. In the months leading up to its debut, I started getting worried. “I understand that Americans don’t eat a lot of seafood,” he said to me one night in Barcelona, “and that they don’t like garlic very much.” What??? Another time, he confessed that he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to put his magical turbot roasted on a bed of potatoes on the menu, because we didn’t have the right kind of potatoes in America.

  I couldn’t get to his grand opening, but the morning after the event, a faxed copy of the menu arrived in my office in Santa Monica. I took one look at it, and my heart sank. It was a dumbed-down, Americanized rewrite of the Catalan original; one of the dishes listed was salmon—an insipid fish compared with what Lluís served in Spain, but one that he had been assured Americans were particularly fond of (true, alas, but still . . . )—on a bed of that old Catalan staple, arborio rice; another was filet mignon with blueberry sauce. Bryan Miller, writing in The New York Times, later described the food as “undistinguished Continental fare” and opined that “Eldorado Petit seemed to be taking the condescending and potentially disastrous attitude that ethnic food must be tempered for American tastes.”

  The restaurant improved in the coming months, but never really found its focus. Lluís returned to Catalonia, and in 1993, the restaurant closed. One afternoon in 2001, I was driving in Sarrià on my way to lunch at another restaurant, and I thought I’d swing by Eldorado Petit just to see how it was doing. I happened to pass the place in time to see two pairs of workmen carrying tables out the front door. Was Lluís remodeling? I later asked Agustí. No, he said, hadn’t I heard? It was closing. Business had flagged, and when Lluís and Lolita were offered a good price for the restaurant, they sold it and retreated to Sant Feliu. It is now a private home.

  AS I SANK DEEPER and deeper into my subject, I started haunting some of Barcelona’s many bookshops, collecting cookbooks, works of history, essays by Josep Pla and others. I spent hours at a time in Agustí’s large private library, too, poring through books in half a dozen languages. I did plenty of field research as well. The more I read and learned, the more I realized that I needed to expand the scope of my book to cover not just Catalonia itself but what the Catalans like to call “els Països Catalans,” the Catalan lands—a vast, linguistically related area that includes the region of Valencia, the Balearic Islands, the Roussillon in France, the Pyrenean principality of Andorra, and even one town on the Italian island of Sardinia, Alghero, or L’Alguer, where some Catalan traditions are maintained and a bit of the language is still used. I visited all these regions more than once, bearing introductions to exactly the right people. In Majorca, it was the well-known local journalist Pablo Llull who told me, “My dear Colman, you can’t possibly write that Majorcan cuisine is Catalan” (but I did anyway, and explained why). The distinguished Valencian poet and culinary historian Llorenç Millo taught me so much about real paella that I can barely eat most examples of the dish today, even in Spain. The Andorran wine merchant Jordi Marquet told me much about his tiny principality’s cooking, though to my disappointment he was unable to arrange for me to eat the old local specialty of rice with squirrel. Unfortunately, he told me, it had become illegal to hunt squirrels and the dish was only made if someone “accidentally” brought one down while supposedly aiming at a bird.

  But Catalonia itself remained my focus. Time after time, I’d head out of Barcelona, driving all over the region in my rental car, usually an indestructible Ford Escort, heading up into the Pyrénées to visit sausage makers and country inns, calling on winemakers in the Priorat (there were only two to speak of at the time, and their wines were unknown internationally), eating at seafood restaurants in and around the old Roman capital of Tarragona, south of Barcelona. In Valls, near Tarragona, I went to a calçotada, a feast built around oversize green onions, grilled and then eaten dipped in a sauce of ground nuts and chiles. I ate a hundred tiny snails, grilled live on black metal trays, at one sitting in Tornabous, in the region of Lleida—and then polished off my share of the grilled sausages and baby lamb chops that followed. At an isolated Lleida farmhouse, I watched a pig being slaughtered—the man who killed it, I was delighted to learn, was called a matador—then helped cut up the still-warm meat for sausages. And I returned again and again to the Motel Ampurdán, learning more, devouring more, on every visit.

  The Motel Ampurdán didn’t miss a beat after the untimely demise of Josep Mercader. His son-in-law, Jaume Subirós, was there to carry on his work. In fact, he’d been there from the beginning. One day in 1961, just before Mercader opened the place, he stopped at a farmhouse in the village of Vilamalla, a few miles south of Figueres, to ask permission to paint a sign for the motel on a wall that faced the road—a common practice in prebillboard Spain. The man of the house said yes, on one condition: that Mercader give his young son a job. Thus, at the age of eleven, Jaume went to work for Mercader, first as a bellboy during the summer and on holidays, later as a full-time employee in the kitchen and dining room. He grew up in the business and went on to help run a second Mercader hotel, the Almadraba Park in nearby Roses. In 1974, he married Mercader’s daughter, Anna María.

  Mercader had been
gone for half a dozen years by the time I first got to the Hotel Ampurdán—he had upgraded it to hotel status in 1968—but Jaume welcomed me graciously and went out of his way to help me. He drove me out to the Almadraba Park to see the jars of Roses anchovies he was salt-curing in the hotel’s dark basement. (His car reeked of anchovies—a jar had tipped over several days before while he was driving it back to Figueres—and he was apologetic, but to me it smelled like perfume.) He introduced me to local olive oil producers and winemakers, and took me to a wine cooperative a few miles from the hotel where wine was dispensed into customers’ own vessels from what looked like gasoline pumps. When I asked about the Catalan rolled cookies called “neules,” he led me to a village called Tortellà, where a man named Valentí made what were reputed to be the best neules in the region. Whenever I asked about some reasonably obscure specialty of the region, Jaume would not just describe it to me but cook it or find it for me to sample—the sugar-cured pork sausage called “botifarra dulce,” for instance, or the meat-stuffed baked apples called “rellenos.” And of course he served me, over a two-year period, virtually everything in the hotel repertoire.

  I ate whole fish, typically gilthead bream, roasted on a bed of thin-sliced potatoes and scattered with onions, green peppers, rounds of botifarra sausage, and small black olives; scorpion fish suquet, the classic Catalan fish and potato stew; veal shank braised in red wine; “platillos” of cuttlefish with mixed vegetables or goose with locally foraged wild mushrooms. Every meal began with “garum,” Mercader’s tribute to the fermented fish sauce favored by the ancient Romans, the best of which was said to have come from the Costa Brava, and with deep-fried anchovy spines, which are just what they sound like and are remarkable.