From The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs to Disfrutar’s Gilda, these are just some of the many plates people travel across the globe to try at The World’s Best Restaurant 2024.
The dining experience of a lifetime, Disfrutar in Barcelona was voted The World’s Best Restaurant 2024. Combining brilliantly imaginative dishes, unsurpassed technical mastery and playful presentation, chefs Oriol Castro, Eduard Xatruch and Mateu Casañas are at the forefront of gastronomic thinking.
Opened in December 2014, Disfrutar has seen many dishes come and go, or evolve, over more than a decade of service. Today, guests choose between two parallel menus: the Classic or Festival, both totalling around 30 courses. While every dish is memorable, there are some in particular that have captured the hearts – and stomachs – of diners, whether through inspired flavour combinations or innovative techniques.
In chronological order of their debut appearance, here are 10 of the most iconic dishes of Disfrutar.
Frozen gazpacho sandwich with fragrant sherry vinegar (2014)
While Castro, Casañas and Xatruch might not be the first chefs to use aroma as the starting point for a dish, they have taken a left-field approach, using it to stimulate diners before tasting. One of the first dishes at Disfrutar, the frozen gazpacho sandwich takes the vinegar you would usually find in the cold Spanish soup and transfers it to a Cognac glass. With every bite of the ‘sandwich’, guests sniff the glass, filling their nose with the pungent vinegar, giving the sensation of it being an ingredient in the dish. The ‘sandwich’ is a tangy tomato sorbet between two slices of super light tomato meringue which dissolves on contact with the tongue.
Panchino filled with caviar and sour cream (2016)
Since 2016, people have been raving about Disfrutar’s Panchino. Decadent? Yes. Delicious? Absolutely. Basically, it’s a caviar and sour cream-stuffed doughnut. Once you try it, you’ll declare that jam or crème pâtissière will no longer do: all your doughnuts must be filled with caviar from now on. The secret to this impossibly fluffy bun is creating a foam that is deep fried inside a heated mould. In just 20-30 seconds, the chefs can achieve a texture similar to a light brioche that can then be filled with fresh produce, without any danger of it being spoiled.
It is served with black truffle-infused vodka, which smells like a forest floor covered in foie gras. Intense and punchy, it enhances the salinity of the caviar while slicing through the creaminess of the sour cream. Apparently, a kilogram of truffles is needed for every 24 litres of vodka.
Multispherical tatin of corn and foie (2016)
This was the first dish made with the multi-spherification technique – one of the hallmarks of Disfrutar – which is now seen all over the fine-dining world. It’s an evolution of the spherification process created at El Bulli in 2003. As the name suggests, it allows spheres of different sizes and flavour to be formed that adhere to each other after being drained from alginate solution. This texturally complex dish is made with a super-thin and crispy corn base, with a creamy foie terrine featuring Pedro Ximenez and the exploding liquid corn multi-spherification on top – a play on what geese eat. It’s served in a reflective box where the dish eludes you as you try to pick it up.
Disfrutar’s Gilda (2017)
A gilda is a classic pintxo from Spain’s Basque region comprising a guindilla pepper, a Cantabrian anchovy fillet and a manzanilla olive skewered on a toothpick. Disfrutar’s Gilda takes all the traditional flavours – briny, peppery, tangy, nutty – and flips it on its head. Served on a plate, on top of a picture of a classic gilda, there are bites of mackerel, capers, pickled guindilla pepper gel, olive oil, and the iconic El Bulli liquid olive. It might look like an olive, but it’s certainly not an olive: it’s an exploding burst of green olive juice, made by mixing the juice with sodium gluconate, then dropping it into a bath of water and sodium alginate.
Black cauliflower with coconut and lime bechamel (2017)
The hi-tech gadgets are in use for this one. To create black vegetables and fruits, the chefs use the OC’OO double boiler. It’s a Korean pressure cooker where the temperature and time is controllable and can be used for long periods of time – which leads to surprising results. To achieve black cauliflower, the team use the ‘aged egg’ programme, which doesn’t just transform the colour, but leads the vegetable to develop interesting balsamic notes and a soft texture, while preserving the original shape of the product. The intensity of the cauliflower is balanced with the velvety and earthy coconut bechamel and a touch of fragrant lime.
Flourless coca pizza (2018)
One of the most important techniques created at Disfrutar, the flourless pizza has featured on the menu in many guises over the years. Oblate sheets – edible film made from vegetable starch which is used in Japan to wrap sweets or medication – are mixed with inulin cream, a fat replacement, to create an extremely light and crispy puff pastry texture. It can be used for both sweet and savoury dishes, including as a base for black truffle, burrata and spherified extra virgin olive oil.
Bread with aerated smoked butter and caviar (2020)
This is bread and butter, but not as you know it. Using an aquarium air pump and a little soya lecithin, butter is transformed into solid fat bubbles, giving dishes the creaminess and flavour of fat, but in a subtle and elegant way. Diners are presented with a magnifying glass to appreciate the technique up close – and appreciate the tiny cut-out of a man on the plate. The smoked butter is set on some crispy bread with a generous heap of caviar.
The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs (2021)
Things are rarely what they seem at Disfrutar. In this case, a basket of eggs is placed on the table, with one golden egg at the centre. Then the plate: a shimmering, golden-hued egg yolk is in fact a spherified, intensely savoury crustacean bisque made with prawn heads. Inspired by chilli crab, the faux yolk is assembled with a (real) egg white and served with three fat, juicy prawns and an Indonesian satay sauce humming with chilli heat and peanuts.
Calçotada (2023)
In late January each year, sweet onions called calçots sprout across Catalonia. To celebrate their arrival, gatherings and festivals are held, where huge quantities are cooked over open flames. Visitors sit at long tables, buy a dozen, remove the blackened skin, dip the onions generously in romesco sauce, tip their heads back and lower them in – all washed down with quantities of red wine.
Traditionally, the calçots are wrapped in newspaper, just as they are at Disfrutar – where it becomes a souvenir to take home. To enjoy the dish year-round, the calçots are freeze-dried after being cooked over an open flame. The result is a crunchy, shattery calçot which is paired with a tangy and earthy miso romesco sauce and intense, smoky onion consommé.
Flavour Concentration (2023)
An aubergine-shaped plate is laid out with 11 different microgreens (sprigs of herbs and vegetables) set in tomato gelée and an accompanying description of how each one should taste. Working from the bottom up with a pair of chef’s tweezers, guests are invited to taste each in turn. The intensity of flavour from every one is surprising and impressive. Even if you don’t spend much time eating raw potato, for example, you’ll still know what it should taste like. The tangy tomato gelée acts as palate cleanser – especially when you’re going from tasting beet to fennel.
With so many intricate and complex dishes on the Disfrutar menu, this forces the diner to take a step back and focus on a series of single, natural products.
Images courtesy of Francesc Guillamet, Ernest Abentin (The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs and Flavour Concentration), Joan Valera (header image of chefs and restaurant) and Rachael Hogg (bread with aerated smoked butter and caviar).
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