Disfrutar (Barcelona, *)

Just came back from lunch at Disfrutar. Needless to say, we had the highest expectations, since it is not only a three-star restaurant, but also took first place this year of The World‘s 50 Best Restaurants (although that list has let us down severely in the past).
But what fired up our expectations the most is that because we live in Barcelona since autumn 2022, we know how incredibly good and inventive many of the restaurants here are, even those with "just" a Michelin recommendation, like Direkte Boquería, Besta, Âme and so on…

I will not describe every single dish now, since that would take fifteen pages, but I want to clearly state that all our expectations have been met, and exceeded. It was a fantastic lunch.

What struck us the most:
In many fine dining places, they throw all the expensive ingredients at you, truffles, caviar, oysters, wagyu, tuna belly, the list goes on.
At Disfrutar, what these chefs are doing with simple ingredients like tomatoes or mushrooms, is out of this world.

A few words on the most outstanding dishes (although, again, almost every course was fantastic):

Gazpacho Sandwich with scented vinegar garnish: A tomato sorbet, in between two slices of tomato merengues. Before you take a bite, you inhale the vinegar scent from a cognac glass. It is very hard to elevate the essence of tomatoes any further…

The four mushroom courses were absolutely brilliant. The first one, Crunchy Mushroom Leaf, was made from boletus broth and rice flour, creating a cookie with magnificent boletus taste.

Flavor concentration: Sprouts. 11 different sprouts, to be tasted with tweezers, on a tomato gel, to be spooned up in between the sprouts, as a palate cleanser. We felt educated, but not in a highbrow or condescending way. This was like taking your four year old daughter to the zoo, so she could touch a rabbit‘s fur, a goat‘s horn, a lamb‘s wool. Or, as my wife put it, this dish was "like a petting zoo for your tongue“.
It really lets you appreciate the defining flavour of every single sprout, in a very fun way.

Macaroni alla Carbonara: Disfrutar‘s Carbonara version, with flourless pasta made of Iberian pork broth, solidified into a gel. And a foam of egg sauce on top. Plus crispy guanciale, freshly ground pepper, freshly ground parmesan. So, very technical (the pasta part), but at the same time the soul of Carbonara was perfectly preserved. You could feed this to an Italian child (used to their grandmother‘s fresh pasta), and the kid would say: sure, this is perfect Carbonara, only the noodles are a bit strange.

Musing on walnuts: they did make the whole walnut edible, by fermenting the thick green outer skin, and by (separately) putting the walnut into sugared water for weeks. Experimental, but not for the sake of experimenting. The result was impressive, and obviously something we had never eaten before.

Hoisin cucumber: A combination of cucumber sorbet, mint sorbet, crispy pork skin, cheese cream, hoisin sauce and mint crackers. Certainly one of the most creative and by far best desserts I have eaten in my life.

So, as I said, not a single dish was below extraordinary. Disfrutar was absolutely fantastic, and clearly the highlight of our culinary year 2024.