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by Stephen S. Hale
 

 I bit into a small, zesty citrus fruit that ricocheted off my taste buds like balls in a pinball machine. By now, I wasn’t even surprised. Our New England-honed senses had been peppered all week by the colors, smells, and sensuality of Barcelona. The narrow streets and sweeping sights of the Barri Gòtic, El Born, Barceloneta, and the wild diversity of food on display at the Mercat de la Bouqueria kept our heads spinning like robots gathering data. Then there were those crazy Catalonians: Gaudí the architect with his fanciful buildings, his slurry of styles, his outrageousness all coming together in the powerful cathedral of La Sagrada Familia with its dizzying detail, soaring towers, and whimsical touches like a pile of fruit at the top of a spire and a tortoise at the bottom of a column; Picasso the painter with his bombed-out angles and juxtaposed parts; Dalí the artist up in Figueres with his shocking perspective on everyday matters like his Mae West that takes up a whole little theater about 50 square feet and is composed of two black and white photographs and a big nose stuck to the back wall, a luscious set of red lips the size of a couch at stage center, and a 20-ft tall mop of yellow hair where the viewer on a raised platform peers through a glass and sees the whole collection as a portrait.

The senses being assaulted belonged to me, my wife, and my older brother. My brother and I grew up on a small farm in a small town in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts. My wife, born in New York City, considered herself more worldly than us even though she’d been raised in upstate New York.

The maitre d’ navigated us to our table, separated from the adjacent tables by a short wall giving the intimacy of a private box at a theater. A friendly, down-to-earth waiter advised us on menus listing out-of-the-earth food. We chose a seven-course Traditional Catalan prix fixe for the three of us: two starters, three main dishes, and two desserts. Normally, my wife doesn’t allow me to order the same thing she does, as that would crimp her habit of spontaneously stabbing her fork into whatever was on my plate, but she let it pass this time. I smiled at her gratefully We ordered a Rioja red wine, Valserrano Finco Monteviejo 2004, a good year for Rioja said the waiter. We also ordered a large bottle of water—my wife wanted con gas (carbonated) while my brother wanted sin gas. I cast the tie-breaker for the non-carbonated. Blood is thicker than water.

The waiter brought a basket of bread. The white bread was excellent but the walnut bread—the walnut bread excelled. It made my wife’s prize walnut bread taste like a hard cracker staked out on the Barcelona beach for two weeks. Then a house appetizer arrived that set the tone for the evening: a reworked version of the traditional pa amb tomaquet in the form of a small glass of clear tomato extract with bread crumbs floating at the surface and a slice on Catalan salami lying on top of the glass as a lid or tapa. Each serving glistened under its spotlight. I felt a tingling all the way from my tongue to my stomach. I never knew your esophagus could tingle. I wiped the tiniest bit of saliva from my lips and began. Instantly, my mouth went into rapture, ignoring angry calls from my stomach to hurry up and swallow so it could have its turn. Next came a plate of olives and a vase of bread sticks that looked like flower stems. That was followed another house appetizer, a delectable zucchini and yellow-white zucchini flower in yogurt displayed in a widely-flaring bowl with a whimsy that would have made Gaudí smile.

I could see my always-sits-facing-the-kitchen wife fixating on the kitchen door like a bull on a matador. She likes to know when our food is on the way. She also needs to check what passes by on the way to other diners to see if she should have ordered what they got. Then our first starter materialized under the spotlights: a sort of micro pizza with thin slices of anchovy, an onion, and truffle butter on a slice of crunchy bread. We labeled this “interesting.” When I order pizza back home, anchovy is the one item I never get. Score zero for adventurousness and one for New England stubbornness. But then the waiter brought a large plate with a small recessed bowl at the center containing local mushrooms on a purée made from a local tuber. The mushrooms were not included in the prix fixe, but my wife asked sweetly when we heard they were just now in season and the waiter made the switch. Down with rigidity. The mushrooms were so good I closed my eyes as I gently worked them around my mouth. By now, every single one of our senses, except for hearing, had been stroked by the food. I imagined the chef, back in some cramped laboratory behind the kitchen with his flasks and test tubes, trying to conjure up a way to make his food sing an aria.

I wondered whether “Alkimia” translated in English to “alchemy” and was about to surreptitiously slip my compact Spanish-English dictionary out of my pocket when our first main course slid into view. A large prawn over rice in a mysteriously dark sauce steamed up promises of heaven in the mouth. The dish, served on a large plate with a recessed center, was presented so beautifully my wife wanted to take a photo, but I discouraged her, thinking it might be gauche, like a cruise ship turning sideways to a spectacular sunset and hundreds of passengers all at once firing a broadside of flashbulbs.

The spotlights bore down, revealing the wide-ranging palette and shapes of the food selected by the artist. One could have just sat there all evening and watched the different dishes pass under your nose and not even eaten anything and been immensely mesmerized. Time to order another bottle of wine. This one, a red Cune from Rioja, murmured down our throats with a smoothness to rival that of the pickpocket we saw gracefully working a wallet at a turnstile on the Metro. My brother was getting loquacious, amazing in light of the fact that several years of living in Hawaii hadn’t managed to override his New England reticence.

  Bone-white serving dishes provided the skeleton on which to hang the art. The plates and bowls seemed especially designed to complement each item of food. The silverware was plain, except for the knives that had the handle at a right angle to the blade so that the blade rested sharp side down on the table (probably Picasso’s knives looked like this). The waiter’s clothes were plain; the only feature not choreographed by the chef was us diners, our shapes and colors and smells. All art has to make some small bow to commerce.

      The waiter brought the second main course, a succulent monkfish with mashed potato, white sauce, pine nuts, and a spoonful of soft, rich-smelling golden cheese. The fish and cheese smelled so sumptuous together I thought my nose had grown to the size of the one in Dali’s Mae West theater. Monkfish is just what I was reminded of the day before when we saw Frank Gehry’s giant copper fish sculpture with gaping mouth down at the beach. In the setting sun, what had seemed plain metal at mid-day exploded into countless alluring tones.

 Each time he came, our waiter patiently explained what he was serving. We didn’t press him for all the ingredients and flavors that went into the sauces. That wouldn’t be polite; it’d be like asking my wife for a prize recipe she’d gotten from her saintly grandmother. The portions for the main courses, spread among the three of us, were slightly bigger than tapa size. When we were growing up, my father insisted that we clean up all the food on our plates at meals. That sometimes led my brother and me to carefully store unwanted pieces of food on the railings just below the big oak table top. No danger that would happen here.

      Now our last main course, a shoulder of young lamb with a prune separated from the lamb by a pile of white foam. Again, the waiter served it on a large plate with a small empty well in the center, which he soon filled with a steamy brown sauce. The lamb was as tender as a ripe avocado. But what was the foam? The only foam we’d ever seen on a plate before was whip cream. We all took another sip of wine to contemplate this mystery. We had read that some Barcelona chefs of the New Catalan cuisine deconstruct Catalan food, then whip it up into foam. In this case, the purpose of the foam seemed to be to physically or visually separate the lamb from the prune on the plate. Or perhaps it was intended to separate the two items on the palate. OK, I thought, now we’re looking at some Dalí metaphor that has no construct in reality. I’ll bet the villager from some small Catalan town who grew this food would be as puzzled as we were. Ernie would have simply said it’s damn hard to get your teeth into.

Then the desserts. At first, I was relieved we had all gone with the prix fixe so I had my own serving and wouldn’t have to share. But now, was it the wine? the city? I was thinking maybe sharing wouldn’t be such a bad thing. The waiter poured a rapturous berry sauce over white ice cream surrounded by a bit of olive oil with tiny cubes of green apple and that small, surprisingly zesty pinball machine citrus fruit. My wife, who largely goes to restaurants for the desserts, almost swooned, then, when the second dessert came, went as rigid as the living street performer statues on La Rambla. I reached over and put my hand on hers. The second dessert came on a flat black slate, the only non-white dish of the evening. On it lay a chocolate gelato, a lemon gelato, and an impossibly chocolaty-chocolate brownie, moist as my brother’s eyes at the topless beach, so licentiously good I cast a guilty look over my shoulder. A brief rest, then, as if the onslaught of food hadn’t made me fully regret I had used the word “minimalist” when we walked in, the waiter presented a house dessert, a riotous flummadiddle, a final coup de grâce to our New England perspectives. A narrow metal plate with one end rearing up like a serpent’s neck held on its back a madeline and a cookie with an intense raspberry topping. Three wooden sticks protruding from the serpent’s head bore chocolate-covered frozen raspberry truffles like colored balls on top of a Gaudian building.

As we decompressed out the door onto the sidewalk, I hoped we wouldn’t run into the clown with a red ball nose and small toilet plunger hat on his bald head we’d seen mimicking passers-by at the Zurich Café sidewalk in the Placa Catalunya. I thought the poor man would be stumped by our expressions. I was left with one nagging question: After seeing the art of Barcelona, our emotions all stirred up, our perspectives re-arranged—transformed by alchemy—how could we go home again? I’m still wondering.

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