I hadn't felt this nervous since the day my daughter was born. I kept asking the employees at the front desk of the hotel what I should wear. I had crossed the Atlantic, spent a few nights at La Rioja, taken a plane to Barcelona, and then driven for almost three hours to the little town of Roses in Spain. In the days prior to this meal, I had visited a number of other restaurants. Every time I mentioned where I was going, they all had a story. It was like the old E.F. Hutton commercials — when I spoke, people listened. I was having dinner at the restaurant that dethroned French food. Yes, I was going to El Bulli, Ferran Adria's cathedral of modern cuisine.
First things first — if you have a rental car, get a driver, or take a cab. The restaurant is located on top of a mountain, with a winding road leading up to it which makes Lombard Street in San Francisco look like a highway. Once you get there, you realize that the place which for years has been the best restaurant in the world is also the most relaxed and unpretentious. I could have left my sport coat at home.
No short rib, Chilean sea bass, or rack of lamb on this menu. Here Ferran Adria, partner Juli Soler, and his staff will serve you caviar made out of mango, eggs fried in nitrogen, olives made out of pasta, ham turned into gelatin slices, Parmesan ice cream sandwiches and whatever else you never expected to eat in this world. He is the king of culinary foam, there is more foam here than at the old foam parties in South Beach's discotheques. The difference is that here everything tastes spectacular. The olives explode in your mouth, swiftly turning into pools of the finest olive oil. The 34-course meal takes about three hours. If you get there early, start with a drink on the terrace, overlooking La Costa Brava.
The food looks like art. Even my wife was impressed, and she's never been impressed with me.
Good to note that the restaurant is only open for about six months of the year. Reservations are taken a year in advance. The other six months are spent at El Taller in Barcelona, a warehouse where they experiment with products for the following year's menu. It's like visiting NASA.
If you want to go, hurry. 2010 is sold out, and there are no scalpers here. If you are lucky, you might get in for 2011. Reservations start again in September.
Adria announced a few months ago that he would close his doors after the 2011 season for a few years. When the New York Times falsely reported that he was closing for good, it felt like the gourmet world's Titanic had just sunk. There were articles everywhere lamenting the closure. Ferran, however, denied the report and all was right with the world once more. The only recent frenzy has been trying to get a reservation before he goes on hiatus. If you do get one, here's something to bear in mind — the restaurant is losing about half a million Euros a year. So don't give the chef a hard time.
Courtesy of Universal Studios
Before the park’s grand opening, Harry Potter expert Melissa Anelli was magically granted access into Universal’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter for a “chill-inducing” walk through the gates of Hogwarts and a taste of some genuine “butterbeer.”
I will never get over the bizarre feeling of strolling through a snowy British town in air so hot and so humid I could boil pasta in the palm of my hand. Nor will it ever feel natural to gaze upon Hogwarts, flanked by its iconic boars—and the palm trees that surround it—from afar. But (sorry, mayor of London), there really isn’t a better place than Florida for the wedge of Harry Potter paradise that is Universal Studios’ Wizarding World of Harry Potter. After a few minutes, the superb detailing of the attraction fully distracts from the environmental ironies.
Months ago, I attended a press preview of the theme park on behalf of my website, The Leaky Cauldron. During that preview we were given a quick tour of the still-under-construction park and offered samples of food from its Three Broomsticks restaurant. After all the deliciousness that ensued, I started joking that we fans were going to enter the park, which officially opens this week, as our normal selves, but walk out fat and poor.
Fast-forward to Memorial Day weekend, when all three hosts of The Leaky Cauldron’s PotterCast—John Noe, Frank Franco, and I—gained entrance to the park during its soft opening period. We get a lot of tips in our inboxes, and quite a few of them indicated a soft open around the end of May. Nothing was certain, but we knew there would be a theme park “experience” for people who had bought a certain vacation package, so we figured, why not just spend Memorial Day in Orlando… just in case? The gamble paid off. It turned out that a guest at one of the Universal Resort hotels could get into the park an hour before it opened to everyone else—and that was how we got into the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. It closed after a few hours, but we spent those hours making the most of everything and my wisecracking prediction came true inside two hours. Three butterbeers, five souvenir pins, a Hog's Head Ale, a pumpkin juice, a Cauldron Cake, a set of wax seals, a Hogwarts shirt, and an annual pass later, my stomach had grown as my bank balance diminished—and I can honestly say it was the happiest I've ever been under such conditions.
At 7:30 a.m. sharp on May 29, we stood on line with roughly 400 other people, awaiting entrance to the Promised Land. Every last person there was part of the largest human train I’ve ever seen, speed-walking like ducks all the way to the back of Universal Studios' Islands of Adventure theme park to get into Hogsmeade. We squealed like children as the arch, with its wrought-iron sign that reads “Please respect spell limits,” drew near, and almost ran to get right into Hogwarts and onto the Forbidden Journey ride, the park’s signature attraction.
Sadly, we never got on: As we were reminded, the soft opening was like the technical rehearsal for a show. We instead spent 20 minutes wandering around the magnificently built Hogwarts, ogling the so-real-looking moving portraits and trying to restrain ourselves from hopping into a seat next to the Gryffindor common room fire, before the queue came to a standstill and a mild-voiced announcer evacuated us.
Who cared? We had all of Hogsmeade to explore—a life-size recreation of the world I’ve immersed myself in for nearly a decade. We moved on to Ollivanders, the wand shop from the franchise, where a wand master carefully selected two young children from our group and performed tests on them to determine their wands. Of course, in true theme park tradition, this meant they would have to buy them in the neighboring shop.
