Disfrutar The Living Table

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When the conversation turns to the restaurants that have left the deepest mark on the history of gastronomy and dining, there is one name that cannot be left out: elBulli (El Bulli), the place that threw open a wholly different horizon for food. Set on the Costa Brava in Catalonia, it took apart the rules of a fine dining world centred on classical French cooking and, in their place, established molecular gastronomy, the experimental tasting menu, and a laboratory-style culture of R&D, completely changing the way chefs around the world think.

Sadly, elBulli closed its doors in 2011, so I had no way to experience it directly. On this trip through Spain, however, I was able to feel, if only at second hand, the shock elBulli sent through world gastronomy. That place was Disfrutar, the restaurant that has climbed to No.1 on the World's 50 Best Restaurants (2024). In particular, I was able to experience The Living Table: the secretive, almost monumental space hidden underground that can be booked only when four or more guests gather. I want to call it the culmination of this trip, its crowning touch. According to the restaurant that evening, my team was, by their count, only the second Korean party ever to experience it.

Because everyone judges flavour by a different standard, there was no consensus on which restaurant was the best. But I tend to reward the holistic experience of all five senses, and to give extra credit to new techniques and creative combinations rather than tried-and-true pairings, all while keeping the essence and core of flavour intact. By that measure, I want to name Disfrutar the finest place of this entire trip. The Living Table, I would say, has risen beyond the realm of gastronomy and into the territory of a total work of art.

The Living Table, I would say, has risen beyond the realm of gastronomy and into the territory of a total work of art.

There are many keywords one could use to explain Disfrutar, but the city of Barcelona itself becomes an essential backdrop for understanding the restaurant. The Mediterranean opens up right in front of you, and as a longtime hub of trade and commerce, the city has always let the influences of Italy, southern France, the Middle East, and North Africa flow naturally onto its tables. To the north lie the Pyrenees and the plains, supplying meat, dairy, and vegetables without pause; to the south, the sea sends up an endless stream of seafood. Add to this an early wave of industrialisation that grew a dining-out culture well ahead of its time, and the flourishing of Gaudí and modern art on top of that. Disfrutar stands at the very front line of the Barcelona gastronomy that all these elements, stirred together, have produced.

To tell the story of Disfrutar, you cannot really begin without elBulli. As you prepare for a gastronomic trip through Spain, you keep running into the phrase "opened by an elBulli alumnus." The three chefs who lead Disfrutar today, Oriol Castro, Mateu Casañas, and Eduard Xatruch, all came out of elBulli's core creative team. From the late 1990s until elBulli closed in 2011, these three stood at the centre of every experiment, every thought experiment, and every new technique, opening the age of molecular gastronomy alongside Ferran Adrià.

Even after elBulli closed, their lives stayed closer to research than to anything else. Through the elBulli Foundation and the Bullipedia project, they carried on the work of organising the experiments they had once attempted in the restaurant into concepts and written records. In short, they belong to the type one might call "people who research cooking." This is why every plate they put out is built as if it were posing a question. Why does this texture have to be this way? Why am I being made to eat this ingredient at this temperature, in this order? These are dishes that pull such thoughts along with them as you eat.

But research alone does not fill the stomach. The desire to meet guests directly, in their own way, kept growing, and the first restaurant born of that desire was Compartir. True to its name, which means "to share together," it is a relatively casual modern Mediterranean restaurant: a place that steps back a little from the radical experiments of the elBulli years, yet still presents refined, deft dishes in a format meant to be shared among several people. Here the three of them relearned, in their own bodies, the feel of actually serving real guests.

Once Compartir had settled into place, they began the plan they had wanted all along: to build, in the heart of Barcelona, "a restaurant focused on research and experiment, standing at the very front line of avant-garde gastronomy." And so, in 2014, Disfrutar opened across from the Mercat del Ninot in Barcelona's Eixample district. As its name, Spanish for "to enjoy, to savour," suggests, the space was designed from the start as "a device for delivering the results that come out of the laboratory to guests in the most joyful way possible." The story of the interior is fairly symbolic, too. The entrance side carries a colourful, playful mood drawn from the iron structure of the Mercat del Ninot opposite and from ceramic tones that call to mind Joan Miró. Then, passing through the kitchen and into the inner main dining room, you arrive at a bright, calm finish that evokes the houses of a Mediterranean seaside village. The very contrast in tone between the playful entrance and the serene dining room is already a narrative in itself.

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And in a little under ten years, Disfrutar has seized both three Michelin stars (★★★) and the No.1 spot on the World's 50 Best (2024), rising to become the restaurant that symbolises the post-elBulli generation. Where it once carried a tag along the lines of "a new restaurant made by Ferran Adrià's disciples," the direction of the arrow now feels reversed: it is rather that "the chefs who made Disfrutar happened to pass through elBulli."

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Another keyword for understanding Disfrutar is the fact that there are three chefs. Most fine dining pushes the strong character of a single chef out front, but Disfrutar set out from the beginning under a co-chef system, with all three standing equally at the front, so that it is not easy to tell who the protagonist of this restaurant is. This structure itself shifts Disfrutar's character considerably. It feels less like watching a solo artist than like watching a band formed by three members, each playing a different instrument.

Oriol Castro was born in Barcelona and received his formal training at the Joviat culinary school and at Barcelona's confectionery guild school. He went on to build experience at La Torre del Remei and Via Veneto, among others, and passed through the Martín Berasategui restaurant as well, absorbing both classical French-based technique and modern Spanish cooking. At elBulli he began as a pastry intern and eventually became one of the core leaders of the creative team. At Disfrutar today, he is closer to the brain that sets the overall concept, the structure of the menu, and the direction of R&D.

Mateu Casañas is from Roses, near Girona. Because his parents ran a restaurant, he grew up moving naturally between kitchen and dining room from a very young age, and his first hands-on experience began at the family restaurant as well. He later joined elBulli, where he worked through nearly every position in the kitchen and went on to take part in the creative team and the elBulli Foundation projects. On the strength of his experience in hotel dining and more classical restaurants, he is rated, even among the three, as the chef with the finest sense of balance and harmony.

Eduard Xatruch comes from Vila-seca, near Tarragona, and trained at the culinary school in Cambrils. He widened his range training at some of Europe's finest restaurants, including Quim Font, L'Oustau de Baumanière (which we also visited), and Arzak, and then worked as a chef de partie at elBulli before likewise becoming a core member of the creative team. Having passed through stints not only in pastry and fine dining but also at creative restaurants such as The Fat Duck and Le Calandre, he holds a particular strength in creative cooking and the research of technique.

It is worth noting that these three did not simply pass through elBulli. Having joined between 1998 and 1999, they rose to co-head chef after Albert Adrià and Albert Raurich left in 2009, becoming the operational core that ran the entire elBulli kitchen; and even after the 2011 closure, they stayed by Ferran Adrià's side until November 2014, working together on Bullipedia. They are, in other words, the people who guarded elBulli's final chapter to the very end.

What the three have in common is that they all spent a long time inside "elBulli's laboratory," and that even afterward they look at cooking as an object of research. And yet, as the chefs themselves have said many times in interviews, they never let go of one standard: "in the end, every experiment comes down to a single question. Is this delicious, or is it not?" This philosophy is exactly the point that sets Disfrutar clearly apart from other experimental restaurants. I have been to a number of experimental restaurants myself, and Disfrutar is plainly a step or two above them in flavour. A restaurant with a single chef leans on that one person's genius, so the cooking can sometimes tilt to an extreme in one direction; Disfrutar, by contrast, runs on a system in which three people constantly test and twist one another's ideas, filtering out the ones that go too far and shoring up the ones that fall short, which gives it a relative stability.

Is this delicious, or is it not?

I arrived at Disfrutar about fifteen minutes before opening and waited to be let in. One thing that struck me was that ordinary staff kept coming and going for their shifts through the same front door the guests use. It was almost surprising to see employees move so freely in and out of a three-Michelin-star restaurant. Counting stagiaires, the operation was large enough that the staff looked to number well over forty.

The dark, avant-garde space you first walk into was less a place to eat than a place for guests to wait and talk.

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After a short wait here, we were guided through a kitchen tour and into the inner dining hall. The kitchen did not look especially long. Two of the three chefs, Oriol Castro and Eduard Xatruch, came out in person to welcome the guests.

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We also took a brief look at the inner main dining room, which, finished entirely in white tones and lit brightly, had a completely different atmosphere from the entrance. To be honest, it felt a little light, a little like a holiday resort, and it was not quite to my taste.

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The Living Table is underground.

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Going down to the basement, you find the restrooms, and beside them a display of Disfrutar's world-famous goods and products. There was a gin made in collaboration with a distillery near Terrassa, the black-truffle-infused vodka that appears on the menu, and wines made in collaboration with wineries in Catalonia and Jerez, among others.

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What impressed me most was the series of menu books Disfrutar has published. At the time of my visit there were volumes one and two; apparently a third has since been released. I thought about buying them as gifts for friends of mine who cook, but the weight and the cost were no small matter, so I did not.

And yet, even down in the basement, The Living Table was still nowhere to be seen. The next step was a cellar tour. The cellar, densely packed and carrying a faintly aged air, does not hold a world-class collection on the level of Baumanière, Can Roca, or La Tour d'Argent, but it held a great many wines, surely several thousand bottles. There were not only legendary Spanish wines such as Único but plenty of French ones too, including Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (DRC), wines from a wide range of regions around the world, and old vintages keeping their places under a layer of dust.

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Then they walked over to a dark corner of the cellar and pushed on the wall, which, it turned out, was a door.

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A space spilling light appeared, and that was The Living Table. The Living Table was truly a space for us and us alone. There was a single table, and right in front of it, in a kitchen that looked like a theatre stage, the chefs were preparing the food.

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It did not look as though the actual cooking happened at this kitchen; rather, the base preparation was done within, after which they came out, laid down the sauces, arranged the display, and served immediately. Around it sat various cookbooks, and behind it hung photographs of the dishes Disfrutar has researched and created over the years.

Unlike the ordinary dining room, The Living Table is itself one great structure, a stage. Built into its top are hidden drawers and lifts, sliding panels and lighting devices, so that the surface of the table keeps changing its face. From a spot you had taken for an ordinary table, a drawer suddenly opens; in a place where there had been nothing, a dessert rises up. The moment the table stops being a flat board for setting down plates and turns into a structure that becomes part of the cooking itself, the guest seems to live the experience from inside it.

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What is interesting is that none of these devices ends as a mere visual gimmick. Whatever emerges from a hidden drawer is always one of the bite-size dishes this restaurant has researched and developed, and the timing of the table's movements was locked precisely into the flow of the course, as if every member of staff had trained at it endlessly. Beyond that, as though you had stepped into a scene from a film, they play background music like a film score, and the lighting, too, is set just so, tuned to make the five senses respond as dramatically as possible. This is exactly why I have called this place a total work of art.

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The main dining hall serves two courses currently in progress, but The Living Table runs only on a signature course that gathers up the whole history of Disfrutar. We moved from place to place at points along the way, turned on a TV to watch audiovisual material, and experienced some genuinely striking pairings. Considering that the price of all this comes to under 500 euro per person, this is less a product than something closer to the restaurant's devotion and its willingness to share.

The wine list was not thick, but I was impressed by how it was laid out with stickers by country, which made it easy to navigate. That evening I drank, for Champagne, Ulysse Collin Les Maillons (aged 48 months), and for red, Kei Shiogai Gevrey-Chambertin "Barraques" 2022.

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Ulysse Collin is a grower Champagne (RM) that Olivier Collin started in 2003, after reclaiming the family vineyards from a lease agreement with a large Champagne house. Built on the low-intervention winemaking he learned under Anselme Selosse, the house is counted among the leaders of the grower Champagne movement. Les Maillons is a plot in Barbonne-Fayel, in the Côte de Sézanne, where Pinot Noir planted in 1971 is grown on iron-rich clay and chalky soil. Facing east, the plot is known for holding on to acidity and freshness even at full ripeness; the wine is fermented slowly with natural yeast, aged mostly in the Burgundy barrels the house has long used, and finished as an extra brut with almost no dosage. That said, the nose was excellent, though the texture and the bead felt a little flat. The delicate, soft mousse particular to a long-aged extra brut grower Champagne is, of course, this wine's intended direction, but it sat at some distance from my own taste, which leans toward a carbonation that lands with real impact on the palate.

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Kei Shiogai, of Japanese origin, studied winemaking in Beaune and Dijon before passing through Philippe Pacalet, the Gevrey-Chambertin great house Armand Rousseau, and the white-wine great house Jean-Marc Roulot, and began making wine under his own name in 2020. He is one of the hottest rising stars in Burgundy. His is a micro-négociant approach, buying in grapes rather than growing them himself, but with low-intervention winemaking such as whole-cluster fermentation and minimal use of sulphur, he shapes a light, delicate, fragrant style that has become a global cult in a short time. He does not even release a photograph of his own face, which makes him all the more mysterious a figure. This Gevrey-Chambertin was a textbook Burgundy red, but my satisfaction did not run as high as its reputation had led me to expect. Being such a light, delicate style, the wine came across as somewhat buried beside Disfrutar's intense, layered courses. Even critics point out that his light touch can be overwhelmed in pairings with food, and I felt exactly that in person.

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Before the grand course began, a briefing came. Because the dishes are so many in number, they show real consideration for pace and rest: I found it striking that they ask you, if you would like to pause partway through, to let them know a course or two in advance. They then asked us to spread a "Hydraulic gel" over our hands, dripping the gel-like liquid from a conch-shaped vessel.

Before the cooking began in earnest, the restaurant handed us a sheet of paper. On it was the question "What lies behind our food?" It was their answer to what values, emotions, and attitudes go into the cooking, rather than to recipes or ingredients. It held words about emotion and sensation (Emotions, Feel, Happiness, Warmth), experience-centred language (Experiences, Interaction, Surprise, Game), words about creativity and research (Creativity, Innovation, Technique), language tied to minimalism (Minimalism, Less is more, Maturity), memory and narrative (Memories, Childhood, Nostalgia), and human connection (Team, Friendship, Sharing). One of the reasons I came to feel, while writing this account, that I absolutely want to return is the regret that I did not savour this kind of philosophical theme fully enough at the time.

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The first dish was the "Frozen passion fruit ladyfinger with rum (2016)." As many Spanish restaurants do, Disfrutar too has the habit of noting, beside each dish on the menu, the year it was developed. This finger dessert was a cocktail, yet from the very start it arrived in no ordinary way. It was a frozen dessert shaped like a ladyfinger, made to be picked up and eaten by hand, and the moment it went into the mouth, the thin outer shell broke and it melted away softly. It was nothing at all like the sensation of ordinary ice cream. It was the first gateway to experiencing molecular gastronomy properly.

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The second was a two-stage composition: "The Toast: Forestfloor distillate (2023)" and "Flavour concentration: sprouts (2023)." One is a glass of distilled spirit, the other a tasting experience of herbs. The spirit was introduced as "a distillate that wanted to become wine." At 17 to 18 degrees, an alcohol level far lower than that of an ordinary spirit, it gave off a great deal of earthy aromas like forest floor, soil, and moss.

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What was fun was that the server deliberately drew us into a toast, turning even sound into part of the gastronomic process.

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The dish that followed had nine kinds of herbs laid on top.

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Nine herbs sat just as they were on a gelatin made from a lightly tart tomato broth, and it was almost like a palate-training game. Looking at a slip of paper with the herbs' names, I savoured them one by one, slowly. Motti tasted of celery, Rúcula of strong arugula, Kyona mustard of raw potato, Adji cress of black pepper, Melissa of lemon and mint, Atsina of fennel, Borage of cucumber, Daikon of spicy radish, and Honny of honey. I savoured them from the bottom upward, and the exclamations came of their own accord: "why is the Rúcula flavour this strong," "it is mustard, so how does it taste of potato," "this white radish makes no sense." It was a precious stretch of time in which I could have a fundamental experience of ingredients and their aromatics.

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Third, "Liquid salad (2014)" and "Tomato polvorón and arbequina Caviaroil (2014)" came out at the same time. The standout of the two was the second bite. Polvorón is a traditional crumbly biscuit, or cookie, eaten in Spain during the Christmas season; usually almond-based, here it had been reimagined with dried tomato. On top went Caviaroil, that is, olive oil spherified to look like caviar. The moment I ate it, the thought came: "is a texture like this even possible?" It had the texture of cotton candy pressed firmly together, and it was a marvel how they had made such a texture out of tomato. The tomato and olive oil burst and melted away softly, spreading out, and the aftertaste was long and rich.

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The liquid salad, on the other hand, was a salad you drink, with the feel of a healthy smoothie. It tasted like a drink my mother used to make in the morning, and to me it was no more than average.

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The fourth course came with a very special pairing: "Vodka/Truffle (2019)" and "Flourless coca bread with autumn truffle and burrata (2022)." The server came right up beside us, glass in hand, and poured the vodka as a piece of service, and it was here that I first clearly felt how far Disfrutar treats "pairing" as part of the cooking itself.

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What came first was a black-truffle-infused vodka. Look at the bottle and you can see the truffle slices still inside it; they put in 80 grams of truffle per litre and steep it for at least six months. The reason the bottle is frosted over is that, just before serving, they put it in the freezer and serve it at an extreme low temperature. The 37.5-degree alcohol strength is pressed down a little, they said, and in its place a thick, oily texture and an earthy scent come to the front. It was amusing, too, that the server urged us to "taste only a little and save most of it for the next dish." The pairing of vodka and caviar is said to be a classic Eastern European one, and in the fact that they go so far as to make a separate distilled-spirit product to express it, I felt a class that was simply untouchable. The truffle-scented liqueur was highly unusual, and its aroma was deep.

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The dish that followed was a flourless puff pastry.

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They said they layered eighteen sheets of Morishi, a transparent potato-starch sheet from Japan, soaking each one in fat and baking them. They had taken the very property of a sheet that vanishes within seconds at the mere touch of water and applied it directly to food. It was striking, too, that they set a single transparent leaf in the middle of the table on its own and told us to "taste it for yourself."

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Originally it was a sheet used to wrap medicine so it could be swallowed easily, and the idea of converting that "disappearance" into texture to make a puff was remarkable. The instant I picked it up and ate it, the crispness "was there" and then immediately evaporated, and into that empty space the flavour of the burrata and the aroma of the black truffle remained all the more distinct.

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And when I took a sip of the truffle vodka I had saved, it felt as though my whole palate were being wrapped in truffle. The very idea of presenting a single rare ingredient in two textures and two ways was excellent.

Fifth came a dish very simple in appearance: "Panchino filled with caviar (2016)."

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It is described as a Chinese-style bun, but it actually looked like a doughnut and was eaten by hand like one. It was made with an unfermented dough, and inside it held crème fraîche and caviar together. The one line I jotted down after eating it was that it was criminally good. The doughnut itself tasted superb, and it perfectly brought the charm of that classic pairing, caviar and crème fraîche, to life through the creative device of a Chinese doughnut. Right down to the way the umami, the richness, and the salinity of the caviar set the seasoning, it was perfect.

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This dish came with yet another experiential device: they showed the making of it as audiovisual material. In the video, the chef stressed that "anyone can follow this, using only traditional ingredients." To solid ingredients such as flour, sugar, and salt they add eggs and butter to make a batter, mixing the two in stages until it reaches a texture closer to a "liquid dough." The key, however, is that there is no fermentation. Because fresh ingredients have to go inside, leavening it could make it collapse. The essence, they say, is to express a seemingly fermented texture with an unfermented dough. They then spread the foam-like dough on the bottom, place crème fraîche and caviar on top, and cover it again with dough to build a sandwich-like structure. Last, they heat sunflower oil to 220 degrees and fry it for the ultra-short time of about 20 seconds. Thanks to that brief moment, the outside cooks in an instant without overcooking, while the inside keeps its airiness alive. The result is that the fluffiness of a leavened bread and the pleasure of a deep-fried doughnut arise at the same time.

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The sixth, "Solid bubbles of smoked butter with caviar (2020)," is a dish that turns smoked butter into foam and then freezes that foam into a "solid bubble."

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Using equipment like an aquarium oxygen pump, they puffed the butter up with air and froze it right away to make it like a solid bubble. Caviar was set on top, and it was served as a bite-size amuse-bouche. In other words, it is a course that turns butter itself into cooking as pure "texture" and finishes it with caviar. The smoky flavour and the texture of the smoked butter were good, and eaten together with the caviar at the end, the balance, down to the gentle aroma and the salinity, was fine. What was fun was that to the left there was a magnifying glass and what looked like a small dot: a visual joke the staff introduced as a "little surprise" called the "Bubble chef." It was a staging in which you observe, through the magnifying glass, a tiny chef walking toward the bubble. It was a device with nothing to do with taste, but its humour and wit made me laugh once more.

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For the next dish, "Amaranth coral with caviar, oyster and codium emulsion (2023)," a staff member suddenly came over while we waited and stressed that we should sit comfortably but keep the distance and angle of our gaze fixed straight ahead. I wondered what this was about, and inside a black box there was not a simple dish but a crystal staging within. It was a device in which you pick up, by hand, a coral-shaped crisp set behind the crystal. The base of the crisp that looks like coral beneath this dish is amaranth, put through a process that uses alcohol to create a crunchy texture. On top went caviar, oyster, ikura, and codium emulsion, realising the taste of the sea in an explosive way.

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Once the box came out and a single bite-size dish was clearly visible behind the crystal, the server suggested we try an "imagination test" before eating. He asked us to suppose the coral had been brought "flying" from back to front, and to picture in our heads beforehand that the bottom would be crunchy and the top explosive. So I reached my hand inside to eat it, but the dish that had plainly been before my eyes was not there. It was disorienting, but it turned out the dish was at the back, and the crystal had created an optical trick.

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When I picked up the dish behind and put it in my mouth in one bite, the amaranth coral underneath shattered crisply first, and the caviar, oyster, and codium piled on top burst all at once, so that my mouth turned into "the sea" in an instant. Because of the codium, it also gave a taste like eating gim bugak, a crisp of fried laver, as the deep scent of seaweed, the richness of the oyster, and the umami of the caviar surged in all together. It was not just "seafood"; it really felt like eating the sea in a single bite. The phrase "an explosion of the sea in the mouth" was no exaggeration.

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A pairing appears once more, and this time the pairing is anything but ordinary: it pairs a scent with the food. "Gazpacho sandwich with scented vinegar garnish (2016)" looks like bread on the outside but is in fact a tomato meringue. Using tomato, they make an airy, meringue-like shell with molecular gastronomy technique, and inside they freeze gazpacho, the cold Spanish tomato soup, in the form of a sorbet. This sandwich, too, had an astonishing texture, an astonishing way of melting in the mouth. Cotton candy is the most my language can manage, and it really did melt away softly. A similar dish had appeared at é by José Andrés in Las Vegas, another signature restaurant of an elBulli alumnus chef. The texture was similar, but in concentration and clarity of flavour this was far above.

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What came alongside it as the pairing was, of all things, vinegar. They pour a 25-year-aged traditional Spanish vinegar separately into a glass, and because the scent is so strong, they guide you to smell it slowly. In fact, if you bring your nose right into the glass, the scent is so sharp and intense it might set off a nosebleed. It was a scent strong enough to reach you from a distance. This device, expanding flavour through the sense of smell, was truly fresh.

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Next was "Disfrutar's Gilda with marinated mackerel (2017)." Before the dish came out, they brought an underplate, and on it was a photograph of the Gilda, the traditional pintxo of the Spanish Basque country. The server first explained that the pintxo is a classic Basque aperitif, and that the Gilda is a famous Basque pintxo whose basic composition of olive, anchovy, and pickled pepper completes saltiness, acidity, and fat in a single bite: "a bite of the Basque country."

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This dish is Disfrutar's reinterpretation of the Gilda. In place of the original anchovy went a large piece of cured mackerel, and they added an element that bursts with the acidity and aroma of something like passion fruit seeds. Small anchovies also took up position on either side.

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What was fun was the way they presented the olive in various forms.

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On the right, they transformed a green olive into an olive-shaped candy, spherified like a chocolate, and the way this olive flavour burst like chocolate was astonishing. The olive aroma spread richly, yet it was neither too salty nor too sour, so the balance was good as well.

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First I ate the mackerel, then the olive, then ate them with the sauces underneath, which were a caper-and-pickle jelly and an olive oil drizzle. The mackerel was fresh and tasty too, but the many aromas of these sauces made the complexity overflow. The olive oil sauce underneath, in particular, was thick as if emulsified, and spread on the bread served alongside it was delicious. It did carry a slight bitterness, though, and I still find it hard to be sure whether that bitterness gave a positive feeling to savouring the dish.

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Next was, once again, a small bite: "Crunchy mushroom leaf (2021)." In a nest-like vessel sat a single small leaf-shaped cracker, and when I turned it over, various sauces clung to its underside.

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For this dish, they say, they mix mushroom soup into rice starch to make a very sticky, gelatin-like batter. They put this batter into a silicone mould, cover it, and microwave it for about three minutes, at which point the moisture leaves in an instant, the inside hollows out, and only the surface remains, forming a very thin, crisp, crispy layer. At the end, they finish it with a light brush of mushroom butter. The reason for using a microwave is to harness the rapid expansion and collapse that starch and moisture set off when they meet. The mushroom flavour was deep, which I liked. That said, because I had eaten so many dishes of remarkable character and creativity that day, the impact beyond the cracker texture and the mushroom flavour was relatively small.

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An early menu item developed in 2014, the year this restaurant opened, followed: "Crispy egg yolk with warm mushrooms gelatin (2014)."

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In an egg-shaped vessel, an egg-yolk tempura fried in its own membrane held the centre. Fried crisp on the outside while the yolk within remained liquid, it was something close to a poached egg. Inside the egg-shaped vessel there was warm mushroom jelly, served together. The way of eating it the server stressed had three steps. First, so the yolk inside can flow out, you take a small bite of the yolk tempura; then you spoon that liquid yolk back into the shell and mix it with the mushroom jelly outside; then you eat the yolk and the mushroom jelly together. When you take a bite of the tempura, the yolk bursts, and the texture of the tempura was excellent too; the mushroom jelly carried an outstanding, truffle-like flavour, and although the seasoning ran a touch high, it tasted truly good.

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Yet another mushroom dish followed. "Marinated mushroom vinegar with oyster (2023)" was an uncommon pairing of mushroom and oyster. Before this dish came out, they brought over, once again, an extraordinary piece of machinery to show us. It was a step in which mushroom vinegar is placed inside a bottle and that vinegar is rapidly matured and activated with equipment that pumps in oxygen.

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They introduced it as a device that brings a vinegar, which would traditionally take several months, up to a usable state in about fifteen days. The dish was shaped like a mushroom, with a mushroom jelly closer to pudding in texture, pine nuts, oyster, an ingredient that looked very much like shiitake, and ice plant. They seemed to have used the mushroom vinegar shown beforehand as a sauce, and perhaps for that reason the acidity was stronger than expected. By its look I thought a nutty character would dominate, but the acidity came first instead. Still, the acidity of the mushroom sauce made the combination with the oyster excellent, and the mushroom-shaped jelly, too, had an original texture in the mouth.

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As the course passed its midpoint, it unfolded around proper dishes rather than amuse-bouche-like bites. "Multispherical pesto with pistachios and eel (2017)" was a plate with the varied components of French cuisine.

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At the centre was smoked eel, the classic axis of this plate. It was not simply eel but a composition with very thinly sliced pancetta, cured pork belly, laid on top. Beside it, a Parmigiano cheese sauce and pistachios were arranged like a painting. What caught the eye visually was a structure of peas packed densely in an S-shape down the middle, but it turned out these were not peas. The pesto sauce itself had been made with the multispherification technique. Basil pesto cream is enclosed within a very thin gelatin membrane and formed in a silicone mould, so that small spheres cling to one another to make a single shape. It was enough to make me say, "this is a sausage structure, isn't it, they have filled it with a stuffing." It was a plate that worked out, in an original way, the combination of Italian-style pesto with Mediterranean-style smoked fish. The combination of eel, pancetta, and Parmigiano cheese was outstanding, and with a smoky, ham-and-cheese-like feel plus the firm texture of the fish, it was superb. The technique of joining the basil sauce into beads with a membrane was impressive too.

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While waiting for the next dish, the server first showed us a transparent penne pasta noodle.

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It turned out to be the completely transparent macaroni used in "Our macaroni alla carbonara (2014)." This was not a flour pasta but something made from 100 percent Ibérico ham soup, gelled so that a "solidified soup" takes the form of macaroni. As a result there was almost no sense of carbohydrate or body to the noodle, and the Ibérico fat felt like the protagonist. The server's emphasis was memorable: "we use only the original carbonara ingredients. But we do not reproduce the original carbonara." They used the existing carbonara ingredients of guanciale, Parmigiano cheese, and black pepper, and on top they poured a carbonara sauce made into a creamy espuma. Finally, just like a real carbonara, they finished it with cheese.

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The important thing, they guided, was not to mix it but to feel it layer by layer from the bottom up.

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Personally, the noodle had a konjac-like texture with none of the satiety of a carbohydrate, which was a bit of a letdown. The cheese flavour of the espuma carbonara sauce was good, and with cheese cubes and guanciale inside, the salinity was right too, but it lacked deep weight. It is said to be a signature dish, but it did not match the big impact of the earlier courses. Still, it was an original and amusing dish. The server looking after us that day was Italian, so I asked "how is this pasta," and the answer was "no."

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As the course moved into its latter half, fish dishes appeared: "Hake Suquet (2016)" and "Cappuccino Suquet (2016)."

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The dish itself had, for the first time in a while, a thoroughly normal appearance. Suquet is a traditional Catalan fisherman's fish stew, based on potato, garlic, saffron, aioli, and parsley. Disfrutar reconstructed this tradition without deconstructing it, changing only its form. For the main dish they used hake (merluza) as the fish, which was very tender and seemed to have been cooked slowly at a slightly low temperature. Served alongside it was a potato gnocchi made from real grated potato, which looked just like an actual potato, and the yellow sauce beside it was a saffron aioli, said to be a very important sauce in the traditional suquet. This dish was very, very good. To begin with, the cooking of the fish was truly excellent, to the point that it fell apart at a touch; the potato gnocchi was outstanding too; and right down to the saffron sauce, the overall balance and umami were truly superb. It was an insanely good dish.

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What came alongside in a cup was "Fake cappuccino: suquet," which looked just like a real cappuccino on the outside but was the suquet broth and potato made into a foam and put in a cup. This was good as well.

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Egg had appeared quite often as an ingredient across the course, and in "The goose that laid the golden eggs: fried egg of crustacean (2022)," a fried egg finally showed up, though in a form where the yolk in the centre was painted gold.

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The composition was a "golden egg yolk" and a large, very springy, perfectly cooked Carabinero prawn.

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At a glance it looks like a simple fried-egg-and-prawn combination, but in fact the acidity and the aromatics were designed in a completely different direction from the earlier dishes. In particular, it was the one dish where a Thai or Chinese oriental flavour, like DiverXO, came through strongly. Personally, I was reminded of Singapore's chilli crab. On the egg there was a chilli crumb, and I tasted shishito, the pepper also known as kkwari-gochu, along with ginger and coriander. This golden yolk was truly excellent, and although the Carabinero prawn was slightly overcooked, the combination of the sauce inside the egg with ginger and coriander was really good. What was fun was the green powder scattered around the dish. I thought it was matcha powder, but it turned out to be a powder made from a combination of parsley and prawn.

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Before the final main came out, "Multi spherical tatin of corn and foie (2016)," something light to eat, arrived. It was a dish that reinterpreted two ingredients, corn and foie gras, through the tatin, the French dessert technique of baking upside down. Look closely and there is a thin film on the very top, which seemed to be a film of concentrated sweetness laid over it to give a slightly sweet taste. Beneath it were spherical beads of corn purée made by multispherification, each one bursting to spread the sweetness and aroma of corn. In the middle was a foie gras terrine, and at the very bottom, under a thin crispy film, was a caramelised corn crumb. The combination of corn and foie gras was really good, and because the corn flavour was faint and a touch sweet, its pairing with the foie gras was excellent.

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At the end of the grand flow of eighteen courses came the meat main, "Squab with amasake kombu spaghetti, almond and grape (2022)." Before eating the dish properly, they paired a scent once again: the server poured something over dry ice, and a faint scent of apple rose.

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They seemed to have added homemade cider, most likely.

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The main was squab, that is, pigeon. The meat at the centre, wrapped in a dark glaze, was the squab, cooked to about medium rare, scarlet to pink inside. Underneath was a "kombu spaghetti," kombu cut thin and used as a spaghetti-like device. This kombu spaghetti seemed to be coated on the outside with amasake, that is, the Japanese amazake, like a sauce. By the restaurant's explanation, it is obtained by fermenting rice starch and gives a faint sweetness. The sauce underneath was an almond cream, and grapes and almonds were set to the side.

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Honestly, the main was a little disappointing. The creative ingredient combinations and the ingenious cooking techniques that Disfrutar had shown until then were not much in evidence. On top of that, when it comes to pigeon, the French style personally suits me better. That said, the soft, springy texture of the pigeon was truly impressive. The texture alone was excellent. As for how it went with the ingredients underneath, the combination with the green grapes was better than with the almond.

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Before the dessert course began in earnest, a pre-dessert started: "Assortment of microwaved snacks (2021)" and "Homemade cider smoked at the moment (2016)." First, the server came over to the side, lit oak wood with a torch, then covered the cup to trap the smoke.

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They served apple cider in this cup, so the cider carried the taste of smoked apple skin and apple chips, and it felt like drinking kombucha. The pre-dessert came as four kinds, and the box it sat in was unusual. There is a mirror on the front, and this was a staging that, for the philosophical reason that "we always eat while looking at others but never actually look at our own face," attached a mirror so that you watch your own expression as you eat. The pre-dessert was four kinds, mostly cheese-focused: Parmigiano and balsamic, Parmigiano and basil paste, crispy blue cheese, and walnut soufflé with praline. Even though there were only four, the cheese flavour was deep, so it was heavier than expected. But the apple cider held the cheese richness of this whole course, and the salty-savoury taste of the pre-dessert, nicely in check.

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After finishing the pre-dessert, this time we moved location. We moved to the cellar right in front, and it was time to taste a "wine" the restaurant had prepared. At first I simply thought it was wine, but it was nothing of the sort. It was "Dealcoholized wine (2020)," the course in which Disfrutar's experiment and philosophy are most condensed. Here I heard a great deal of the story as well.

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At this spot, the server explained the birth narrative of Disfrutar. elBulli closed of its own accord after winning World's Best five times. The three chefs who had been its head of kitchen, head of creativity, and head of pastry opened their first restaurant in Cadaqués, the northern Catalan fishing village where Salvador Dalí had lived, and then, in 2014, opened Disfrutar in Barcelona. The present cellar space was originally a plain storeroom, they said, but after the pandemic it was renovated into the current cellar and the space of The Living Table.

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The server went on to share Disfrutar's sense of a problem with the world of drinks. During the pandemic, the chefs asked themselves, "we have done avant-garde work in food, so why do we keep repeating the same approach in drinks?" They had felt the limits of the existing options. They had considered tea pairings at some restaurants in China and Japan, the kombucha pairings done at places like Noma, and even mocktail and juice pairings, but for guests who had come all the way from around the world to Barcelona, a "tea pairing with fruit dishes" was not persuasive enough and fell short as a substitute for wine.

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So in 2020 Disfrutar began the "Dealcoholized Wine" project. They ran their experiment with a sherry wine of about 19 degrees of alcohol, processing it under vacuum through a piece of equipment called Girovap to remove only the alcohol selectively. The key is not "removal" but "preservation." Create a vacuum and alcohol evaporates even below 30 degrees, so without boiling the wine they selectively removed only the alcohol, keeping the original aroma and structure with no cooking reaction. The result was a low-alcohol drink lowered from 19 percent to about 3 percent, with most of the aroma, the oxidative quality, and the aged nuances retained, they said.

Here we tasted two drinks. The first was the original sherry wine, the second a dealcoholized wine made from this sherry. The server introduced the two as the same wine. Unexpectedly, the dealcoholized one had its acidity revived so cleanly that it was very good. The oxidative character particular to sherry and its mushroom-like nuttiness were well preserved, and because sherry is not originally a category of drink where the sense of alcohol comes through strongly, there was less of a jarring difference.

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What matters is that Disfrutar put this experiment into actual service from January 2024 as a pairing of eleven dealcoholized wines. The reactions, they say, split to the extremes. Some called it innovation; others criticised it, saying it "damaged the soul of wine." In the end, Disfrutar does not currently offer this pairing as a regular service, and instead delivers it in the form of an experience like this, at the tail end of The Living Table course. But in the fact that they neither hide nor make excuses for the failure, and rather explain this process in person in the cellar, sharing even what fell short, I felt an experience worthy of the world's number-one restaurant. Of course, the fact that they serve even failure as part of the experience may be judged differently depending on one's view of fine dining.

Disfrutar is now, they say, conducting research again with mead, that is, humanity's first alcoholic drink. They do not use honey, though, but ferment on a base of fruits such as pineapple and banana, securing sweetness, acidity, and the complexity that comes from fermentation all at once. The goal is clear: not a substitute that imitates wine, but the development of a new drink that has structure by a logic different from wine's. In this process the cellar has become no longer a storage space but a laboratory. I too would like to visit Disfrutar again someday and experience the new results.

Returning to my seat, the lighting and the mood seemed to have changed somehow.

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Beside me lay a single rose. This, they said, was "Rose water (2023)." Before entering the dessert part, it is a ritual course of washing the hands. To symbolise the start of a day when the rose blooms red, they spray rose water extracted from roses onto your palms. It is not a simple cleansing but signifies the turning point of the course, they said.

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Then one more pre-dessert came out, with countless chocolates stacked in the shape of a ring. This is "Engagement rings (2023)." I wondered, "are four of us supposed to eat all of this," but it was a device to pick and eat just one each. White was yuzu and white chocolate, gold was cinnamon and chocolate, brown was dark chocolate. I chose the dark chocolate. They were not all different, but each had a different ingredient on top. The taste was an utterly ordinary chocolate.

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At this point I ordered, on my own, a glass of sherry: Pedro Ximénez Anticuario, El Maestro Sierra D.O Jerez. El Maestro Sierra is a small family-owned bodega founded in 1830 by José Antonio Sierra, a master cooper who made casks; with its production not large, it is counted among the oldest and most refined soleras even in Jerez. This Anticuario is made only from Pedro Ximénez grapes sun-dried to concentrate their sugar, and is a wine oxidatively aged for an average of fifty years in American oak casks via the solera and criadera method. What is interesting is that, rarely for Jerez, it is unfortified, so the natural alcohol obtained from fermentation alone stays at around 10 degrees, which is why the strength felt lower than expected. Within a thick texture like unagi tare, coffee and dark chocolate, dried fig and nutty aromas burst out explosively.

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The first dessert was "Hoisin cucumber (2018)." It was a quite amusing dessert, entirely different from the usual taste of a dessert. It held cucumber raisin, frozen ginger, cucumber sorbet, and anise cream, but the important thing was that there was chicharrón. The combination was quite unusual. It is a creamy dessert, yet beneath it lay a deep sauce tasting like char siu or the seasoning of yangnyeom chicken. So the taste was very distinctive, and the cucumber sorbet kept it in balance. It is not easy to call it delicious, but it was a dessert whose combination, in the way it built the structure of flavour, was interesting.

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The second dessert was "Black sesame cornet (2017)." It looked like a cone ice cream, but the cone was not an actual cone; it was a thin-textured cone reminiscent of the pork-skin family. On top there were black sesame cream and berries, an ingredient with the feel of strawberry, and at the bottom there was yogurt. This was delicious. The crisp texture of the outer part was well brought out, and the inside flavour, nutty and fresh, was well realised too.

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Served with it came "Black apple with noisette butter ice cream and flourless puff pastry (2023)." Before the dessert came out, the server first showed us apples in four vacuum packs; the leftmost was just an apple, and the rightmost was so shrunken you could hardly tell it was an apple.

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It was an experiment on the time of an apple, that is, a black apple completed not by fermentation but by low-temperature, long-duration heat denaturation. The way a black apple is made is to vacuum-seal a raw apple and leave it in a 60-degree cabinet for about 60 days. By day 10 the colour begins to change, by day 30 it darkens, and by day 60 it turns completely black and becomes extremely soft. The texture is just like a fully boiled apple, and the taste is caramelised, with the sweetness condensed.

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On the far left you could taste this very black apple; next was a vanilla cream topped with the puff said to be made without flour. By adding only a minute amount of sugar, they minimised the sweetness and created a very light texture, they said. Finally, on the right, there was Noisette Butter Ice Cream, a brown-butter-based ice cream. Personally, since I like desserts that taste of apple, the black apple was delicious, and its harmony with the other desserts was fine too. That said, because the high acidity that balances an apple's sweetness was gone, the charm of the black apple did not come through strongly to me.

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Around this point I was thinking, "now we will eat the petits fours and it will be over," when the server suddenly put on a grand piece of background music and began to lower the lights. Then they cleared away every glass and dish on the table and took up the tablecloth. Only then did I realise, "ah, this is The Living Table." One by one the table transformed, and inside it were petits fours. Cotton candy in the shapes of trees and flowers hung above, too. The change that unfolded before my eyes so suddenly felt unreal. In that moment I felt a magnificence that words can never explain.

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The finale of The Living Table is the act of creating a single scene of nature on top of the table. Each texture and decoration, they said, carries the meaning of the landscape. The swan symbolises the beginning of the scene, the sprout the birth of life, the moss permanence, the dry branch the change of seasons, the petal emotion and memory, and the water the cycle of life. If there is one more important philosophy, it is that "everything dies, but nature never ends." The moss appears as a being that does not die, the dry branch gains "the life of sweetness" once more as cotton candy, and the plants fallen to the floor represent becoming a layer of humus. At this point smoke rises up from below, and it was as if I were watching the creation of nature.

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The desserts within were each symbolic. On the moss there was a small ball made of berries and cookie, and the cotton candy on the dry branch was dusted with powders in the fruit, violet, and honey-flower family. On the rose flower, which signifies emotion, there were rose petals and a strawberry mochi, and there were also raspberry-flavoured Rice mellows.

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Inside a box conceived as a humus layer, signifying earth, there were matcha stones and yuzu paste, and the cocktail spheres in water, signifying the medium of life, had coconut, cassis, and passion fruit flavours. There were also olive oil jellies hidden among the flowers.

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Beyond these, there were a pomodoro made from raspberry, a white-chocolate-coated, caramelised black-sesame "stone," and vodka chocolate served with cleanser fruits such as mango and pineapple. And on a texture of fine and coarse soil sat various chocolates, almond and hazelnut meringues, small pine-cone-shaped cookies, and macarons.

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By around this time I was full and could not eat every dessert, but it was a simple, intuitive, and delicious composition. It was good to eat with coffee, too.

Finally, explaining this living table, the server said this: "because this is a table of 24 courses, we wanted to pay a small homage to all the French chefs who invented that very number, 24, as a symbol of excellence." I was struck by the attitude of paying homage to the French chefs who created this, even as they unfolded the final, crowning performance of their own.

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Having taken photos and tasted for a really long time, we came out, and a staff member guided us once more through the dining hall and the outdoor space to round things off. It seemed to be a structure where, in good weather, you can dine outdoors as well. The afterglow of this meal lingered so long that I even went back the next day to buy souvenirs.

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By objective measures, Disfrutar already stands at the very top of the world. It is a restaurant that the titles alone, three Michelin stars and No.1 on the World's 50 Best (2024), can explain to some degree. But behind those dazzling titles there is a substantive reason: that it keeps "the essence of flavour," and the overwhelming power of staging, service, and space that blends all of this together.

If asked whether there is anything regrettable, of course there is. Personally I think they made dishes that keep the essence of flavour and meet that question, "is this delicious," but naturally not every dish was perfect. Among them, it was a pity that the meat main lost its strength and did not fully meet that question. Because the number of dishes was so large, the tempo was fast, and there were moments that were a little hectic. In creativity Disfrutar is a step further ahead, but in flavour and the grain of taste I felt it lies in the same direction as El Celler de Can Roca. DiverXO looks toward a completely different flavour and flavour structure, the exploration of the third world, so I would call that creativity of another direction. Disfrutar, by contrast, was not scattered and its structure was simple, and within that simplicity it worked research and creativity out into a layered complexity.

Disfrutar itself is hard to book, but The Living Table, which requires gathering four people, is harder still. Even so, for those who seriously love gastronomy, I recommend experiencing it at least once. There, we come to confirm that a table is not simply a board for setting down food but can itself become a total work of art.

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