Art And Food In Barcelona
La Pedrera (below right, photo: Flickr/J.Salmoral), Antoni Gaudí's 1912-vintage biomorphic masterpiece. There is no line at all at the famous building's front door, however — just a security guard motioning in people who are interested in what's inside—which in this case isn't a guided tour but, up a broad curving staircase, a mouthwatering exhibition called L'Art del Menjar: De la Natura Morta a Ferran Adrià — The Art of Eating: From Still Life to... well, you know who.
The show, assembled by Valencian art-book editor and curator Cristina Giménez, consists of some 130
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Some of the artists represented have had more than an aesthetic connection with food. The American conceptual artist Gordon Matta-Clark actually ran a storefront restaurant called Food, staffed by artists, on Prince Street in Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood for a couple of years in the early 1970s. (The menu included sushi and sashimi, then rare in New York, as well as borscht, stewed rabbit, and a salad of figs and anchovies.) In the mid-1980s, Catalan artist Antoní Miralda collaborated with Barcelona chef Montse Guillén to open a tapas bar called El Internacional, six or eight blocks south of Prince Street in TriBeCa. (Covering the place, New York magazine helpfully described tapas for its readers as "the legendary pub snacks of Spain".) And then there's Ferran Adrià of El Bulli, who has always maintained that he isn't an artist, but some of whose most famous innovations conclude the exhibition — by way of photographs by his court photographer, Francesc Guillamet.
A half hour or so spent enjoying L'Art del Menjar — open seven days a week from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. through June 26 (with free admission) — is a great way to work up an appetite. And a great way to satisfy one would be to walk three blocks down the broad Passeig de Gràcia, one of Barcelona's prettiest boulevards, to the new Mandarin Oriental Hotel, for lunch at Blanc (below, photo: Michael Psaltis)
Blanc is the preserve of Jean-Luc Figueras, who first made his mark as chef at Eldorado Petit, probably the best restaurant in Barcelona for much of the 1980s, and went on to cook at the acclaimed Azulete and then in his own eponymous place in a beautiful Modernista house just off the Avinguda Diagonal. Figueras is half-French and his cooking seems approximately that, too, but he also honors the Catalan portion of his heritage with intelligently updated takes on local classics, sometimes with unexpected but felicitous foreign accents. (He was, among other things, one of the first contemporary Spanish chefs to incorporate Asian ingredients into his dishes.)
mar i muntanya (sea and mountain) idiom, which combines seafood with meat or poultry, in this case an arrangement of espardenyes, or sea cucumber, with confit Ibérico pork cheek and a grace note of black truffles; a paper-thin tart of crumbled botifarra sausage topped with translucent slices of fingerling ratte potatoes and more truffles; and a dish of peas from the Maresme farmlands north of Barcelona, greatly prized here (there were shelled ones in the market for almost $20 a pound), with salt-cod tripe and bits of black trumpet mushroom — everything in perfect balance, precisely seasoned, and full of flavor. The main course was purely French: a glorious veal shank, lacquered-brown in hue, with side dishes of favas, baby carrots, pearl onions, and artichokes (above left, photo: Michael Psaltis). For dessert? A nice long walk.