With a bit of research and the usual avoidance of the tourist rubbish, the food you can get in Tapas bars in Barcelona can be of very high quality. On the first day of our stay in the city we toured the tapas of the amazing Boqueria Market, sampling staples such as patatas bravas, puntillitas (fried whole baby squid), morcilla (blood sausage), chorizo tortilla, croquetas, jamon iberico, albóndigas en salsa de azafran (meatballs in a saffron and almond sauce), all washed down with a glass of cava. On it's own this food would have been worth the trip to Barcelona, but we came to this beautiful city to look for something even better. This included stops at Albert Adria's Bodega 1900 and Tickets.

Bodega 1900 is a tapas bar that serves local produce presented simply and purely. The ingredients are allowed to shine and a meal will give you a splendid taste of the finest offerings of Catalonia. The main menu changes with the seasons with daily specials based on the best produce from the market. The servings are simple, but quite often perfect. In all we had more than a dozen plates, the most memorable being: air dried tuna with almonds; smoked mackeral; sea urchins; oysters; gras with sea salt. The flavours, like most in the region, are big and always leave you wanting more. Bodega 1900 lets the nature of Catalonia do the talking and the cooking shows appreciation, intelligence and respect. A meal at Bodega 1900 is a great experience and gives the diner a fantastic taste of the region.

Across the road from Bodega 1900 you will find Tickets. Like Bodega 1900, Tickets is a tapas bar serving the best Catalonian produce, but whereas the former demonstrates purity, Tickets adds the creativity, the fun and the flair synonymous with the name Adria. A meal in Tickets is an assault on the senses. It is noisy, a little chaotic, a touch theatrical and is an extremely fun place to spend an evening. It will be your tastebuds that will be most under siege though, with each plate of food delivering a big flavour. The food here truly is excellent and each serving is very exciting, often managing to deliver the wow factor with each bite. Adria has managed to add creative twists to tapas dishes, but still maintaining and respecting the essence of the tapas bar. Many of the flavours are that of Catalonia with dishes rooted in classic tapas, but there is the occasional outside influence thrown in. Despite the creativity in the food, each flavour is still well defined and tastes of what it is and most dishes only have a couple of ingredients. 

It would be hard to pick out any dishes as so many of them were of high quality, but some stood out from the rest: tuna tartare on crispy seaweed; crunchy octopus; spaghetti made from cep with black truffle; orange and olive juice salad and maybe the best of all; eel in a seaweed bun. The one criticism is that the three dessert dishes were a let down as, despite being fun and presented well, on flavour they did not live up to the previous courses.

For those of us who never got to eat the food of elBulli, this is currently the nearest you will get, it is a sort of 'elBulli does tapas' or an 'elBulli lite'. A meal here is memorable, from the slightly chaotic hum of the dining room with chefs moving across from one section to another, to the site of the many beautiful and intriguing dishes coming out, to the pleasure of the exquisite food. 

Albert Adria's Tickets and Bodega 1900 are a must on any, and every, trip to Barcelona.

We had eaten in restaurant Chapter One twice before. On both occasions we had the pre-theatre - we went with the intention of having their tasting menu, but as it was early in the evening the pre-theatre was all that was offered to us. There seemed to be a lack of care with the pre-theatre menu, both with the food, which lacked refinement, and service, which was haphazard. It gave the impression of being designed to just fill people up and get them out and it was certainly not what we would class as fine dining. 

Sadly, it isn't that unusual for good restaurants to drop the standard on their less expensive menus such as lunch or pre-theatre, but it can be frustrating. Sure they have to reduce the number of expensive ingredients they can use, but the care, the precision and quality should still be the same. A diner getting a lunch or pre-theatre menu should still get the same standards and still be able to see the merits of the restaurant and the talent of the chef. 

So, we returned to Chapter One recently to try their tasting menu and see if it is superior than the pre-theatre. Well It was better, most certainly, but still far from perfect and suffered from some of the same problems.
 
There were some dishes that were of high quality and very accomplished. Scallops with unfermented chorizo and lemon emulsion worked very well, the strong flavours balanced with perfectly cooked scallops. Crab salad with cucumber and seaweed was fresh, light and very polished. Pig's tail stuffed with bacon and Dublin Bay prawns was powerful, a little over sweet, but still quite good and the prawns were not lost to other strong flavours.  A beetroot and goats cheese dish was a bit boring, but preserved lemon (it may have benefited with more of this), and smoked almond just managed to elevate it to more than just a conventional beetroot and goats cheese salad. These three dishes were enjoyable and the marriage of flavours showed there is a good palate in the kitchen. However on a tasting menu each dish should leave you wanting more and only on the scallop and the crab dish did we finish it wishing it was larger.

It was the last savoury course in this dinner that really let it down though, it was terrible. Extremely overcooked loin of venison, so over cooked in fact that it was nearly grey all the way through with just a small amount of slight pink hue in the middle and it had that faint livery taste that venison gets when cooked to within an inch of it's life. The dish was served with terrible roasted parsnips that were inconsistently cooked and creamed potatoes served on a soggy potato crisp. The dish was massive, even for a la carte it would have been very large. A complete mess of a dish that brought back memories of last years pre theatre. What was most infuriating about this dish though was that we saw other people get this dish on the a la carte and the venison was cooked much better with the bright pink all the way through that it should have. It is shameful to see this level of inconsistency in a restaurant.

The dessert was nice, but again it was far too big and rich for a tasting menu. A rich chocolate soufflé served with an equally rich orange ice cream. Both parts were nice individually, but did not work together at all.

The service, whilst being friendly and hospitable, was still a bit poor at times. Waiting staff lacked knowledge of the menu and sometimes got things wrong describing the dishes - calling a pumpkin soup 'chestnut' for example. There is also a slight conceit throughout the service that starts to grate a bit. We don't mind being asked once if it is a special occasion, it is quite nice in fact, but after several times it gets a bit much, especially after answering 'no' to be told that it is 'just a treat then' - it wasn't! You get the impression that they think it is quite an occasion and a privilege to be dining in Chapter One. You are often told how good a dish is instead of being asked how good you thought it was. Seeing one waiter throw the foil off the top of a bottle of wine across the dining room to another waiter gives the sense of a lack of professionalism.

The tasting menu did not in any live up to the €85 price tag, there are far better meals to be had for less, and even though some dishes were very good we left frustrated again.