Here is a round up of some of the restaurant visits over the last few months.

Relae, Copenhagen
An excellent restaurant serving seasonal and local ingredients. The food in Relae marries big, unadulterated flavours and there are only ever a few components on the plate. The best dish of the night of trout, mushrooms and chicken skin demonstrates what this restaurant does best. The beautifully cooked trout was soft and perfectly cooked and went amazingly well with the raw earthy mushroom, with the chicken skin giving the dish a sort of seasoning and a bit of texture. The food is very pure, each ingredient tasting of what it is and the components combine well together. A dessert of chewy beets divided our opinion on otherwise very good meal that represented very good value in an expensive city.

BROR, Copenhagen
A restaurant from two Noma Alumni, Victor Wågman and Sam Nutter, this is a charming little restaurant serving interesting food. They have taken some of the Noma ethos of regionality, seasonality and experimentation, but have gone completely their own way with the interpretation. The food is simpler, much more rustic, stripped down to it's bare bones. Nose-to-tail cooking is utilised here and they commonly serve a whole head of animal for the whole table to carve. One of the snacks on our meal was a half a cod's head with rye crackers - soft, meaty and delicious. In a city that now has a lot of high end restaurants cooking experimental and challenging food, the food in BROR  offers something a bit different, something a bit more accessible and is worth a visit.


Amass, Copenhagen
Former Noma head chef Matthew Orlando has gone it alone with Amass. He has kept the same high standards of cooking too. The food in Amass really is excellent. This is evident straight away with the fermented potato bread, which is surprisingly light, but at the same time wholesome and moreish with a great earthy flavour. After one dish we moved from the 5 course to the extended menu which had an extra few courses, so we could sample more of the dishes. A parsnip roll, a sort of brandy snap, filled with liquorice and brown butter was perfectly spiced and had great flavours of the season. A serving of pumpkin was also a highlight.  The food was very well balanced, with each element on the plate standing by itself, but marrying well with the others. The dining room has a sort of old airport hanger or warehouse feel to it and there is a bit sterile and lacks warmth. Amass is less than two years old, so it will probably continue to get better and is a must on any stop to Copenhagen.

Restaurante Lasarte, Barcelona
Martin Berasategui's Restaurante Lasarte in Barcelona is cooking ambitious food, much of which was excellent, but occasionally did not quite deliver on flavour. The menu was local, drawing on many ingredients from Catalonia, but with the odd surprise thrown in. The dishes showed a lot of cookery skill and technique and some were truly excellent, but on some the flavours were muddled and confusing on the palate. Some of best dishes were the most simple, which had a tried and tested combination, such as tempered beef, foie gras and mustard ice cream or a serving of snails with crayfish. The perfectly cooked pigeon with a pineapple compote was also extremely good. But other dishes did not live up to this standard, Red prawn 'on a sea bed' had an unpleasant texture . Yolk with toasted butter and black truffle toast lacked definition and was not great on the palate. The service was absolutely flawless, friendly, hospitable, attentive and extremely knowledgeable. Lasarte is an interesting restaurant and the best dishes are extremely good, but it is pricey and there may be better value to be had in Barcelona.

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.