"Will You Eat Rabbit Brains?"

That's one of the questions they ask when you call to make reservations at El Bulli. Otherwise, you eat what they give you, about 35 separate courses. The cost, without wine, is about $340 per person. Here, an account of the author's recent meal

By Colman Andrews

• Sake sorbet with yuzu foam and tonic. Tart and bracing—a kind of pale sorbet soda in a tall glass. Wakes the palate right up.

• Nori-trias. Black nori seaweed made crisp and crackly, like pâte feuilleté, then folded around black sesame butter—sort of a peanut butter cracker elevated to perfection, with an Asian accent.

• "Easter egg" of frozen coconut milk with curry powder. A large white globe of frozen coconut milk, almost like a thin layer of firm frosting. A server cracked it open at the table and sprinkled on the curry powder. It was to be eaten in shards. Strange but good.

• Passion fruit "orchid." Thin slices of the fruit turned into three crisp, bright, yellow-orange petals with a sweet carpel of hazelnuts and passion fruit essence—as fragrant as an orchid.

• Pine nut bonbons. Racy-looking bittersweet chocolate globes, each with a single pine nut extending from it like a nipple. Very tasty.

• Gominola of shiso. Vinegary little sour plum candies with a strong taste of minty shiso leaves, jellied and a little chewy in texture. Not my thing. (Gominola is Spanish for Gummi bear.)

• Galetas of tomato and Parmigiano. Medium-thin cookies, one of each ingredient. I would have liked a few more of both.

• Amaranth with hazelnut oil. A little round of pan-toasted amaranth leaves anointed with hazelnut oil. Nutty and ethereal.

• Miso turrón with walnuts. Extraordinary, like a real turrón (halvah-like Spanish nougat) but cold, salty, and sweet.

• Peking crêpes and crab and soya wontons. The former were like fried soup dumplings with impossibly thin skins, filled with liquefied sesame with a touch of heat; the latter were sweet and salty, with some peppery microsprouts on top for texture. I could have eaten a plateful of either.

• Braç de gitano and beet essence. The braç de gitano (literally, Gypsy's arm), traditionally a rolled sponge cake filled with cream, was made with a featherweight beet meringue filled with whipped yogurt. It came with one of El Bulli's funny little spoons—mostly bowl, with a wisp of handle—full of concentrated beet reduction.

• A single grilled strawberry flavored with gin and juniper. Didn't do a thing for me.

• Chervil tea. Served tableside by one of the chefs, who performed a kind of tea ceremony. Two chrome bowls on wooden stands were placed on the table; into these he spooned a fine powder of dried chervil, then whisked in very hot (not boiling) water. We were instructed to drink from the bowls. Tasted like medicine.

• Gorgonzola mochi. A creamy little morsel, snowy white and glistening, in which the traditional Japanese pounded rice paste had somehow been turned into a skin so delicate that it almost broke on the way to the mouth; inside was a subtly blue cheese-flavored liquid. Satisfying after that chervil tea.

• Black sesame sponge cake. So light in texture that it seemed to countermand some basic law of physics, with a creamy, savory miso paste interior. Perfect balance of salty and sweet. Remarkable.

• Oyster leaf with vinegar dew. The gray-green leaves of Mertensia maritima were known popularly as lungwort before the menu writers got hold of them. Their new name is no cheat, however; they really do taste like oysters. The presentation here was a single leaf per person, each bearing a few drops of amber-hued shallot vinegar. Pretty, like something in a jewelry ad, but not particularly appealing.

• Razor clam Laurencia. A single raw razor clam on the half shell, the other half shell filled with a concoction of ponzu jelly and crunchy, slightly iodine-y red Laurencia seaweed. Very Chinese tasting. Not bad.

• Umeboshi. Adrià's version of the traditional sour-salty Japanese pickled plums.

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