Has anyone seen the It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia scene where Frank Reynolds pretends to be an…read moreart collector? That scene exemplifies Mugaritz.
To be fair, the service and ambiance were on point. The whole experience has a sense of theater, and we genuinely liked the mold water at the beginning. They clearly know how to create a vibe.
But if you're going to turn food into art, the food still has to be legitimately good. Here, it ranged from bland to genuinely awful. Of the entire tasting menu, only two savory courses were actually enjoyable: the sweetbread and the pesto-wrapped item.
At one point they served what they described, more or less, as their take on glue: a white, multi-textured concoction topped with caviar. I took a bite and my immediate thought was, "Well, you nailed it." Unfortunately, that isn't really a compliment. Who wants to eat glue?
That was also roughly the point where I started wondering whether Ashton Kutcher was about to walk out and tell us we were being Punk'd.
We've eaten at plenty of Michelin-starred restaurants. We understand experimentation, and we don't expect every unconventional dish to land. But a .250 batting average is decent in baseball. It's disastrous for a tasting menu.
Ironically, one of the best things we ate was dessert. And surprise, surprise, it was created by a guest chef.
Mugaritz absolutely succeeded at being interesting. It just rarely succeeded at being delicious.
