No no no NO!!!!!
We went to try Compartir after reading about it and learning that the chefs trained at El Bulli. This gave me high hopes for the meal and I was excited to try their experimental twist on Catalan cuisine.
Ok, good things first. The restaurant is set in a walled-in stone courtyard nicely planted around the edge and with simple but smart furniture and table settings. All in all a good looking place with a nice feel. Our server was extremely lovely and we genuinely felt like her prime mission in life was to make our evening at the restaurant an enjoyable and memorable occasion. And that's it.
As soon as we sat down, we were enveloped in a cloud of cigarette smoke that lingered and grew more powerful throughout the meal. We asked our server about this, but she said that despite the large "no smoking" signs, smoking was indeed allowed. I'm sorry, but if you're running a high end restaurant serving what you consider to be top quality food, you just don't allow smoking. End of story. It ruins your creations for smokers and non-smokers alike and makes for a seriously unpleasant atmosphere. How am I supposed to enjoy my meal when all I can smell and taste is cigarettes?!
Nevertheless, we pressed on.
The idea here is to order lots of different things to share, thereby getting a well-rounded taste of everything. The menu was varied, with some dishes sounding fairly standard (tomato watermelon and blood orange salad, seafood rice, flame grilled steak (seriously?! at this fancy shmancy El Bulli-inspired avant garde restaurant??)) and some dishes offering more odd-sounding flavour combinations (salty L'Escala anchovies with kumquat and honey for example). Keen on trying new things and encouraged by the provenance of the restaurant we ordered a range of starters and fish and meat main courses.
Of everything we ordered (6 starters and 5 mains), there was not one dish that I considered to be good, forget great. There were three dishes that I considered to be OK insomuch as they were inoffensive and fully edible. These were the seafood rice (tasted mainly of rice boiled in salty store-bought stock, dyed black with what I can only surmise was food colouring, since it was tasteless, and mixed with some squid and langoustines), the grilled monkfish with shaved fennel and pineapple (as long as you removed the pineapple, which was covered in cinnamon or nutmeg or something similar and did not go with the rest of the dish at all) and the steak (yes, we ordered it, and it was cooked very well).
Everything else was just bad. Not ok, not "not great" but actually bad. The strange-sounding combinations were even stranger in practice than they had sounded on the menu (and just to allay the thoughts of anyone who thinks I'm a newbie to this experimental stuff, I'm most certainly not), some dishes that were supposed to be hot were room temperature and some things were not cooked properly (I'm all for pink game bird, but serving quail that's as rare as the rare steak we ordered just didn't do it for me...I didn't bother sending it back though, because I didn't like it nearly enough to want to eat any more). To make matters worse, there was a very long wait of nearly 30 minutes in the middle of our meal. We were told that this was because the kitchen is very small and a lot of people had ordered their meals at similar times. Well, if your kitchen is really that small, don't use it to feed such a large restaurant and stagger your reservation times! Besides, these are supposed to be some of the best trained chefs in the world, surely they can handle more than one order at a time?!
Anyway, desert time came round and I hesitantly ordered a hazlenut coulant with mango sorbet which was...surprisingly good and tasty. Finally!! The liquid chocolate balls with blackcurrent sorbet were also a treat. Alas, the brilliant deserts were too little too late, which was a shame really, because I could tell that the ingredients were top quality, but their presumably wonderful natural flavours had been obliterated by a kitchen too focused on theatrics and shock value and not enough on basic cooking and flavour combining. I couldn't fault their presentation though, which was excellent.
I feel quite bad giving somewhere like this a one star rating, especially given how hard our waitress worked to make our meal a good one (I really want to emphasise that point), but it just wasn't up to par. PLEASE don't waste your time making the (somewhat vomit-inducing) drive to Cadaqués just to visit this restaurant. You will feel cheated out of an evening spent at a much better restaurant elsewhere in the region (of which there are many) and you will feel a bit like a victim of daylight robbery as you hand over your credit card at the end of the meal. read more