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Dos Pailillos
Add: Elisabets, 9, El Raval, Barcelona
Tel: +34 933 04 05 13
Hours: [Tue-Wed] 7:30~11:30pm [Thu-Sat] 1:30~3:30pm, 7:30~11:30pm
Website: www.dospalillos.com
Price: [bar] €35~50/person [restaurant] €60~75/set
Visited on: Jan 2013
As much as I enjoyed the endless feasts of tapas in Barcelona, a craving for something different took over entirely on my last night in town. This was when I thought of Dos Palillos, a Japanese/Spanish fusion restaurant bar by Albert Raurich, a Ferran Adrià disciple, the chef de cuisine at El Bulli from 1999 to 2007. Just browsing through the online menu, I noiced that Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese elements are also incorporated in the food…fusion confusion? Let’s give it a try.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get a last minute reservation for the restaurant (which has been awarded with a Michelin star, by the way), so instead we sat at the walk-in only bar. While the restaurant side serves only tasting menus (€60 and €75), the bar side serves only a la carte items, though with many overlaps.
Start with a glass of cava – bertha brut nature reserva (€3.80/glass).
Oyster grilled with sake (€6.80), plump, lukewarm, with a shot of sake. Perfect appetizer.
Sea anemone tempura (€6). Crispy little fritters, only wish the portion were bigger.
Just an example of the Spanish-Japanese fusion here.
Steamed prawn dumplings (€8.20) is not a typical har gow one can find at a dim sum joint. The dumpling skin, made with potato flour, was exceedingly chewy (in a good way), and fresh prawns were supplemented with Iberian pork belly. Sounds good? Tastes good too.
Tuna belly temaki (€12.40), DIY version. What to do: take a piece of seaweed, pile on some rice and a piece of tuna belly, roll it up and into the mouth it goes. It’s too bad that the quality of the tuna belly was not top-notch.
Char grilled eel temaki (€11.40), on the other hand, was lovely with the right texture and the right flavor.
Jap burger (€5.60) was a soft fluffy homemade steamed bread topped with beef, ginger, cucumber, and shiso. I’m not sure what was mixed in with the beef (lots of fat and tendon?), but it was exceedingly tender and not at all what you would expect of a burger patty.
Stir fried baby vegetables (€8.90), a melange of baby carrots, pokchoy, shuen kai, choi sum, ginger, etc.
Desserts – yuzu ice cream (€3.90) and yuzu dorayaki (€3.90). Erm, tasty, but the portions were way too small.
Dinner at Dos Palillos wasn’t mind-blowing, but was punctuated with pleasant surprises here and there, and definitely satiated my need to deviate from Spanish tapas. My only complaint is that the portions are very, very small, making the meal a rather pricey one. Still, I would be very interested in trying the tasting menu on the restaurant side to see how the experience would differ…
