Global Life: A New Food Mecca

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Drive into almost any town in Spain, and you'll see road signs pointing to restaurants and hotels. But if you arrive in Sant Celoni, just north of Barcelona, seeking one of the finest restaurants in the country, you'll be out of luck. The place is tucked away on a narrow street off the main square; most of the townsfolk are familiar with it but may be scant help if your Spanish is so lame that you confuse the words nombre and número.

The obscurity of Can Fabes seems odd since the restaurant is one of only four in Spain to have earned three Michelin stars and routinely draws an international clientele. Also unusual: chef-owner Santi Santamaria will probably come over to your table and say, "Hola." Not many world-famous chefs do that; most aren't even in their kitchens on a daily basis, since they're too busy empire building. But Santamaria, whose restaurant occupies the first floor of his family's ancestral home, takes an Old World pride in his place--while serving up slick modern dishes like calamari with pumpkin purée and pigeon in phyllo pastry sprinkled with confectioner's sugar.

The new foodie mecca, Spain draws culinary pilgrims the way France did a generation ago. Hit the Basque town of San Sebastián, and you'll be surrounded by restaurants serving inventive, often experimental cuisine: places like Arzak, a three-star Michelin legend, and in the countryside, Etxebarri, where chef Victor Arguinzoniz takes such pride in his grilled meats and fishes that he bakes his own charcoal out of different tree branches every morning in an oxygen-controlled oven. At the Guggenheim in Bilbao, a prodigy named Josean Martínez Alija, 27, is winning accolades for dishes like roasted tomatoes stuffed with baby squid and candied cod in garlic oil. Most famously, there is Ferrán Adrià of El Bulli, two hours north of Barcelona in the seaside town of Roses. A food alchemist, Adrià has inspired a generation of chefs with his scientific approach to cooking: rendering gelatins out of seaweed powder, combining flavors like salmon and coffee, using nitrous oxide gas to create sauces airier than foam. Unfortunately, Adrià, 43, closes shop for half the year (to run food experiments in his lab) and can honor just 8,000 of the 100,000 table requests he gets annually.

If you're shut out of El Bulli and stuck in Madrid, don't fret. The city boasts plenty of innovative places. One of them is La Broche in the Miguel Angel hotel, whose executive chef, Sergi Arola, apprenticed with Adrià. Dining at La Broche is an immersion in formalism. The color scheme of the dining room is sci-fi white, from the rectangular tables to the window blinds. The wait staff is all business (as is most of the clientele). The food, accelerating in flavor and intensity through a meal, seems conjured in Adrià's lab: breaded fois custard cream with apricot jam, baked skate with clam aioli, smoked beef with "ancient mustard" foam. In cooking as in science, not all lab experiments succeed: an unappealing appetizer of Iberian porkpie with truffled duck liver consisted mostly of morsels of fat. But considering the rich and varied fare dished out, the fact that we didn't feel bloated at the end of this meal counts as a triumph for the chef.