Just how preposterous is Tickets? It’s been open three years
now and it still takes some serious string-pulling to get a table. From the bell-boy
uniforms (the door-girl wears a ringmaster’s topper), to the three-language
menus, our waitress’s opaque patter, and the carefully-created air of
controlled mayhem, the place has the feel of a chaotic pantomime in a
provincial theatre.
The décor is a jaunty post-retro hotchpotch of big top and music-hall:
brickwork, a 1960s bare-bulb cinema marquee above the bar, 19th-century
playbill menu graphics – all cheekily ironic. There’s even a hint of send-up in
the wait staff’s greeting,‘Hi, I’m Beatriz and I’m here to look after you this evening’.
So there you sit, trying to make sense of it all, getting
nowhere with the menu and its daft divisions – so what is the difference between
tapa and finger-food, and how big is this dish, and what the hell is an airbag
baguette anyway? And there’s a guy in the middle of the room dressed like a
flunkey doing something with dry ice (and dry ice is as dated as Gordon
Ramsay’s swearing). After five minutes of Alice-in-Wonderland back and forth
with Beatriz– she’s explaining spherification and thinks we’re being wilfully
dim – she says, ‘why don’t we start with the olives?’ and we snap our menus
shut and settle back to enjoy the Cava.
Jaunty post-retro hotchpotch: Tickets |
Tickets, the brainchild of the Adrià brothers – Ferran (of
El Bulli Foundation and whose late
restaurant was just up the coast in Rosas), and Albert, who have said the time
for high-concept fine dining is past – opened in 2011 and is still the hottest molecular bar in Barcelona. It’s supplanted the achingly avant-garde Tapas 24, now seen
as very año pasado. ‘A tourist trap,’ one of my local colleagues sniffed. Tickets
has a four-month waiting list. It's also got a list of sponsors as long as your arm, from Estrella Damm and Riedel to Coca-Cola, Sharp, Lavazza and half a dozen media companies.
From the moment you arrive and see the dismembered penny-farthing
in the window, you know you’re in for a performance. Indeed, the menu tells us
the whole affair is an ‘Adrià Entertainment’ presented by the ‘Tickets Theatre
Company’. It all seems rather over-produced, and we’re just beginning to be
dismayed by the paucity of the wine list (short and unimaginative), when
something wonderful happens. The food arrives.
Just what the hell is an air baguette? |
First, the spherified olives. Spherification is the first
trick you learn at molecular cookery school. Invented by Ferran Adria 10 years
ago, it’s an alchemical process by which a solid is liquified then re-formed
into a sphere when suspended in a calcium bath.
When done to an olive it produces a thing looking very much
like an olive but whose greenness is somehow greener, as if we’re suddenly in
Technicolor, whose texture (they explode on your tongue) is like cooled, molten
salted honey, and with a flavour of such delicate salinity and umami meatiness
that it’s like eating the first olive ever.
Then we’re entranced by the ‘Edible cocktail’ a slice of
Granny Smith marinaded in beetroot juice and fennel, an appley crunch releasing
a delicious cool draft on the palate. Then cod crackers, crisp saltiness and a
slow-developing, intense flavour of fish.
The oysters have a lovely smokiness and concentrated taste
of the sea, and the ‘pearl’ – spherified wakame seaweed – detonates
deliciously. Then there are the air baguettes, little wands of hollowed-out
loaf wrapped in pata negra ham, and mini-air-baguettes filled with foamed
manchego, and anchovies on toast with tomato and fake scales of edible silver. Then
cumin-marinaded 6-hour pork which is so melting it has to be scooped up in your
fingers.
A mild disappointment was lobster with pimento sauce, fine
and picante but lacking in the
surprise factor that had everyone flocking to Rosas in the first place.
This is the law of diminishing returns: you approach every dish expecting
fireworks. There’s no place for the merely delicious.
Pipette: passé |
The puddings are fun, delicious, slightly dated (any dish with
a self-basting plastic pipette...), but still the flavours have us guessing –
was that verbena with the coconut ice cream?
Tickets is a mini-Bulli, a kids’ version of the molecular Mecca,
cheaper, faster, slightly easier to
get a table, with a wine list that is frankly unchallenging. What I loved about
it was the exuberance and the lack of cynicism. Everything’s done with a
knowing wink, but it’s an inclusive joke (pace the sponsors). I get the feeling it could only work
in Barcelona – that Londoners would regard it with ennui and a raised eyebrow, thinking they'd seen through it and not realising the joke is that it's already been seen through. And so the whirligig of irony runs round and round. The crowd’s interesting,
definitely not the hipster bunch it would attract in Shoreditch or
Clapton, rather more office workers and hen-parties. The room erupts into Happy
Birthday at one stage, as staff bring a cake and candles. Very uncool, and rather sweet. As one of my party said, ‘you
can only do this sort of thing if your second name’s Adrià’.
The bill for four with two bottles of wine, and four glasses
of liquoreux, came to just shy of €300.
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