Better than El Bulli? | Welcome to Can Jubany

It is a rare event for me to be ahead of the curve; overtaking the Zeitgeist requires a purring Bentley Mulsanne, not an Oyster Card. But like those pioneers who “discovered” El Bulli, or returned with northern tales of Basque Country pintxos, I bring news of a restaurant that awaits its audience. One without a globetrotting chef, a glitzy profile in “The World’s Top Restaurants” or even, heaven forfend, a Twitter Frenzy to its name.

Can Jubany’s time may have come, for its joyous blend of food, culture and family. We have done with the science lab pyrotechnics on the plate for their own sake.  It’s worth remembering that for four decades hardly anyone noticed El Bulli, but as Ferran Adrià rose from head chef to co-owner, the fireworks ignited. Recipe books had been thrown out and the kitchen was on its way to inventing nearly two thousand new dishes (now available to you in book form) electrifying the palates of a lucky few out of the two million trying to book every summer. Its rise coincided with the annual PR conceit “World’s Top 50 Restaurants” getting into its stride and El Bulli took the no.1 spot 5 times: half top banana, half weirdo curiosity. At the end of its reign in 2011, it had altered the very axis of haute cuisine: Spain was it.

Furthermore, when Ferran Adrià closed his doors to the sound of rapt applause, promising to re-open in 2015 as a foundation to “keep the spirit alive”, he left a legacy that included  30 books, a Simpsons guest appearance, a movie in development, and an exhibition: The Art of Food.

The world has moved on, and this is what we want: Catalan food in Catalunya

In Barcelona, one and a half million people queued and paid to see this curated homage of press clippings, plasticine models of the food (made by Ferran himself), cutlery, crockery and screeds of text. It transferred to London’s Somerset House in mid summer and not surprisingly, at the opening party, Adrià and his team were whooping with delight. They even put New York’s Danny Meyer in the shade for a second as he opened Shake Shack UK over the road at the same moment (whispers: if nothing else confirming London’s status as restaurant capital of the world).

The exhibition was a declaration of modern historic import, but slightly odd: there was a table where, through the magic of overhead projection, an El Bulli dinner for two was placed before you, to be consumed by off-camera diners wielding what appeared to be your knife and fork. I found that slightly unsettling, reminiscent of a tale I was told from Moscow during Glasnost when the only good food was to be had in hard currency stores. Not only did customers queue, but a black market sprang up so that people could go inside and look at the food, before handing back the dollar they had paid, with interest, at the exit. The entrance fee to The Art of Food was £10. You didn’t get it back as you left.

This was was food porn at its most graphic, its most explicit, and it has left the stage, possibly forever. Question is, has it left a vacuum? Is there a successor?

After a brief sortie to Northern Europe, the “Best Restaurant” paper crown has been brought back to Catalunya to El Celler de Can Roca, just 60km from El Bulli. It’s a superb operation deserving of every accolade — just try getting a table — but in Barcelona recently, I noticed something within the recommendations I had been given for the Roca brothers’ gaff; a sub group had appeared. It had started in London, but was mostly local, Catalan, and particularly knowledgeable. “Go to Can Jubany,” they whispered, as if breaking a code of secrecy.

Vic (pronounced Bic) is an hour out of Barcelona, an unprepossessing little town famed for its sausages and Saturday morning market, both of which are superb. That’s it.

Out of town, at the Calldetenes roundabout off the C-25, there is an exit to what appears to be a Harvester, a car park packed with saloons, and some greenery. The walk to the door changes things a little: a sea of lavender, the building itself – a 17^th century farmhouse – and glimpses of vegetable gardens, orchards, and fields bordered by hedgerows.

This is the home of Nandu and Anna Jubany, where they raise their children and, a few years ago, expanded to create Can Jubany – one of Catalonia’s finest restaurants. The exterior is ancient, the interior super modern, a series of small white rooms (“you’re seated in what was our TV room,” explains Anna) with beautifully crafted fixtures and fittings, smooth contours and furniture afloat on the walls rather than freestanding. Most of the dining is upstairs, the ground floor now given over to two vast kitchens – savoury and sweet – affording most of the tables a picture postcard view over the surrounding farmland.

While the actual ingredients are restrained by the seasons, the menu at Can Jubany presents an array of options: two courses for local businessmen, families splurging on extended choices, and foodies opting for a variety of tasting menus.

Nandu himself is in the kitchen. He began at his parent’s restaurant nearby and moved quickly to Madrid’s Cabo Mayor and Arzak in San Sebastián. He’s been on the boil in Catalunya since. People love him: he makes sure everyone is catered for, and nobody leaves without the magic.

On arrival we were quickly befriended by Anna, who made sure we were happy with tap water, a young, fresh Abadal Picapoll from around the corner (sharp and fruity pear rather than acidic) and…. well this is all pretty normal so far, isn’t it? Let’s step on the gas…

“In fact,” she enthused, “after work we all go down to the club in Calldetenes and dance till 4am. Wanna come?”

The first fifteen minutes were a blaze of colour, of surprise, of taste explosions. Enormous strands of crunchy suckling pig crackling, savoury, flavoursome and light, followed quickly by a customised miniature steel butcher’s rack hung with dolls-house sausages, cured at Fussimanya, two miles away. Tiny customised versions of Vic’s most famous product followed, chewy with the concentrated savoury flavour of a long slow cure, then were replaced with a white football — a large sphere of the village’s blue cheese, hollow, paper thin, frozen by nitrogen (a nod to old Adrià) — followed by a second: his, and Spain’s, favourite jamon, Joselito, brought wrapped around “air baguettes” with an intense essence of cherry gazpacho, a sliver of sardine and “cloud of olive oil”. The locale’s best produce, transformed while retaining concentration of flavour, exciting and provocative, served swiftly by a young local staff who’re joyously, feverishly, wholly in tandem with the kitchen.

So Nandu, when he feels like it, can do the fireworks. Woo.

The mains, which are shared around all the various menus (everyone gets the same quality of food, just in different forms) scores heavily on all fronts. Puffed pastry with foie and caramelised apple comes as a palette of shades from a glossy photograph, prepared with precision and TLC, tasting like it should – bold, pronounced, complementary flavours. The apples are grown outside the door, the foie is curled into delicate rolls, the puffed pastry light as the proverbial feather.

Free range chicken cannelloni with spring mushrooms in cream doesn’t sound much beyond  a Masterchef entry, but again the colours and tastes are transformative. A slice of hake cooked at 65 degrees melted in the mouth; the accompanying “pumpkin gnocchi” had been gelatinised to retain flavour, but made light too. After a particularly satisfying square of crunchy suckling pig with “calçots”, a Catalan hybrid of leek and onions, I discovered that the livestock too is reared outside the door.

This is the “return to roots” branch of Spanish cooking — regresar a las raíces – which takes traditional ingredients and reworks them into modern cuisine. The matching of flavours on the plate – rarely more than four at a time – is the key. Forget the explosion of traditions, forget the import of rare Japanese seaweeds, forget the foam. The world has moved on, and this is what we want: Catalan food in Catalunya.

The desserts, which come from their own kitchen, are descendants of the Willy Wonka school of presentation. Utterly desirable, persuasive, seductive. Thankfully I had been restrained on our menu otherwise I’d be signing off here as Mr Creosote, Monty Python’s fat diner who explodes after one last wafer thin mint – in my case a millimetre thick sliver of dried, intense pineapple from pinya colada which could single handedly revive the fortunes of that now dead cocktail.

Despite not knowing us from Adam (and Eve), our waitress volunteered to show us around the extensive vegetable and herb gardens, since we had shown more than a little enthusiasm for the ingredients over lunch. During our wander she explained that the staff were ecstatic to be working there: they worked together and played together. “In fact,” she enthused, “after work we all go down to the club in Calldetenes and dance till 4am. Wanna come?”

At their peak, if you ever experienced the sheer happiness, the absolute joy, of El Bulli or The Fat Duck, the unbridled enthusiasm of that waitress suddenly encapsulated it all perfectly.

A round of applause please. The world has moved on, and it’s time to savour the return to our roots. C

Can Jubany, Carretera de Sant Hilari, s/n, 08506 Calldetenes, Barcelona, Spain
+34 938 89 10 23; canjubany.com