The small town of Sant Celoní some 50 kilometres from Barcelona was the birthplace in around the year 1400 of one of Catalunya’s greatest Gothic artists, Bernat Martorell. His graphic depictions of St Vincent receiving a roasting (and dreadful things being done to Santa Eulalia) can be admired in Barcelona’s superb museum of Catalan Art.
Six centuries on, Sant Celoní is home to an artist of a different kind, Santi Santamaría, one of Spain’s most celebrated chefs. His restaurant, El Racó de Can Fabes, is housed in a simple stone building around which a handful of scruffy streets have shuffled themselves into some semblance of order.
The welcome began for us well outside the house, as a smiling outrider waited on the corner to receive us off our train from Barcelona. The family home of the Santamarías for several generations, the building has been a restaurant since the days of Santamaría’s grandfather. (The fabes part of the restaurant’s name apparently evokes a legendary scrap between locals and Napoleonic troops; it also means beans - especially of the broad variety - which abound round here).
But beans, as we were to discover, are only a small part of the story. Can Fabes, a member of the select clan of three-star Michelins around the world, is a restaurant for people who take more than a passing interest in food and wine. The menus are - literally - works of art, designed by the artist Tapiès, each one numbered like the limited editions that they are. The wine list is an eclectic selection studded with treasures from the world’s finest vineyards, with some notable wines from Catalunya. The food is a supremely subtle alliance of earthy Catalan and maritime Mediterranean flavours and raw materials.
The Menu Prestigi gives a concise summary of Santamaría’s finely tuned skills and catholic tastes. Consisting of nine or ten exquisite mouthfuls of food - nuggets of this, morsels of that, never too much of anything - each dish bears the personal signature of the chef. (He describes it as una cocina de autor.)
The menu changes with dazzling frequency, reflecting Santamaría’s mood and the seasons of the year. Recent offerings included a silken lobster mousse under a slender mirror of aspic and a warm pea soup upon which was suspended a single sweet scallop, topped with a smattering of coarse salt. Aided by the complicitous sommelier (who instantly understood our wish to ‘drink locally’) we chose a Penedés Chardonnay from Albet i Noya, only recently out of its barrique and into bottle, fruity and discreetly oaky.
There was something about the combination of chipirones (baby squid) with various wild mushrooms (morels, ceps) and a suspicion of lentils which made the ensuing dish entirely memorable long after the event. Broad beans also made a timely appearance - minus not only their furry overcoats but their leathery skins too, which as any gardener-cook will know is a labour of love. They served as a bed for a mystery shellfish and some other unidentified, calf-based delicacy which in Britain would certainly be banned.
A chunk of lobster, its claw a brilliant coral against vivid green wild asparagus, reposed on a bed of sofrito, the classic Catalan confit of onions, garlic and tomatoes. A piece of scabbard fish (sabre) came with frog’s legs turned inside out, like Chinese chicken wings, with a pair of mangetout peas and a sternly reduced red wine jus. The barón of baby lamb, pink and succulent and served with leafy spinach, almost stole the show.
The remaining mouthfuls of Tempranillo (also from Albet i Noya) gave us the perfect excuse to test a selection of goat’s and cow’s milk cheeses from the area, which came with a gorgeous house bread, plump with raisins and pine nuts.
For a little pre-pudding there was an innocent ravioli of fresh strawberries with crème anglaise, followed - at a decent interval - by a grandiose chocolate conceit called a tubo de chocolate: a chocolate chimney of Gaudiesque proportions enclosing a seriously rich white chocolate mousse and an oval of milk chocolate sorbet on the side.
A glass of Moscatel from Navarra was grapey and sweet, but not burdensome. The petits fours fell into the category of distinctly superior (rather than superfluous calories at the end of a wonderful meal) and featured a giant, lightly orange-flavoured brandysnap, tuiles with pine nuts and some darkly bitter orange slices dunked in dark chocolate.
Lunch was rounded off with an invitation to visit the kitchens, visible through a huge glass window. We found 20 cooks beavering away in the kitchen on behalf of the mere 40 covers the restaurant holds. Such individual care and attention, such precision, such sheer artistry lifts a meal at Can Fabes into a special category.
Martorell’s works of art will live longer than the memory of a superlative meal could ever hope to do. But I like to think that the fifteenth-century artist, sitting down to table with Santamaría, would have had plenty to say to his Sant Celoní successor.
El Racò de Can Fabes, Sant Joan 6, 08470 Sant Celoní, Spain
Tel. +34 3 867 2851
