This Girona restaurant serves up brutalism and six-course desserts

Set in a Nineteenth-century fortress on the hilly outskirts of Girona, north-west Spain, a brand new restaurant evokes the fantastic thing about uncooked supplies with a rugged but refined contact. Esperit Roca is a part of a gastronomical centre by Spain’s famend restaurateur trio, the Roca brothers, in a distant spot of northern Catalonia providing views throughout mountains, woodland and sea.

‘It’s a privileged a part of the Mediterranean,’ says head chef Joan Roca. ‘We’ve ecosystems of untamed merchandise, with good agriculture, livestock and fishing.’ His new advanced additionally homes a 16-bedroom lodge and can open a culinary analysis academy in future.

Wallpaper* dines at Esperit Roca, Girona

The temper: pure spirit with a rocky contact

Stone, concrete and wooden type the brand new restaurant’s interiors, with impartial shades of gray and inexperienced. It’s the work of Girona-based designer Andreu Carulla, who wished to exude a way of nature with an austere, brutalist really feel.

Carulla sourced piedra de Girona – a limestone characterised by the tiny fossils in its textured floor – from native quarries to sculpt counters, lamps, tables and the bathrooms’ monolithic sculptural sinks. The items evoke the area’s rocky panorama whereas additionally echoing the unique citadel’s development, which makes use of the identical stone. ‘It’s not a noble materials,’ says the designer, ‘however we wished to raise it with craftsmanship.’

Customized-made furnishings consists of midcentury-inspired picket chairs and curved concrete benches seating diners in intimate alcoves. Vegetation sprouts from massive, cylindrical concrete pots, whereas curtains and overhead lamps are constructed from shade cloths utilized in native farming, a nod to the area’s rural traditions.

The meals: jaw-dropping flavours with ingenious type

Idea-driven dishes embody an ‘orange’ salad, the place mussels and sea urchins complement the citrus fruit, and a ‘trilogy’ of turbot cuts – fin, loin and carpaccio – every with a special remedy. Beautiful native lamb and prawns are stylishly plated up, and who knew a pumpkin might achieve this a lot: three differing types come wearing juice, oil and milk from the fruit.

One of many tasting menus provides simply two important programs however six desserts – it’s masterminded by pastry chef Jordi Roca, who shatters expectations of what puddings ought to be. One consists of black chanterelle and powdered pine; one other is infused with the aroma of previous books.

Diners enter by way of a large dome housing sommelier Josep Roca’s wine cellar, the place 80,000 bottles are shelved on an expansive, ephemeral-looking construction designed by Carulla from metal pipes totalling 20km in size.

Full the Esperit Roca expertise with spirits from the on-site distillery, crafted with flavours of gentian, mugwort and different aromatic native herbs.

Esperit Roca is situated at Carrer Main, Entrada 1, 17481 Sant Julià de Ramis, Girona, Spain; esperitroca.com