Giving back to the community – I booked this reservation a year in advance randomly and planned a whole trip around it. Disfrutar is such an absurd, preposterous, incredible experience. If you think you’re serious about food, about cooking, you should go to Disfrutar and see just how high the mountaintop is.
There are plenty of reasonable complaints – 30 dishes is way too many. Reddit doesn’t even let you upload that many photos. We walked 20k steps that day and skipped lunch, but we still had to ask them to slow down twice. We were literally there from opening to close and I could still feel my enjoyment of the later dishes fading. I never want to hear any fat American jokes again, an elderly spanish couple next to us speed ran the whole menu. There’s a lot of stuff that feels like it would be gimmicky if it wasn’t so good, and some stuff that still feels gimmicky. I understand why they do it – forcing the audience to do stuff makes them engage with the food, takes them from being a passive spectator to an active participant, trying to be less “rich people enjoying a spectacle without thinking about it”, but like… cmon.
I would say relative to other 3* restaurants I’be been to, the highs were higher but the lows were much lower. At per se, everything was an 8+ but disfrutar had more 10/10 moments. Personally, I felt like it was 75% hits, 15% “ehhhhh I see what you’re going for, but nope”, and 10% “I think this is straight up bad”.
Highlights
– The creme fraiche and caviar croquette literally made me tear up when I bit into it. They do so much “gimmicky” cooking and every now and then they’re just like “nah we’re better at normal cooking than you too”. It tastes like heaven.
– The deconstructed pesto carbonara with eel that is so perfectly cooked that it resembles pork belly fat. I couldn’t believe I was eating meat.
– The aged balsamic vinegar and “pan con tomate”. Definitely on the “would be gimmicky if it wasn’t so good” side of things, but I love how it plays with your senses and pushes you texturally and temperaturally? Is there even a word for that? They might be so far ahead of the curve there’s no way to express what they’re doing.
– I really liked how aggressively Galician the whole experience is, from the tiling to the food. In a world where there’s so many generic global fine dining restaurants that are disconnected from any sense of place, it’s nice to have a restaurant that is so deeply rooted in local tastes.
Lowlights
– The clear pasta, the texture is just weird. No idea how this has lasted so long on their menu.
– The corn and foie gras behind the mirror – I get it, play with all your senses, food is visual taken to the extreme, don’t care I don’t think that flavor combo is good.
– Smoked apple cider. Cool concept, cool process, don’t know if the final outcome was better than regular apple cider. It is entirely possible I can’t taste ‘smoke’ as much as most people.
Caveats
– Did the alcohol pairing, and Disfrutar’s style of pairing is to double down on flavors and concepts instead of complementing them. It’s more experiential for sure – where else are you going to get a mushroom shochu with your mushroom dish, and I look back on it probably more memorably than a traditional pairing, just know that it’s coming.
by Miserycorde