La Broche (Madrid, Spain)

Two weeks ago, my wife and I had an excellent meal at La Broche in Madrid. La Broche, located in the Hotel Occidental Miguel Angel, was started by Sergi Arola and Angel Palacios, both of whom trained under Ferran Adrià of El Bulli.

Arola left in 2004 to start his own eponymous restaurant in Barcelona, and I believe Palacios left to helm La Broche Miami, so I'm not sure who was overseeing the kitchen while we were there (Palacios's name is still on the menu & website as executive chef)...but from what I read, it sounds like whoever it is is carrying on Palacios's legacy of cuisine that's Adrià-inspired, but at the same time a bit simpler & down to earth.



Our reservation was for 10pm (the normal dinner time of Madrileños), but we got to the hotel at 9:45pm. We were welcomed into the restaurant very graciously and were told we were more than welcome to have a drink before dinner. However, the restaurant was very quiet & empty, so we opted for a drink at the hotel bar...which was very quiet & empty After a glass of rather terrible Ribera del Duero in the aging, garish, faux-Victorian lobby bar, we headed back into the restaurant.

The decor in the restaurant is, well, non-existent:


I'm assuming this is to keep the surroundings from detracting from the food. There's also no background music. Way-too-quiet restaurants usually make me uneasy & reluctant to talk, but somehow we stopped noticing after a few minutes.

We were brought a stark white wooden box, which contained the menu & wine list (they folded up & slid inside...they kind of resembled the cardboard, folding case that U2's "Achtung, Baby" album originally came in), and chose the full tasting menu, and ordered a couple of glasses of cava to enjoy before the meal started.

The sommelier came & chatted, asked us what we liked, and helped us narrow down our wine choices to two Ribera del Dueros, a 1996 and a 2003. Since it was a special occasion (an anticipated amazing experience, and our one fancy meal in Spain), and to make up for the awful wine we had before dinner, we went with the 1996 Arzuaga Ribera del Duero Gran Reserva. It was a phenomenal wine...subtle, smooth, full-bodied taste but without leaving a coating in my mouth...yeah, I'm terrible at describing wines, but when we first tasted it we both made comments along the lines of, "ah, so THIS is what a properly-aged, truly good wine is supposed to taste like!"

Then came the meal (sorry for some of the blurry pictures...I didn't want to use the flash, and was using trying be a bit discreet while using a point & shoot):

Amuse bouche

(L to R) Don't remember what the white fried things are, tempura-fried morcilla chips,
little balls of tortillas de patata, buttered popcorn lollipops.

Boletus with ham

Purée of boletus mushroom, some sort of gelée, and jamón ibérico.

Lentils with duck liver

A variety of lentils, garbanzo beans and raisins on a very smooth duck liver paté.

At this point, the bread service came out:

A couple different kinds of artisan bread, butter, some fantastic olive oil, and two kinds of flavored sea salt.

Beef head and leg

A terrine of slow-cooked beef, topped with demi-glace, surrounded by cubes of marrow gelée

Artichoke with duck liver and champagne

A cylinder of artichoke heart filled with duck liver paté, surrounded by champagne foam.

Lamb sweedbreads with squids

Squids and lamb sweetbreads, both cooked a la plantxa, with a lamb-based sauce & squid ink. This was our favorite dish of the night...the grilled taste of the squid & sweetbreads with the oceany squid ink was fantastic.

Fin ra with "gaspachuelo"

Skate fillet with two steamed, gazpacho-filled pot stickers on a pile of guacamole.

Chicken with crayfish

Little rounds of chicken white meat (I'm sure there's a culinary term for this), chunks of crawfish meat, fried crawfish bodies (legs and whatnot), chicken skin chicharrones, and "creole" sauce. The waiter specifically said this was inspired by Louisiana cuisine.

Thyme veil

A very thin thyme leave, stuffed with...something slightly sweet...and cooked like a pot sticker, with a citrus foam. Unfortunately I don't remember what the orange stuff was either.

Pistachio sponge cake with yoghurt ice cream

A rather odd (and frankly, slightly dry) spiral of of pistachio sponge cake, a carrot "cookie", a quenelle of lightly-sweetened frozen yogurt, and a cylinder of something that almost seemed freeze-dried.

Cocoa

A sugar shell filled with cocoa sorbet, topped with unsweetened cocoa powder, on a pile of cocoa sugar. My wife absolutely loved this one, because of the dark chocolate-type flavors.

After dessert we enjoyed some espressos (con leche for her, sin leche for me):

A cart containing 10 bins of dark chocolate-coated nibbles was rolled up to our table, and we were told to choose whichever ones we were interested in...we went with dark chocolate-coated crystallized ginger, and dark chocolate-coated unflavored pop rocks. A scoop of each was put into the small dishes seen above in the center of the table.

We wandered out of there around 1am, and headed straight back to the hotel, full and happy. The overall experience was like a cross between Alinea and Moto...all in all, it was an excellent evening.

Edited to dump Picasa for Flickr

Wow. What an interesting looking place. Last time I was in Spain (and we're talking 40 years ago -- I was still a child) your choices were much more traditional. Things have changed.

Of all the dishes, the artichoke and duck liver that "calls" to me most, at least based on photo and caption. Though nothing looks bad. Thanks for sharing.

Cynthia wrote:Of all the dishes, the artichoke and duck liver that "calls" to me most, at least based on photo and caption. Though nothing looks bad. Thanks for sharing.

That was a great dish also...the duck liver was very smooth & mild-mannered, to the point that even my liver-hating wife enjoyed it (much to my chagrin...she hated the chicken liver at Schwa so much that I got to eat her dish in addition to mine )

My only complaint was that it was rather tough to eat without making a mess. When I tried to cut into the artichoke tower, I mangled it a bit and ended up with a semi-cut, collapsed cylinder with duck liver mousse all over the plate.