Barcelona foodie experience at Table by Ona

What is food, anyway?

We were once single-celled organisms, floating in the primal goop.

For the longest time, simple life survived on carbon compounds, or making energy from sunlight.

When photosynthesis grew boring, a couple billion years later, an amoeba decided to swallow some nearby algae, and just like that: “food” was born.

It’s gotten a bit more complex in recent years.

But from that amoeba’s first meal to your Sunday afternoon paella, it’s just a few more leaps of logic and faith.

As someone who has no idea how to grow rice or saffron, or how to scour the bottom of the ocean for crustaceans, I take these things mostly on faith: the ingredients appear in the supermarket, somehow, and I buy them.

At home, I touch a button, and the stove heats up.

But sometimes I think: what are we even doing?

How did food get so complicated?

A bunch of mostly-hairless primates, creating vast logistical networks so we can eat lobster with a squeeze of lemon on our birthdays, flying pieces of meat around the world in metal tubes for consumption elsewhere. It’s bizarre.

On that note, I recently had an interesting meal that I wanted to talk about.

A month or so ago, a new guy from Australia came to the gym.

Talking to him after class, I learned he was re-doing a warehouse up the street.

Re-doing a warehouse isn’t too unusual in Barcelona, with real estate like it is, but I asked some follow-up questions. And the result was that my new jiu jitsu buddy Jack was a fancy chef starting a new project in Poblenou: one table, six people, and an elaborate tasting menu.

Now I’m the kind of guy who usually runs a mile when he hears the words “tasting menu”.

But as you may know, I’m married to Morena, and Morena is a foodie.

She talks about food. She knows the names of dozens of dishes and ingredientes in Chinese, Japanese and Korean – languages she otherwise doesn’t speak. She watches videos of old ladies making noodles, and has opinions about every type of chili paste in Asia.

I’m the opposite. I can eat steak every day. And I would, if it were cheaper. As it is, I sometimes meal prep chicken breasts for the whole week, or buy salmon filets in bulk for freezing.

This isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy food. I do. But I think of it more as protein, fat and carbs. Eating (and cooking) are maintenance tasks that happen to be enjoyable.

In other words, I’m well-fed, but not a foodie.

An experience for foodies in Barcelona

Jack’s project is called Table by Ona, and it’s in the up-and-coming Poblenou neighborhood, where hipsters meet over specialty coffee in old industrial buildings, and the sight of new office buildings under construction is a constant.

And the concept is as I described: one table, six people, and a long tasting menu.

I signed up for their opening night. (Ninety euros per person, pay in advance, location undisclosed. Once you’ve spent some time sweaty and grunting with exertion on top of another man, supporting his new business is something of a no-brainer.)

At jiu jitsu a few days before the event, Jack describes the experience they’re putting together as “the American hipster’s dream”.

“Well, then,” I say, “I’m the American hipster.”

He laughs. “No you’re not.” Then we roll around on the ground and try to choke each other for six minutes.

So it is that at 9 PM on a Friday, Morena and I go up the stairs of a nondescript Poblenou building and arrive at Table by Ona.

There’s Ethiopian lounge music playing on vinyl. Long candles dotted around the room for ambience. A lamp over the one table made of thick, handmade paper.

“I made the table myself. It’s a piece of German oak we brought with us.”

Jack sits us down.

His partner Aniela (a fashion designer from Portland, Oregon) serves us drinks, and Morena starts chatting with everyone.

Soon, we begin.

Foodie fun at Table by Ona

The first dish is a bit of fennel with some slices of a tiny lemon-like fruit, swimming in white liquid.

“The yogurt”, announces Jack, “is an homage to Ayran, the Turkish drink”.

Jack hovers over the next dish in the background, adding minute amounts of sauce with an eye-dropper, looking like a heavily-tattooed mad scientist in his lab.

After that, there’s a tuna tart, and some white asparagus that’s covered in an emulsion made of fat from the same tuna. There’s a tiny skewer stuck through two pieces of glazed Iberian pork belly.

It’s all very good, but I realize after about five minutes that I’m not the target audience for things like this.

Morena’s in heaven, nerding out on the various exotic edibles – “Oh my god, where did you get Buddha’s Hand?”

(Buddha’s Hand is an oddly shaped, fingery citrus fruit. Google it.)

Life before foodies

Growing up back in Arizona, we didn’t have much food culture.

It was several miles from our house to the nearest supermarket. There was no Turkish anything, as far as I can recall, and tuna came in cans – but we did eat a lot of Mexican food.

And, as is common in former British colonies, when cooking, we boiled our vegetables with nothing, cooked our beef till it was grey in the center, and found numerous other ways to ruin what must have been perfectly good food.

I’m sure other types of Americans had fine culinary traditions they’d brought from the home country.

Middle-class anglo-saxons like us ate bland mush and leathery meat for dinner.

Often, bread with butter was the high point of the meal for me. A growing teenager, I’d eat whatever my mom had cooked, then have slice after slice of bread and butter till I was full. When the Safeway started selling freshly-made baguettes, some time in the late 90s, it was a huge revelation.

In other words, we weren’t foodies. I don’t know if anybody was, back then.

Offending Moses and Yahweh, probably

Jack brings out veal tartare.

“Eventually we’d like to work closely with the farms so we can boil the veal in the milk of its own mother, which of course is totally not Kosher.”

You probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you how often I think of the biblical injunction not to boil a calf in its mother’s milk. Mostly, I think, “What kind of person would do such a thing?” But I guess we’ve found one.

(Morena, at this juncture, would like to point out that I have enjoyed plenty of beef stroganoff in the last several years. And if we’re splitting hairs, I suppose that browning pieces of beef in butter would also be not kosher.)

According to thetorah.com and other sites, there’s quite a lot more to be said about boiling suckling calves. It’s even possible that the whole thing is a big misinterpretation and that Yahweh is actually fine with us mixing meat and dairy. Also, I’m not Jewish, so I shouldn’t care at all.

Next up, some beetroot that’s been cooked in its own dirt.

After cooking, the beets are peeled – nobody’s making you eat dirt at these things. But for a moment I wonder: what if the next big thing is kids eating bowls of dirt?

Coming soon to a brunch spot near you.

Fun with blowtorches

The conversation around the table is, logically, about food. Jack’s blasting our next course with a blowtorch, which makes Morena think that she’d like to own a culinary blowtorch of her own.

“What would we use it for?” I ask.

“All sorts of things!” she replies, as if the many culinary uses of a blowtorch were obvious.

But in the end, she can only think of lighting candles, and of burning the sugar on top of crème brûlée. So maybe she doesn’t need one after all.

“My dad had a blowtorch when I was growing up,” I say. “It was for joining copper pipes.”

The courses keep coming. Here’s some mackerel with apple sauce, accompanied by a slice of apple covered in mackerel sauce – made from the smoked heads of the same mackerel we’re eating.

“Mackerel is funny,” says Jack. “I’d never tried it till I got to Spain. In Australia, we just use mackerel as bait to catch bigger fish.”

Indeed, I find this whole thing to be pretty hilarious, but for other reasons.

A shoutout to my ancestors

My grandfather Henry was in New Guinea, in World War II, building bridges and runways.

Probably the last male of his line to have visible abs, he complained about the food out in the Pacific Theater. Mutton so full of worms that if you tried to pick the worms out, you’d be left without any mutton.

Several men in his unit died of botulism.

And here I am, eating a two-square-inch piece of scorpionfish, living the 21st century foodie’s dream in Spain.

The final course is a couple of slices of duck breast with a layer of fat along the edge.

I think this is a take on magret de pato, a popular thing around here that I never order. Jack’s version, of course, is better than the one I had years ago. Because he’s very good at all this.

“Back in Berlin”, he says, “we made 50 courses a day”.

Jack worked at Ernst in Berlin before moving to Barcelona. Apparently, Ernst is (or was) a nine-seat counter restaurant that people would fly in from around the world to visit. The menu changed daily. Farm to table, etc.

I guess the idea of this sort of place is to buy your seasonal produce in the morning, then sit down and decide how you’re going to cook it. Some of the ingredients for tonight were foraged up on Tibidabo.

I wonder what fancy chefs eat at home.

Barcelona Foodie Experiences: spinning ice cream

Finally we’re almost done.

There’s a strange noise coming from behind a curtain. I just assume Jack’s started washing the dishes, but one of the other guests (a chef herself) suggests he might be using a Pacojet.

And he is. First, some sorbet as a palate cleanser. Morena claims it was made of grapefruit – my photographic memory for food seems to be failing me in this case.

For dessert, we have ice cream made of duck eggs that’s “an homage to Ben and Jerry’s”. It’s been spun in the Pacojet – a machine that spins ice-cream at 2000 RPM until it’s light and fluffy.

I wasn’t aware that foods could be an homage to other foods. But I’m sure Ben and Jerry would be flattered.

What kind of foodie are you?

Food is a part of people’s identity.

Whether you’re a broke college student eating packaged ramen noodles or an OnlyFans girl in Dubai who eats nothing but gold-leaf hamburgers, your food choices are part of what makes you you.

Culture tells people what to eat, and how, and when.

Spain wouldn’t be Spain without all its wonderful cuisine.

But beyond the basic premise that Americans eat hamburgers and Spaniards eat tortilla de patatas, there are plenty of cultural dos and don’ts regarding food that we often just take to be basic “facts”.

Is mackerel a food, or is it bait to catch better fish? Can we have noddles for breakfast, or should we reach for a box of cereal? Do we cook veal in milk? Or in olive oil? Or do we reject veal entirely?

Interesting questions.

I also find it fascinating how some things go from “basically garbage” to “expensive and hipsterish” to “totally mainstream” – when the only thing that’s really changed is people’s ideas about what’s good to eat.

I’m a man of simple tastes – a stoic, if you will – so I’m completely unqualified to write about fine dining experiences. Also, mainstream food and travel writing makes me gag.

But I will say that I enjoyed my evening at Table by Ona. And if you’re a foodie (American or otherwise) who dreams of seventeen-course tasting menus, by all means go to ona.restaurant and reserve your spot.

Or you could follow Jack K Tonkin on Instagram. If you do go, tell him I sent you.

Yours,

Daniel AKA Mr Chorizo.

P.D. While we’re on the topic, what is a hipster, exactly? I usually say I definitely am a hipster, because no real hipster would ever admit that’s what he is. But really, I think I’m more of a podcast bro. What about you? Hit me up right here in the comments… Thanks!