REIGN IN SPAIN FALLS MAINLY ON U.S. CHEFS

Bradley Ogden went to Europe for the first time carrying two pounds of blue cornmeal. The San Francisco chef was off to do a little cooking in Barcelona. “I wouldn’t have been so motivated to go,” he says, “if the rest of the group hadn’t been going, too.”

The group was merely five of America’s most famous chefs. They went at the invitation of the city of Barcelona, which is trying to promote interest in Catalan cooking. In exchange for a tour of the best restaurants of Barcelona, the city officials asked only one thing. They wanted the chefs to cook a meal--for absolutely everybody who counts in the Barcelona food world.

But when they left for Spain two weeks ago the chefs hadn’t a clue as to what sort of ingredients they would find when they got there or what kind of a kitchen they would have to cook in. None of them spoke Catalan. They had never collaborated on a meal before, and nobody knew if they would even be able to get along. “It sounded like an adventure!” says Ogden (Campton Place, San Francisco).

“It sounded crazy,” says Jonathan Waxman (Jams, New York). “I mean, these collaboration dinners are very hard to do.”

“If it hadn’t been this group,” adds Alice Waters (Chez Panisse, Berkeley), “I never would have gone.”

“I went,” says Lydia Shire (Seasons, Boston), “because I wondered what it would be like to work with Alice Waters. To me she’s an idol.”

Mark Miller (Coyote Cafe, Santa Fe) took the long view. “I agreed to do it,” he says, “because we need to prove that American cuisine has arrived. And what gives American cooking its strength is our ability to share ideas, work together and learn from one another.”

It is hard to imagine a more diverse group of people sharing ideas. Ogden, a farm-bred boy from upper Michigan, has gotten where he is by dint of sheer hard work. The father of three, he spent a good part of the trip worrying over the watch he wanted to buy his wife. Waxman, on the other hand, spent most of his time worrying over a way to get Ogden to France--if only for a day. Born in Berkeley, with a degree in music and a graduate degree in political science, New York’s most famous young chef is a jet-setter with a deceptively relaxed air.

There is nothing relaxed about Miller, who has a degree in anthropology and an insatiable appetite for culture. He devours monuments at an amazing rate--he can knock off three churches and four museums in a single afternoon. He has an opinion on almost everything. “Picasso had no sense of line,” he announced one night at dinner.

Lydia Shire keeps her opinions to herself, but not much escapes her. At the age of 20, she had three children and no money. This did not keep her from going to England, getting a degree from the Cordon Bleu and working her way to the top of the heap. She is friendly, calm and absolutely direct. Contrast that with Alice Waters, who is the opposite of direct. Used to being a star, she speaks in a small breathy voice and gets her own way through enormous charm--and by simply ignoring opposition.

Outside of the kitchen they have little in common. Yet this odd assortment of cooks spent a week together--eating Catalan food, choosing a menu, cooking a meal. They learned a lot about the culture, but in the end cooking in Spain proved to be a bigger challenge than any of them had bargained for.

MONDAY

It’s 4 in the morning in California, and some of the chefs have been flying for almost 24 hours. But it’s only 6 p.m. in Barcelona, and the chefs acknowledge neither fatigue nor jet lag. They are hungry. “I ate all the food on the plane,” says Waters, the queen of baby vegetables, “even that terrible tired spinach. But it wasn’t much.”

The first meal is memorable only because the restaurant is so quaint. It is after midnight when we finish, and clearly the reasonable thing to do would be to go to bed. “On Bradley’s first night in Europe?” says Mark incredulously. “Impossible.” So off we go to drink champagne and eat the quintessential Catalan dish, pan y tomaquet (thick slices of bread rubbed with halved tomatoes and drizzled with olive oil).

The bar closes at 3:30. Do we go to bed? Not a chance. We are off to look at the cathedral, all lit up at night. I suddenly realize that on this trip there will be a lot of food, a lot of wine, and very little sleep.

TUESDAY

The East Coast contingent has arrived; there is much kissing. These chefs seem less like rivals than co-conspirators in the good life. Before noon, Jonathan Waxman has led us into one of the little cocktail bars that are scattered throughout the city. The drink of the day is an extremely alcoholic concoction called a Pampa; it’s quite a breakfast.

We have lunch in the old city port, at a wonderful restaurant where the chefs cook in an open kitchen on a wood-burning stove. Before long we are up to our elbows in fish. There are baby octopuses and tiny squid, no larger than the tip of your little finger. There are fat grilled shrimps and esperdenas, a delicious local specialty (it is filet of slug). All through the meal the wine is passed, and before the afternoon is over, everybody is very merry.

That night THE DINNER comes up for the first time. We are at Eldorado Petit, the fanciest restaurant in Barcelona, eating a mixture of Catalan specialties like fabas a la Catalana (fava beans cooked with blood sausage), sweet shrimp cooked in sea water, and fideus rossejat, a sort of golden pasta. As a dish of red peppers stuffed with a mousse of snapper is put before him, Jonathan suddenly says, “The pimentos are wonderful; we should do something with them.”

It is past 1 when we leave the restaurant. Some of the group go sensibly to bed while the rest go off to drink Sidecars until the wee hours of the morning. In his absence, Mark and Jonathan discuss Bradley’s options for the future. He keeps getting offers to open his own restaurant. “Being a chef today is a very high-stakes game,” says Mark. “Bradley is at the peak of his powers as an American chef. He’s now worth 150 grand. In two years he may only be worth 75 grand.”

WEDNESDAY

The Mercado de San Jose is also called La Boqueria . There has been a market on this exact spot for many centuries. Today it is bustling and beautiful, the stalls neatly stacked with pyramids of fruit, bunches of vegetables, great bouquets of fluffy herbs. The chefs move through the market with little cries of joy.

“Look at those quail!” says Bradley, staring admiringly at the dark-fleshed birds. He calculates the cost and then says, “Fifty cents apiece? Can that be possible? We’ve got to do something with quail.”

Mark has found the baby goats, and he drives one poor butcher woman slightly crazy. The Catalans eat their goats so small that when the butchers take their knives to them they move through the soft bones without a sound. “Larger,” Mark keeps indicating with his hands, and she looks bewildered as she keeps getting bigger and bigger carcasses out of the cooler.

Jonathan is taken with some clams called Romeos. The fish monger pats their shells and they all stick out their little red tongues. Waxman stands there laughing, and the fish lady does it again, laughing with him.

Alice is cooing over wild garlic and asparagus. “I love their little lavender tips,” she says, stroking the bunches of fat white asparagus. She leans over to break off a baby bean and stick it in her mouth. The chefs move through the market grazing quietly, breaking off a leaf here, a bud there. The market people seem slightly stunned by this, and never make a move to stop them.

Lunch is another long, jolly affair, but it is not until later that THE DINNER is discussed. They wonder where they will get a grill. “With all the cobblestones lying around we could build our own little fireplace,” says Jonathan.

The food comes--meatballs in a dark sauce of squid ink, the flavor rough and wonderful. There is stewed salt cod and goat and then a dish of bull’s testicles, sliced and fried that causes shudders to go around the table. Mark refuses to taste them.

“Come on,” says Jonathan. Embarrassed, Mark tentatively takes a bite. “They taste just like Wiener schnitzel,” he says.

THURSDAY

Jonathan will later blame this particular lunch for the faults of THE DINNER. “Let’s face it; we were in a very bad restaurant when we planned the menu, and it was not the right place to think about it.” But think about it they do. Alice shoos some fried shrimp away from her (“the oil is old”), pulls out a little notebook and in her most businesslike voice says, “We have to decide about THE DINNER.”

“We should do a lot with vegetables,” says Jonathan. “We do a fresher version then they do here; they cook everything so much.”

“We’ve got to have some sort of raw fish,” adds Mark. “I could make a tuna tartare with chiles.”

Lydia says, “I’d like to something with calf brains.”

Alice doesn’t seem to even hear her. She says, “I think we should have a salad course because they don’t have that here.”

“A cold seafood salad!” says Mark. “Jonathan’s good at that.”

“What about the blue corn?” cries Bradley. “I lugged two pounds of it.” Nobody can quite figure out what to do with the stuff, so Alice says, “If we have time, we’ll do it. What about desert?”

There is a discussion of shortcakes, cobbler, sorbets. Lydia keeps saying, in a small voice, “What about brains?” Bradley is worrying about the blue corn, and Jonathan keeps talking about clams. “I know!” he says suddenly. “Clams casino! It will be great with some of that ham.”

Alice suddenly remembers that the one recipe she has brought with her is for blood orange sorbet. “We’ll have that for dessert,” she says. “But where are you going to find an ice-cream maker?” asks Mark. Bradley rises to the occasion, promising to do it by hand. “All I need is a stainless steel bowl and rock salt and ice,” he says. They all look at him a bit incredulously. “I didn’t know you could make ice cream without a freezer,” says Alice.

At dinner that night everybody has a sudden longing for uncomplicated food. The usual amounts of wine are passed around the table, and then nobody feels like going to bed. Barcelona is an obliging city; it is well after 3 before anybody gets back to the hotel.

FRIDAY

“Oh God, THE DINNER’s today,” says Alice, looking a bit green about the gills, as she sips coffee and hands each chef a list of things to buy. As they fan out through the market, the chefs are unaware of the stir they are creating, struggling to make their purchases in a foreign language.

Lunch is an even longer affair than normal. The chefs devour grilled onions in champagne and cream sauce, duck with figs, black rice cooked with squid ink. They drink a great deal of wine. By the time they leave the restaurant it is almost 5 o’clock, and the sky is looking very ominous.

Indeed, just as we pull up to the restaurant the sky opens up and a hard, steady rain begins pounding down. “Don’t worry,” says Jonathan, “I can grill in any weather.”

But a transformation more dramatic than the weather is occurring. The chefs walk into the restaurant, don their whites and this laid-back and slightly inebriated group suddenly becomes intensely professional. And they instantly realize that they’ve got trouble.

The kitchen is appalling; it is too small to hold all five of them at the same time. There is almost no equipment--not even a measuring cup. There is virtually no help, and the small sink keeps stopping up. Even worse, some of their carefully purchased products betray them: The wild asparagus turns out to be bitter, the Muscatel they want to marinate the quail in is awful, and much of the produce is no good. “We’re not going to have enough food,” says Alice, an expression heard the first of many times.

Jonathan begins to make stock for the sauce for the quail, and Lydia puts water on to poach the brains. Mark goes out to the dining room where he stands peeling artichokes, a great pile of leaves growing at his elbow. Alice inspects her greens, throwing out the spinach with disgust, tests the wild asparagus, (too bitter, out it goes, too). Bradley, his hands covered with blood, is cutting up the quail.

Jonathan soon discovers that there is no broiler; clams casino will be out of the question. He shrugs, says, “Well, we’ll put the clams in the salad.”

Have you ever tried to take notes in a kitchen filled with chefs? It is nearly impossible. “Peel these fava beans,” Alice is saying one minute, and the next Mark wants me to seed the peppers. There is garlic to be peeled, oranges to be juiced. Somebody is always sending me out in the rain to buy another bottle of olive oil, or locate a lost pair of tongs. Through this all, the chefs manage a sort of kitchen ballet, handing off knives and bowls and burners. At one point, Bradley is kneeling by the stove checking his blue corn cakes (which he has had to bake in flan crocks), while inches from his ear Lydia and Jonathan share the two burners.

Lydia is a champ; she works in this chaos as if it were a model kitchen, poaching the brains, then taking them into the dining room to roll them in bread crumbs. She fries them in a tiny pan, 2 at a time, then tops them with a sherry sauce she has somehow conjured up. Topped with little fried capers, they are an immediate hit.

Mark also scores a hit with the tartare, the fish that he has laboriously chopped by hand. He mixes it with chopped chiles, some lime, the cilantro and then heaps the mixture onto toasted croutons.

As the brains and tartare are passed around the dining room, there is a little buzz of approval. Alice looks out into the dining room, turns pale and says, “ Le tout Barcelona has arrived; there are 38 people and we’ve got to get moving.” The chefs form a sort of assembly line and begin dressing mache and radicchio with the vinaigrette and piling it onto the plates. Alice arranges the white asparagus, Jonathan adds the marinated beans, the peppers, his steamed clams. Lydia goes around arranging the shrimp on the plates, Alice adds some chervil and Bradley sprinkles fava beans which have been laboriously peeled and parboiled on the top. (They will occasion much comment from the assembled guests.)

The rain has stopped, the fire is hot, and outside on the cobbled streets Mark and Lydia are grilling the quail to the total delight of the children of Barcelona. Inside Jonathan is making the sauce out of his reduced stock and the cooked garlic and butter. Alice is wringing her hands over the fact that there are so few potatoes, and shaking the artichokes in the pan. “Alice, Alice, it’s all right. Relax,” says Jonathan calmly, for the 10th or 20th time.

The quail go out on the plate with the artichokes and the blue corn cakes and potatoes. “Everything’s brown,” wails Alice. (Indeed, the local chefs will later ask if there was chocolate in the corn cakes.) “It’s OK,” says Jonathan, “the salad was very colorful. Now all we’ve got to worry about is the sorbet.”

Alice tastes it; she is not happy. “It will be fine with some of the wild strawberries,” soothes Jonathan. “What if we mixed the strawberries with the Muscatel?” Alice tastes it, decides she likes it. “More,” says Jonathan. Alice pours more. As the pretty plates of red ice tumbled with wild strawberries and slices of blood orange get assembled, even she admits that they look pretty.

There is much applause for the meal; the chefs are disgruntled (“If we did it again tomorrow it would be perfect”), but the guests have been astonished. “It was so interesting to see our own products used in such different ways,” said Ramon Cabau, who is the Julia Child of Barcelona. When the chefs come out of the kitchen to take a bow they are exhausted--and hungry. There is not a morsel left for them.

At 4 a.m. they are sitting in a sleazy all-night joint that is the only place open. They are munching on greasy French fries, pallid sandwiches and the world’s worst pizza. “This isn’t quite what I imagined when I thought about coming to Europe,” says Bradley. He smiles and drinks some more champagne.