Compartir

Cadaqués

Compartir, a restaurant in the seaside village of Cadaqués, has lots going for it. The most obvious thing it has going for it is Cadaqués, a tourist town but not troublingly so, with its own unique identity - bohemian, somewhat eccentric, traditionally popular with artists and writers - and its own architectural style - grey slate walls, irregular oblong cobblestones and whitewashed narrow alleyways decked with bright purple bougainvillea.

The shady courtyard of Compartir makes the most of this unique style and is a lovely place to sit and eat, even if, unlike the majority of the most popular restaurants in town, there’s no sight of the sea. Instead your view is of a tasteful selection of Mediterranean plants and, of course, fellow diners - a well-heeled-looking lot - on pleasingly well-spaced tables.

First thing to arrive on the table was a little house aperitif of orange juice and Campari. It tasted a little subdued - any fresh juice from any number of coffee shops in the area would have had a stronger hit of orange - but was a nice enough gesture given it was free. Alongside were a little row of pillow-shaped crackers dusted with tomato powder, and again they didn’t taste of much considering the effort that had clearly gone into them - the cracker would have been like cardboard on its own, and there wasn’t enough tomato powder - or it wasn’t strongly flavoured enough - to offset the bland cracker.

Fortunately Compartir found its feet with the first course proper, a tuna “cannelloni” (tuna tartare rolled up into a neat tube) surrounded by a colourful and cleverly patterned sauce of olives, capers, various herbs and who knows what else, topped with trout roe. This was genuinely inventive and genuinely lovely, the tuna never overwhelmed by the other flavours on the plate and all the ingredients clearly of very high quality, treated well. This is apparently a Compartir signature dish, and you can really see why - it was a real highlight.

Crab and avocado was very nearly right. Plenty of fresh crab meat (plus a good amount of brown, always nice to see) and exquisitely presented, with dots of what I assume was a very light mayonnaise dancing around a generous dollop of roe. But there was something slightly off-putting about the texture of the avocado - it had been blitzed to within an inch of its life to a strange, characterless, cold avocado-flavoured cream which rather than complimenting the crab just ended up relying on it for seasoning and texture. Also - and I’m quite prepared to admit this is my own personal hill to die on - if you use a particular animal’s form to serve a dish, whether it’s a scallop shell or as in this case a ceramic sea urchin or anything else, it really should contain some element of that animal in the dish itself. And I don’t think there was any sea urchin in this. Or if there was, we couldn’t taste it.

Then we were right back on track with these grilled Roses red prawns. There’s always a risk when you shell out (’scuse the pun) a lot of money (by Spanish standards - in London they’d be three times this price) on top ingredients that any mistakes in the kitchen could render your investment void. These, though, had been treated very well - timed to just under with regards to some of the larger animals but always so that the meat pulled out of the shell in a satisfying single piece, they were beautifully sweet and smoky from the grill, a brushing of chicken jus the perfect extra touch. Well worth the €39.

Then next, roasted scallops with potato and spinach. Plump little slices of sweet scallops alternated with soft potato, topped with spinach, pine nuts and lemon zest (such is the Catalan way) and all of it soaked in a lovely glossy, meaty jus, it was another intelligent, beautifully presented course that showcased just how good this kitchen can be. It would have been the perfect end to the meal.

Because we really, really should have stopped there. In my defence though, “Breaded fried rabbit ribs and artichoke with apple Aioli” sounds like it might be nice, doesn’t it? In my mind I was imagining a painstakingly French-trimmed rack of rabbit ribs, lovingly rolled in herb breadcrumbs, roasted and served sliced into little cute rabbity lollypops. What arrived was essentially fried rabbit bones, with so little meat on them to make the effort of attempting to find some under the opaque breadcrumb coating a distressing chore, none of it seasoned properly and the whole affair feeling like some kind of elaborate practical joke played on gullible foreigners. We pointed out the complete inedibility of this dish to a waitress.

“Ah yes that’s the speciality of the house, we’re famous for it.” she replied. Yes, you should be, I thought, but not in a good way.

“But we can’t eat any of it. How do we know what’s just breaded bone and what’s meat? How do we eat them?”

“You just eat them.” She replied. Then perhaps realising this was less than helpful, added brightly, “You eat the bones. They’re crunchy!”.

Now, I am prepared to believe that somewhere, somehow there is a breaded fried rabbit dish, perhaps even involving bones, that may be worth eating. But to suggest that we should ignore our own dental - and mental - health and attempt to chow down on whole rabbit bones, marrow splintering and cracking in our injured mouths like an urban fox working its way through a discarded box of high street fried chicken, is one of the most absurd things I’ve been asked to consider in all my years eating in restaurants. And I’m in my late 40s. Of course, we sent it back. It still appeared on the bill.

We probably should have kicked up more of a fuss about being charged for rabbit bones we didn’t eat or want, but by this point we just wanted to get the hell out of there and convince ourselves that we weren’t going completely mad. “Did she really suggest we were supposed to eat whole animal bones?”, we kept asking ourselves for the rest of the trip. “Does anyone else eat them? Do they throw in free dental reconstruction work as well?”. We just ended up with more and more questions. I’m not sure any of them will ever be satisfactorily answered.

So, scoring the place is a little bit tricky. When it was good, Compartir was very, very good. And when it was bad, it was life-threatening. So in the end I suppose I’ll have to go for the midpoint between 10 and 1 and hope that if you ever decide to go yourself, you end up only ordering dishes that don’t threaten to put you in hospital. Maybe check with your waitress first, and if anything sounds like it might be a bittoogum-splitting, steer clear. As for me, well, I’ve done it now and don’t feel the need to go back, not with so many other lovely seafood restaurants in that part of the world for a lot less than €60pp. If you need me, I’ll be at the orthodontist.

5/10