For me it was last September. At the time, I felt like I shouldn’t write about it, because I worried that my personal feelings might cloud my judgement. Now, 13 months later, after being fortunate enough to have several meals since then at restaurants ranked as highly or more highly, I’ve decided it’s time to write about our dinner at Cinc Sentits in Barcelona. (Cinc Sentits means ‘Five Senses’ in Catalan.)

Because when you have an amazing experience when you’re traveling, it doesn’t really matter why you found it amazing. What matters is that the experience itself is forever linked in your mind with that place at that time. And at the end of the day, that’s why I travel – not to cross countries off a list, or have good pictures on Instagram (I never put camera photos on there anyway!). It’s to do something we can’t – or won’t – do at home. To, for a few moments, find ourselves out of our comfort zone, imagining another life that maybe could have been or still could be, and connecting with the people living that life. So here we go.

Our dinner in Barcelona started in Istanbul several years earlier. Keith, his mom and I decided to spend Thanksgiving in Istanbul. (We’d have Turkey Day in Turkey! Yeah, I know.) For years we’ve been big fans of the food walks offered by Culinary Backstreets in cities all over the world. They got their start in Istanbul, so every time we’ve gotten to go to Istanbul, we’ve done one of their tours. (You can read about our Tokyo food tour with Culinary Backstreets here and can save on your own Culinary Backstreets tour with promo code KEITH. And someday we’ll get around to writing about our Tbilisi and Barcelona tours with them. But I digress.)

So as we planned our Istanbul trip, we included time to do a Culinary Backstreets walk. We went into it knowing we’d try foods we wouldn’t normally at places we wouldn’t find on our own, and – key when jetlag strikes – get a break from each other. So off we went.

What I didn’t anticipate was meeting a guy named Jordi who was in our group. He said he was a cook from Spain. Then at the end of the 6 or so hours together, he gave me his card and said “if you ever get to Spain, you should come to my restaurant. Just be sure to book in advance.” I thought that was nice of him and said good bye. That dang business card floated around for a long time, even though I had immediately scanned it into Evernote.

When we decided to go to Barcelona, I remembered Jordi and thought “I wonder what that cook guy from Istanbul is doing now. If he’s still cooking, we should look him up.” That’s when I learned that Jordi Artal is, shall we say, a big deal. He’s the Chef-Owner of Cinc Sentits, a Michelin-starred restaurant that has been featured in the press and on Spanish TV so many times he could run around calling himself the Spanish Emeril or Rick Bayless, but instead he introduces himself as a cook. I now know that Jordi and his sister Amèlia Artal are – depending on the source of the information – Canadian-Catalan or Catalan-Canadian and worked in Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom before moving back to Barcelona and opening Cinc Sentits together. Somehow, this self-taught chef opened a restaurant that within months was named one of the best restaurants in Spain. That was in 2008, and they haven’t rested on their laurels.

Truly a fantastic experience to reunite with our friend and “cook” we met in Istanbul so many years ago.

I eventually made a reservation to visit Cinc Sentits as the last dinner of our 10 week, round-the-world trip. As I’m not a food writer, I won’t even attempt to recreate the magic of the prix fixe menu. Instead, here are my thoughts – some contemporaneous, and others that have fermented over the last year.

- So many fancy restaurants feel the need to let you know just how special they are by letting you know just how inadequate you are. Cinc Sentits is the opposite. I would bet if you asked anyone else dining there that night, they all would’ve reported that they were treated specially. (Cinc Sentits is kind of like that friend that everyone thinks is their best friend.) The cameraderie among the guests was really unusual – we kept grinning at our neighbors, delighting in their expressions as they got the courses we had just completed, while the diners “ahead” of us did the same watching us.

- So often restaurants with reputations of greatness grow comfortable and slack off. This note I wrote the night of our dinner captures how Cinc Sentits is different:

“Tonight we went to [Jordi Artal’s] restaurant, and it was AMAZING. Better than Eleven Madison Park or any other top-rated restaurant I’ve ever been to. Truly insane. None of this nonsense where you wait forever to have dirty plates taken. [My biggest pet peeve and something that seems to happen regularly at white table cloth restaurants.] Zero attitude. Like a more modern Charlie Trotter’s without the drama. Even the food I don’t normally eat was excellent.”

- That last line is, I think, part of why Cinc Sentits is so amazing. (Though “a more modern Charlie Trotter’s without the drama” is certainly compelling prose.) There are certain foods I will never eat (rabbit), and there are others I normally don’t eat. But at Cinc Sentits, the fact that that every single item is thoughtfully and ethically sourced from as close by as humanly possible made me willing to try things I wouldn’t normally to, so to speak, try on a different experience.

- I love restaurants that engage my brain as well as my stomach, and where I can feel good about the treatment of the food I’m eating. Cinc Sentits does have informative booklets about where their (hyper local) ingredients come from, but I also loved that every single person working there seemed to be able to recite the entire life cycle of every ingredient on the plate and, most importantly, to care about it.

- Usually when I’m in a restaurant and someone tells me to close my eyes, I become suspicious that one of two things will happen: my bag will walk off or severe intestinal distress is headed my way. So when the sommelier invited us to close our eyes and take a particular bite and drink together to imagine the Canary Islands, I was sure I was on Candid Camera. And yet, here are my notes from that night:

“the most amazing part of the night [was that the] sommelier advised eating a bite with your eyes closed. I did it, assuming he was nuts. He was not. It was amazing.”

More than just nourishing your belly, that dinner nourished my mind. (I had no idea what a bite from the Canary Islands would taste like until I followed the sommelier’s instructions and now I’m convinced I will never forget.)

If you aren’t headed to Barcelona any time soon but would like to have your own amazing dining experience on your next trip, here are some suggestions, regardless of whether you normally eat at Michelin-starred restaurants or not.

- Decide how many special meals you want to have. We generally do one per trip, depending on where we are. Having that target/limitation saves a ton of time and probably money because we know we have that meal to look forward to, so others may be wonderful but if they’re not, the pressure is off.

- Research, research, research. I loved Anthony Bourdain’s restaurant recommendations, while the Michelin Guide and Saveur are also good places to start. (While TripAdvisor or Yelp can be good when you find yourself just needing to eat, I prefer these other sites when we’re wanting a special meal.) If you book a food tour (through Culinary Backstreets or someone else), ask when you’re reserving if they have suggestions for a special meal. (If you wait until your tour it may be too late for a reservation in some cities.) If you have a particular chef you really like, you may also be able to get restaurant suggestions from him or her if they’ve recently traveled there. (Rick Bayless has loads of good restaurant suggestions on social media from his travels, both in Mexico and elsewhere.)

- Book way in advance if you can. A month before we went to Barcelona, I think we had the dinner reservation before we had a place to stay. And for some restaurants, you need to book even farther in advance. (Conversely, when we had the chance to go to Chez Wong’s in Lima in 2018 we booked a couple of days before – there may be cancellations so if you don’t get your first choice, book a backup and keep checking for cancellations.)

- Don’t obsess over TripAdvisor and other “layperson” reviews. If you’re going to a restaurant with a seasonal focus, it really doesn’t matter what someone liked last month. At Cinc Sentits, for example, menus change seasonally and consist of eight to ten small courses, depending on the menu you select. And, no principal ingredient is repeated twice in the meal. As they explain “Each course is meant to be a moment of deliciousness to be savoured . . . and then the next one arrives.” That’s why I’m not sharing my favorite courses or anything specific about the food – your experience will be totally different. If you are really curious, though, Cinc Sentits does share a sample menu here.

- Consider lunch instead of dinner. We celebrated Keith’s mom’s birthday in 2019 by having lunch at Astrid y Gaston in Lima, Peru (one of the world’s best restaurants and a very lovely place . . . but second to Cinc Sentits!). It was less expensive than dinner and we didn’t need to worry about packing a suit or fancy dress. (I wore black pants from REI because it was too cold for the dress I had planned to wear and I was just as or more dressed up than other people around us.) (Side note: the folks at Astrid y Gaston gave Keith’s mom an entire birthday cake to take home! Amazing.) Cinc Sentits offers the same menus at lunch and dinner, so you don’t miss anything by eating earlier. Plus, if you’re having a big meal at lunch you can offset some of the cost by having a small dinner.

- Plan ahead to enjoy the experience. Just getting to go on a trip period can be a big sacrifice. And if you’ve already scrimped and saved and having any dinner out, let alone at an acclaimed restaurant, is already going to be an event, it may not be worth delaying your trip to save for a nice meal out. But rather than buying a bunch of souvenirs you’ll just have to dust, or a birthday gift your spouse will forget about a year from now, consider instead devoting that money to the experience of a special dinner. You can skip a couple of mediocre dinners out at home, and instead have an astounding dinner at Cinc Sentits. (The current price for the 10 course menu at Cinc Sentits is 119 Euros per person (about $130 US), while the 8 course menu is 99 Euros (about $110). Pairings of Spanish and Catalan wines add either 59 or 69 Euros. I promise you that I have no idea what I had the last few times I ate at a “fast casual” restaurant. But I can also promise you that I will never forget that dinner at Cinc Sentits.

I know now, a year later, that our dinner wasn’t just great because it was at the end of the trip, or in a city and country I love. It was great because it was a truly spectacular experience from start to finish, made better because every person there brought their A game to their role in the evening, from the man who opened the door to the person who plated the food, the sommelier who transported us to the Canary Islands, the server who treated us like family, the fellow diners who shared our joy and delight at the entire experience, and the chef who introduced himself as a cook so many years ago in Istanbul.

Cinc Sentits has moved to a new space, which seems to me like an excuse to go back. (Writing of the new space, one reviewer has said “Cinc Sentits now has dining areas worthy of its kitchen, and a kitchen worthy of its chef.”) Until then, I’ll keep thinking of that night in Barcelona, where I knew in the moment I would remember that experience forever.

When was the last time you finished a meal and thought “I’m going to remember that forever?”