Dos Pebrots — Restaurant in Barcelona

I invited a small group of friends here to celebrate my birthday and the overall experience was poor and not what I had expected.

The menu has been created to confuse diners and encourage them to choose the set menus of 70€, 90€ and 120€ per person. This is what the restaurant's small kitchen is set up to produce; repeat batches of the same types of food, rather than fiddling about with lots of one-off dishes. We were obviously curious about many of the dishes on the menu, but the waiter wasn't able to give us any guidance about how many of each dish to order, so everyone could get a taste. So inevitably, we ended up with the taster menu.

The amount of food served for 6 people was ridiculously small. For example, two 2 cm long pieces of white asparagus with a sliver of iberian ham around the outside, per person. The next dish was a teaspoonful of white paste with petals on top. The gnocchi were good, probably because we had 3 pieces each. There is nothing on this restaurant's menu for people who are hungry. If you've had your jaw wired or some kind of bariatric treatment to reduce the size of your stomach, then this is the place for you! Interesting flavours but nothing to satisfy your appetite, which I have come to expect when I go out to dinner and more so when I go for what should be a great dining experience.

The wine experience was equally disappointing. There was no sommelier and the waiter was clearly out of his depth. The restaurant has a selection of obscure wines, at very high prices, when there are better-known, cheaper wines that taste a lot better. We ordered a local Priorat wine, but they didn't have it. The second wine we chose was also out of stock. The waiter recommended an alternative wine from the Pyrenees, but when we tasted it, it was quite awful. A mercilessly dry, leathery, "garnacha" wine. After trying three different recommendations we gave up because it was becoming embarrassing and ended up with an unknown, expensive French wine. "C'est la vie".

The service during the meal was inconsistent. We noticed how it dropped off as the waiters ended their shifts. We waited for more than 30 minutes for dessert and had to remind the waiter that we were still waiting to finish out meal.

I will not be going back to this restaurant. I think they started off with an original gastronomic proposition that has been monetised to produce the maximum return on investment.

Imagine a successful, authentic, family-run restaurant that has been taken over by a venture capitalist and you'll have an idea of what to expect when you dine at "Amb...

It has the right ideas but execution isn't great and the dishes were hit and miss. I really want to give this more stars but 50% of the dishes were forgettable.

The main issue was the starters (or smaller dishes) - they lacked flavour and imagination and we were left a bit surprised at how average they were. Especially the omelette that is made in front of you - it just tasted like an omelette you'd make at home, none of the additional flavours actually came through. The smoked / cured fish was interesting but it was incredibly dry and some of the fish was significantly less nice than the others. The squid in that oil that was slightly cooked was just fine, but didn't think the squid quality was particularly good.

The main 3 courses were great, but eating as a trio is hard in this restaurant. You're left wanting a bit more or you don't have enough to make 2 servings. The presa ibérica and the kebab were delicious and perfectly cooked.

The olive oil ice cream was certainly interesting and I've had similar (but goats cheese ice cream) but it was just not great and also 6 euros for a ball that small...

What left me really disappointed was the selection of wines they had. Being in Spain and knowing the exceptional wines you can get for a reasonable price, the medium and light body options were pretty terrible and their most expensive in those areas were... French. It felt like it was trying to appease tourists. It has a few interesting Priorats and thankfully we could go for an Arbossar from Terroir Al Limit which was fabulous but there are significantly cheaper Priorats that they could be offering.

Service was just fine, but we were left waiting for quite a bit to pay the bill.

I think the place lacks a bit of the finesse of Dos Palillos and tries too hard to be unique without getting the core offering right and a decent wine list. Not somewhere I'd recommend going but restaurants open on a Sunday are few and...

Another fine - and quite budget-friendly Barcelona restaurant Dos Pebrots (Two Peppers) located in El Raval, however not deep inside El Raval but rather situated on El Raval-La Rambla border.

Dos Pebrots is the second city restaurant (the first one being a Michelin-star Dos Palillos on Carrer d'Elisabets) by the outstanding chef Albert Raurich, a Chef de Cuisine, for ten years, of the legendary restaurant El Bulli of Brothers Adrià.

The Chef and its restaurant are famous of incorporating into their menu the ancient recipes from different Mediterranean cultures and various regional cuisines, meticulously researched in old cookbooks and surviving manuscripts, with some of them numbering thousands of years, such as the fermented fish sauce garum. Your menu will detail the historical time-line for many a product served at the restaurant.

There are two tasting menu available, Menú Dos Pebrots (seven courses) and Menú Dos Pebrots Festival (eleven courses), offered for € 60 and € 75, respectively.

As it is often the case, you can't rely on the on-line menus, for there surely will be alterations and substitutions.

The dining room is comfortable, the service is very obliging, if somewhat hurried, the staff command perfect English.

The food is very decent, even though the centuries- and millenia-old recipes don't necessarily translate into anything unique or unusual, just a sold reliable fare, that - honestly - can be had at any other reputable restaurant. For instance, "Jewish Artichokes" are nothing more than the ubiquitous "Carciofi alla Giudia" served by every Italian restaurant in the world. The same applies to the "XIX Kebab", with the recipe dating back to ancient Persia, 1500 BC, which is - fair and square - not any different from a shish kebab sold from a cart by a street vendor.

We still gave Dos Pebrots five stars for a friendly service and...