This week’s dinner was another Ritual dinner this time featuring Spanish Chef Javi Olleros from the 2 Michelin star restaurant Culler de Pau. The venue was at a small a art gallery, the saved venue when they hosted Nacho Manzano from Asturias.

These Ritual dinners are a great way to experience the cuisine of internationally acclaimed chefs without having to travel. There are always some potential trade offs since the chefs are not cooking in their own restaurant kitchen and don’t have all of their usual native ingredients unless they bring them with them. Consequently, some of the chefs do better than others and in this case, I can say chef Olleros did a great job. His flavors were very rich as evidenced by the broths and sauces. I enjoyed the way he did a pork broth, a fish broth, a menuiere sauce, and a chicken sauce each rich and flavorful. He extracted so much flavor from his ingredients. Even the pumpkin dessert, which sounds so simple and doesn’t look like much, but used multiple components of the pumpkin with different preparations all combined to provide layered flavors.

Wines were tastefully paired and service was very good. Our fellow diners are always interesting to talk to and we sat next to a couple we met at our first Ritual dinner in Atherton with chef Alex Atala. Accra thought that this was the best Ritual dinner (out of the five) she has attended. It’s a toss up for me with this one and the last time I attended a Ritual dinner in this venue with chef Nacho Manzano (Andrea was working so I attended solo. Regardless, it was a great event once again