Dos Palillos

Eight o'clock, a plain door off a Raval side street, and inside ten minutes the evening's shape is set. You are steered to a counter rather than a table, the ordering is mostly lifted from your hands, and the kitchen begins cooking at you before your coat is properly off. Asian technique on Spanish product is the idea, and from this close you can watch it executed: temperatures held to the degree, textures worked out course by course rather than left to chance. I come once a year and pay attention. Impressed is the honest word — not besotted, impressed. Everything lands where it should, the pacing never slips, and watching a kitchen this drilled at arm's length remains one of the city's better lessons in how discipline becomes pleasure.