Cala Montjoi, Ap 30 17480, Roses, Girona, Spain; 34 972 15 04 57

Book by mid-October for a table June 16-December 20, 2009

5 stars: Bull's eye , 4 stars: Feeling bullish, 3 stars: Take the bull by the horns, 2 stars: School bully, 1 star: Load of bull

We walked through cloud. The weather drifted out of the sky like paint dripped into a glass of water, opaque filigree swathes and fretted blots whitening out the miraculous landscape. Hillsides vanished: you’d never know Slioch, the place of the spears, was just beside you, a 3,000ft mountain removed by a veil of nebulous vapour. We trudged and skittled up the face of a glen, chasing a parcel of hind with a couple of stags, a big red imperial, braw and bouncy, carrying his spiky head like a circus trick, and a switchy, skinny, shootable chap tagging along, a randy chancer. The rut hasn’t begun quite yet, but early bellows bounce off the corrie’s walls, softened by the heavy, wet air, premature exclamations of the most extreme testosterone drive in the world.

This is mate or break for the stag. They won’t eat for the rest of the month. They grow thick, matted necks, roll in peat bogs, emerging black as death, their antlers swagged with bog myrtle, mad-eyed and up for it, the embodiment and concentration of masculinity, stinking sex and shoving, a constant humping, brawling, rattling and roaring that will reduce them to shrunken sinew and corrugated exhaustion. Many are already too thin, like our prickle-browed lad, who won’t hear the cuckoo, the sooth says with a grim jest. And if we get within 100 yards of him, he won’t hear the grouse tomorrow morning.

The cloud moves on, and the top of the hill dances in a slim dab of sunlight. Here’s where we bolted a fox last year, says the stalker. You can still see the shallow scrape of the earth, and imagine the awl-jawed black patterdale terriers, the death dealers of small things, snapping at the vixen as she shifted along the crest, just three steps from the blind side of bracken and screes. There, he said, you can see where we left her, a sodden mat of tufted grey fur and picked ribs, one claw stretched out, and the brush tangled with blaeberries. The grass around her is startlingly lush and green on the mottled dun and khaki hill. The vixen’s byre is an intense viridian: the leaves of grass arch over her curled body, making a frail mausoleum, a verdant halo, paid for by the leached minerals and traces of her life.

We nailed the stag; cracked him behind the shoulder. He spluttered chunks of lung and died on his back, his head resting elegantly on his little bone crown. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on him. He was old before his time, although he’d had perhaps only nine years in this landscape.

As I write this, the last gasp of Hurricane Ike is breathing down the chimney. I was in America when it was born, out in the Atlantic, and it followed me along the Gulf Stream to this secretive, empty lump of the western Highlands. It seems strange to have been so immersed in events over there and to be so distanced from them out here. Across the peat-black loch, empires collapse, fortunes are puffed in a morning, things teeter. But here on the margin, it is all the faintest of whispers, and matters less than whether the wind is shifting to the south.

But I’m not supposed to be writing about up here. We’re meant to be on the Costa Brava, and the “best restaurant in the world”. That really doesn’t sound right. The Costa Brava, the first man-made tourist destination, the hot and crowded, greedily jerry-built originator of sun, sea, sex and sangria, where the traditional food is bucket-boiled paella, and tapas and ketchup.

El Bulli is perched between the windsurfing schools and the peon barbecuing beaches. It is regularly voted the finest restaurant in the world, a title that is hostage to ridicule, like being called the most interesting, handsomest tweed-wearing raconteur in the world (not that I’ve ever been called the most interesting, handsomest tweed-wearing raconteur in the world). There is a well-founded belief that the “best restaurant in the world” is the one that all sensible, tasteful, relaxed and modest people would avoid like the Costa Brava.

It would undoubtedly be poncy. Poncy little bits of ponced-up ponce, served on poncy plates in a poncified room, by oleaginous ponces to unmitigated superponces. The whole thing would unquestionably be a poncimonious cluster-ponce. (Ponce, and its derivatives, is the most commonly used word in the letters you write to me. If anybody is foolishly thinking of opening a restaurant, you could call it Once a Ponce a Thyme.) I must admit, I was reluctant to make the trip to Barcelona for an El Ponci dinner, but the Blonde was very keen, and it turned out to be a salutary lesson in nose-amputating cynicism before experience.

The first thing that’s a welcome surprise about El Bulli is the complete and utter lack of ponce in the decor department. It’s a couple of simple dining rooms built with the careless abandon of people who throw up buildings beside the seaside. The decoration is untroubled by the creative ministrations of gay interior ponces. Pictures are hung because there’s an available nail; they may be greening photos of French bulldogs or Dali prints — the old melting-clock charlatan lived down the road. The chairs and tables are only chairs and tables; the lighting is medical rather than flattering; but the kitchen is a room of impressive form and function, which is as it should be, considering that, in a fight, the staff would overwhelm the customers.

El Bulli is notorious for the chemistry of cooking. Ferran Adria, the chef, asks: “Tell me, what cooking isn’t chemistry? What ingredients aren’t microbiological?” This is just very, very good cooking: intense, and obtusely original, in the sense that it’s not rooted in history or region or culinary orthodoxy or fashion. It certainly isn’t Spanish. It manipulates a worldwide variety of ingredients. We were given 38 courses that came without fuss or fanfare, at intervals dictated by how fast we ate, not how slowly the kitchen could cook. Most of it was eaten with fingers in a mouthful or two. The combinations of flavours and textures and methods are challenging, but never overpowering, and often astonishing. I’m loath to describe the ingredients: they sound comical or disgusting. Food on paper is only ever an approximation of food in the mouth, and it relies on a shared experience, and if you haven’t eaten here, you haven’t had the experience.

For instance, a dish of rabbit brains and oysters was superlatively brilliant, as was a smear of hare pâté on a wafer of chocolate. A dish of tagliatelle that turned out to be frozen shavings of foie gras in the mouth was a heavenly surprise, and an olive that was a balloon of agar jelly full of olive oil made me laugh out loud. A dish of coconut water and coconut milk with dabs of caviar was such an inspired and complementary match that you wondered why caviar wasn’t always served in a coconut. There are dishes that play with bitterness and that strange cardboard and plastic taste that the Japanese love, and despite what you’re thinking, none of this is done for dinner-table amusement or as a party trick. It’s all gastronomically, aesthetically and emotionally honest. It’s difficult to talk about the emotion of food; it’s plainly an element of eating that goes beyond epicurean pleasure. Some of these dishes directly feed the heart, as well as the cultured head and greedy stomach, and it’s all done without overt decoration or fuss, without adjectives or exclamation marks. There is none of the faux ponce or haute civility, not the merest whiff of provincial grandeur that always comes with three-star gourmandising. And it’s not that expensive. I shan’t damn El Bulli by saying it’s the best restaurant in the world, but it is a masterclass in the metaphysics of how, what and why we eat, while still being dinner.

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