2. Celler de Can Roca, Girona, Spain. Expense of a meal for two, without wine: $390-480.
In what may in all likelihood be the most wonderful lounge area in Europe, a Roca dinner amazes with its wizardry (a starter called Eat The World that typifies, in five unmistakable nibbles, the tastes of the five distinct cooking styles; a pastry called Messi’s Goal, that reproduces, with a sweetened pitch, flying white chocolate balls, and a plate side iPod playing the thunders of the group, what it feels like when Barcelona’s soccer saint Lionel Messi scores), while remaining immovably established in the kinds of the Mediterranean