Eivissa

Photo: Martha Williams

Toss around the culinary terms foam, emulsion and air and you’ll get a few blank stares, some eye-rolling and maybe even a kick in the metaphorical groin from surly cooks responding with, “Yeah, but can you roast a chicken?” Throw those terms onto a Spanish-themed menu, as Old Town’s Eivissa has done, and you’ll inevitably face comparisons to Spain’s indelible El Bulli. (When your proprietor goes so far as to promote the place as “El Bulli but more accessible,” as Eivissa’s Joseph Alcantar did, consider said comparisons cemented.) Make no mistake, Eivissa is not El Bulli and its chef, Dudley Nieto, is no Ferran Adrià. Given that the association is unfair (not to mention unattainable), let’s get past it and just focus on what’s going on in Old Town.

A lot, apparently. From the looks of the packed patio and the bustling bar, this neighborhood is starving for new blood; even on weeknights, Eivissa is as busy as the staff’s wildly patterned Custo Barcelona shirts. Comparatively, the decor is somewhat forgettable (I visited twice and remember only white birch wallpaper), but menus are right in line: They’re splattered with bright colors and peppered with random thoughts like “taste the art. drink with all your senses” and “the essence of the essence.” I’ll grant an excited first-time restaurateur a little poetic license, but the actual organization of the menu seems as if it was run through a Babel Fish with A.D.D. If you can wrap your brain around the seven categories of cocktails, the good news is you’ll find a few worth drinking. Who knew that a dry rosé cava could handle a splash of Campari so long as sweet orange-blossom water was in the mix? Likewise, it turns out that classic red sangria is delicious sprinkled with a little cinnamon and infused with vanilla beans, and that a mojito shifts from drinkable to lappable with a layer of muddled strawberries. (For reference, these cocktails are named “Xampany,” “Vi-Negre” and “Criado,” respectively, but you’re on your own with finding them on the lists.)

Trouble is, things go south when the first sign of any El Bulli–esque textural play comes in, and not just when gelatinous “edible pearls” are tossed into an uneven mix of plum vodka, St-Germain and cranberry juice. “Chupitos,” a.k.a. “liquid tapas,” are a disaster across the board. From an unseasoned hunk of pork lurking in a shot of viscous pineapple-cucumber juice to a thimble of sticky tamarind molasses adorned with a skewered scallop, this section of the menu should have been scratched in pre-opening staff tastings. They might also take a closer look at the pinxtos, as the “air” made of idiazabal, a nutty sheep’s-milk cheese, is as intangible as the stuff we breathe, adding nothing to the mushroom ragout that tops a bread slice a day past stale. That bread is also a platform for octopus and calamari ceviche—fresh, briny and acidic on its own, but sabotaged by passion-fruit “caviar,” oddly purple and tasting more like the gummy-bear version of passion fruit than the actual fruit.

Looking past Nieto’s experimental whims into the classics doesn’t yield much better results: There are more menu choices than there are weeks in the year, so I couldn’t try everything, but croquettes suffered from blah chicken filler; flavorful but oily paella showed no signs of socarrat (the bottom layer of caramelized rice all paella cooks strive for); and the choice of puff pastry rather than empanada dough meant the beef-filled pockets stood little chance of having crispy exteriors. And while it turns out that Nieto can, in fact, roast a chicken—or more specifically, execute a surprisingly tasty duck confit—when it’s drowning in a sickly sweet emulsion of red wine and fig, who could notice?

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