The hapless, ZPZ tape-loggers, caffeine-jacked myrmidons who toil away in the filthy sub-cellar of our corporate headquarters, reviewing hour after hour of mind-numbingly repetitive and boring video tape, noticing this spectral apparition, began to lose their already tentative grips on reality. One scene after another, a glimpse here, a face in the crowd there, lurking suspiciously in the background in another scene, down the bar a few positions, pretending he doesn't know me in another -- or front and center; there he is.

It's Albert's very ubiquitousness in the raw footage, his omnipresence -- even in the scenes where the viewer won't see him, that tells you all you need to know about Spain -- and how damn good it is.

Understand: Albert, along with his brother, Ferran, is a chef/owner of the three Michelin starred El Bulli, the hardest to reserve, restaurant table in the world. He's a national hero, an international superstar in the world of chefs and restaurants. Suffice to say that just about anywhere in the world of fine dining, from Shanghai to San Francisco; when Albert walks in the door, the whole place goes on Red Alert. He's used to the very best. If there's a downside to his life in the culinary firmament, it's that too much foie gras, truffles and expensive wine come his way.

As a chef at El Bulli, hugely respected pastry chef -- and as the owner of a casual eatery in Barcelona, he can surely have the very best Spanish ingredients delivered anywhere he wants, quickly, with a phone call. You'd think, he'd be a bit .....jaded by it all.

Yet, there he was at Espinaler, gobbling up those supernaturally delicious, canned cockles and razor clams and mussels like he'd never had them before. Tagging along at Quimet and Quimet, shoveling in the tapas with a big smile on his face. Out in the country, with a silly red bib, a blissed-out expression, sucking down the calcots and the red wine like it was his last meal on earth.

I've never seen anyone so happy to be in Spain -- and (this is my point here) HE FREAKIN' LIVES THERE!!!

All that magnificent food -- all those cool little tapas bars, they're right down the street--and yet, it was like he just landed in Barcelona from Mars. His enthusiasm for his own country, his own heritage, the everyday places and things of Spain was something to see.

Naturally this made me misanthropic and deeply envious.

Why can't I have that? How come I gotta go halfway across the earth -- to like, Singapore, or Hong Kong (or Spain), for instance, to really get MY culinary jollies these days? He's on a magic carpet ride in his own town and I'm like a full-bloom junkie, the honeymoon period over, needing a higher and higher dosage to get off in MY home town of New York!. Why?

The sad fact is, we'll never -- and I mean NEVER have it so good as in Spain. It's not like we don't have great restaurants in Manhattan - -and will surely have many more. And certainly, we can get many of the same ingredients jetted over (more or les s-- if at a steep price). No. It's attitudinal. You can faithfully reproduce the look of a Spanish tapas bar in New York City. You can stock it with all the best, most authentic ingredients, just-jerked from the rivers, streams, soil and seas of Spain. You can staff the joint with the best cooks, dragooned off the streets of the parta vieja. And you'll still never be close to the real thing. Because what your tapas bar needs -- really needs -- is three or four or eight OTHER tapas bars (or casual Spanish eateries within walking distance).

You can't really enjoy this kind of food in a vacuum. You need to graze -- or at least know that you can graze (should the urge arise), bouncing from one place to another, a mouthful or two of what's good here, a glass of tinto, a few mouthfuls of what they do well over there -- another glass of tinto and so on. In fact, the whole customer base has to re-groove to accommodate this notion. They'll have to accept the idea that a small can of tuna -- or clams -- can actually be better than fresh stuff. And worth about $150 bucks.

That the fat of Spanish acorn fed pigs is the stuff of which dreams are made. That there's nothing unusual about growing up with Goya, Dali, Bunuel, and Gaudi. That midnite is a normal time to sit down to dinner.

The best example of What They Do In Spain that We Can and Never Will Do is to be found in the Extebarri scene near the end of the show. Here, at a rustic pub in the mountains near St. Sebastian, grilling has been raised to unthinkable zen-like heights. Hand made charcoals. A separate fire for each individual order. Separate grills -- and custom designed and crafted pans and implements to best achieve perfection.

Ingredients of a quality undreamed of by most mortals. This, in a simple, neighborhood-looking joint with a smoky bar and a self-taught chef who grew up in the village. It's where the Adrias, Arzaks and Aduriz's go for their own pleasure -- high end comfort food.

Back before cable, if you took a baseball bat and smacked it upside a television set in the middle of a show, there'd be a black and white sputter, a flash -- and then white noise and static. That was what my first bite of grilled elvers was like there. And the grilled gambas. And just about everything else in that chilly, wood-smoke smelling kitchen. A jarring, flood of endorphins, then brain overload, and for a second, a blinding light. Momentarily, the synapses shorted out. Sensation returned in a warm, intensely pleasurable afterglow of flavor. It was a sensation that related directly to the experience of a few weeks before -- in Tokyo. At Sukibayashi Jiro. Two seemingly simple things done well -- as well as they can be done. In Tokyo: old school sushi.
In Spain, grilled stuff with a little salt and a light spritz of oil.
Nothing, as it turns out, could be better

There are, on reflection, some similarities between the two destinations: in both cultures, the very best ingredients, presented in all their unadorned, un-fussed with, pristine simplicity, are celebrated and enjoyed with great enthusiasm. The cult of jamon in Spain, for instance, bears some resemblance to the Japanese obsession with the very best tuna. Neither culture requires additional ingredients or garnish to get the point. I love seeing what happens to Western chefs after visiting Japan for the first time. A very fine Italian chef friend of mine returned typically traumatized by what he'd seen and experienced. Weeks later, he still had that uniquely blissed out, confused, sort of hangdog look on his face -- an expression I can only compare to what happens after you've had the first really, really good sex of your life. It's a look that says, "I thought I knew a few things. But apparently I don't." It's devastating. The kind of earth-shakingly wonderful -- yet deeply upsetting event about which great romance novels are written (most, sadly, tragedies). Travel forces you to re-define the meanings of words you thought you knew. Just as watching the lives of rice farmers in Vietnam causes you to adjust your understanding of the word "work", and exposure to hutment dwellers in India requires a reexamination of the word "hunger" , you can never return from Japan and hear the word "sushi" in the same way. Utility sushi is suddenly, no longer enough. You will be at least dimly aware that there's "rice" and then there's a universe of unknowable varieties and subtly different grades and preparations -- about which neither you nor I have enough time left to learn enough about to even fake a conversation with a skilled sushi chef.

When, for a few days, or hours, your mouth comes to know the taste and feel of fish for which the proprietor paid $300 to $400 wholesale ... when you wrap two fingers -- gently -- around slightly warm, crumbly/soft rice -- over which a perfectly cut, slightly dressed piece of mackerel served at just the right temperature has been lovingly draped ... when you realize the old man in front of you has spent fifty or more YEARS just getting these seemingly simple things right, you enter a whole new dimension of food appreciation.

Yakitori: Bits of chicken on a stick are no longer a snack -- but the expression of centuries of thinking about pleasure.

Soba: A noodle is no longer just a noodle. The world turns on its axis -- and plain old vanilla food porn is no longer enough. Tonight, at Sukibayashi Jiro, you will see what is inarguably, some of the very best sushi available on the planet. And no one -- not the nerdiest of food nerds -- can argue that Jiro-san himself, is not among its greatest living practitioners.

I will spare you additional details, giving you time, I hope, to pour yourself a stiff drink, situate yourself comfortably on the couch, position a bucket of ice water nearby, and strap on some extra absorbent adult diapers to avoid embarrassing emissions. Foodies with heart conditions should probably medicate themselves appropriately. The Spain episode that follows next week will only make matters worse. Food bloggers will surely be caused to bleed unexpectedly and inexplicably from various orifices, a fine mist of brain matter and steam issuing from the ears.

A seemingly straightforward scene at "Espinaler" near Barcelona, where we crack open some cans of mussels, cockles and razor clams will cause, I'm quite certain, heads to explode across the internet, leaving only smoldering stumps. The gurgling pipe-loads of dark, African chocolate rumbling beneath the floor of Enric Rovira's workshop, when spread across marble, will no doubt initiate many newcomers watching with that special someone -- to the experience of rolling over into the wet spot. By the time the Extebarri scene rolls around, and the Imperial beluga caviar and the prawns and the freshly made, uncured chorizo and the just-killed baby eels start grilling over their individual fires of hand made charcoals, few will be left alive, I fear, to appreciate the Arzak scene.

You have been warned.

"But I've never felt so FRESH," he kept wailing, plaintively from the back seat. His face pressed to the window as he stared longingly back in the direction of the hotel.
Last night, we shot "walking B-roll" in the narrow alleyways of Golden Gai, an incredible rabbit warren of tiny bars and casual "joints". After the rest of the crew fanned out across Kabuki-Cho, Zach and I took a break from the cold, randomly choosing a particularly uninviting looking doorway and then climbing what was literally a ladder to a dollhouse-sized second floor bar. Slid open a door and found what appeared to be a punk rock themed six-seat bar. Empty but open for business. Smaller than the interior of our production van, there was just room enough for the two of us, our coats and Zach's camera. Two beers later and back to work.

Later, off to Shinjuku to meet Shinji our former fixer/driver-from such shows as the Tokyo episodes we did years ago on that Other Network. He led all of us down an insanely overlit street filled with big-haired hawkers and shills (all of whom seem to have modeled their do's after mid 80's Poison, Cinderella or Motley Crue) ... into an anonymous office building, up a banged up elevator to the 5th floor, arriving at the kind of loud, packed casual izakaya I dearly love. Sashimi, grilled yellowtail collars, tuna cheeks, chunks of whale (sorry PETA), beer and more beer.

I'm concerned about Chris Martinez, our editor, who we flew out here at great expense to our masters. The idea was, quite frankly, that the poor man doesn't get out enough. He's certainly edited a lot of tape set in Asia - he's just never been here himself. It was argued, back at ZeropointZero HQ, that while his work has always been brilliant, it could only improve if Chris himself were given some time outside of the dark editing room in which, from all appearances, he has spent the greater part of his life. I looked forward to plying him with sushi and unidentifiable squiggly things, forcing great quantities of beer and sake upon him- and watching his mind expand - even, perhaps, blow apart (temporarily), as mine did, my first trip out here. But so far? It hasn't worked out that way. First off, the sonofabitch appears to be some kind of semi-vegetarian. Didn't make it to the izakaya crew meal cause he had jet lag and the squirts. During a micro-club shoot and the yakitori scene, he had to huddle in the cold outside as there was no room to put him inside. At the soba place this morning--while Morimoto and I slurped noodles, Chris sat out of range, food-less, reading a much used and suspiciously stained copy of Outlaw Editor magazine. I think the article was called "Cuts and Sluts" - illustrated with photos of a hefty looking Amazon with an orange faux hawk and a silver lame thong, stretched across a console. During lunch, while Morimoto worked his knife through a whole monkfish on my behalf, Chris ordered out for pizza. Tomorrow's three star Michelin sushi shoot at Sukiyabashi Ono holds out equally small promise for the guy. The place only has six seats. I feel compelled to feed him liquor. Maybe even violate my own deeply held principles about karaoke. I even promised to perform my own, rather notorious version of "White Wedding" if he chugs a couple a bottles of Sapparo and wraps a tie around his head. I don't know--Time is running out.

Hopefully the ryokan on Monday will bring an attitude change. My attempts, by the way, to pump the very diplomatic Morimoto for inside information on my former employers, have come to nothing. He parries my every question with the evasive skills of a Condaleeza Rice:

"Who's the most clueless judge you've had to face on Iron Chef America? Mo Rocca? Or That Guy who played 'Big Pussy' on the Sopranos?"

"Next Food Network Star: Could ANY of those tools even cut an onion?" I get nothing. A low chuckle, a shake of the head. Morimoto's way, I'm guessing, of saying, "Nice try."

Update: On the way to the Master knife forger scene, we stopped at an okonomiyaki joint for a quick crew meal. Morimoto suggested the Hiroshima style (not surprising, as he comes from there) but Martinez stuck with the home team: classic Osaka. Apparently, he's been having impure thoughts about the stuff since cutting the Osaka show a while back - and he fell on that order like a one man pack of feral dogs, snorting and breathing heavy and making all sorts of Godawful noises, scraping his food right off the griddle with the handy - but still sizzling hot - spatula and shoveling it into his greedy maw without a thought. We were all quite impressed. Morimoto, catching sight of the carnage occurring only a few feet away, moved quietly away - afraid, perhaps, of losing an extremity in the flurry of snapping jaws and grinding teeth. I believe Chris is happy now.