Our third day of the Barcelona international tour with Portland Food Adventures took us out into the countryside to the Michelin-starred restaurant where our guide Chef Jose Chesa (of Portland’s Ataula) worked before coming to the USA.

Can Jubany is a glorious example of slow food and not only locally-sourced but mostly grown right on the property. Chef Nandu Jubany is an international star of slow food and farm-to-table cuisine, with modernist touches.

We started our visit with a tour of the kitchen garden, farmhouse and chicken coops.  Jose translated as Chef Francesc Arumi described how they rotate the crops continuously to provide the ingredients for the dishes. It was very impressive. The restaurant itself is in a restored country house.

While I could have visited this marvelous place on my own, it was priceless to get a tour from an insider. We also got a tour through the kitchen to see our first appetizer assembled.

The dining areas of Can Jubany looked peaceful compared with the noisy industrial settings for most Portland restaurants. We had a separate room for our group with a tastefully set table.  Each course was paired with wine.

These first two appetizers had definite modernist twists.

I love pumpkin gnocchi. The service was perfect, as you would expect at a Michelin-starred restaurant.

It seems we always had to have some foie gras.

This lovely caterpillar appears on the Can Jubany web site, too.

That’s what the chickens were up to out in the coop.

The Spanish classic dish, with unusual seafood.

And now we got a flood of desserts

Quote of the day from Jose, “Modern is good, but if you go too far you miss the point.”

I’m pretty happy still by the end of the meal.

Anna says Nandu married her for her stomach size.

Many of us considered this day to be the highlight of the trip, it was wonderful.

But with the bus ride too and from, I got in almost no walking. I had to make up at least 30 minutes of exercise on the exercise bike in our hotel to make my Apple Watch meet that daily goal. But it was one of the few days in the past year I didn’t get 10,000 steps on my Fitbit.

This was good as some of our group had blisters from the walking the previous day. And we all far made up the missed steps the next day, in which I logged over 31,000 steps, as much as a half marathon.

Next: Big Big Day of Eating and Walking and meeting culinary superstar Christian Escribà