Codigo de Barra, Cadiz: Overly Complicated

There is a trio of menus at Código de Barra starting with two tasting menus and an a la carte.

The 12 course menú degustación (€47.50, $53, £40) features wine paring with a €23 supplement ($26, £20). The menu also offers a €30 supplement for sherry pairing ($33, £26).

Menú Clásico

As intrigued as I am about 12 courses, I opt for the 7-course menú clásico (€35, $40, £30) without the supplemental wine pairing (€18, $20, £15) or sherry pairing (€20, $22, £17). Instead, we opt for a bottle of Tempranillo-heavy Biga Luberri to carry us through the evening (€18, $20, £15).

I say we. EatGoSee Sr is my partner-in-dine on this occasion and throughout my travels in Spain and Portugal.

I nearly opted for the a la carte menu with intriguing options such as the wild boar tenderloin with choucruote, cane honey and “glove sauce” (€18.50) and roteña swordfish belly (€17.50). More daring options drew my attention towards the tartare of Iberian pork with piccalilli ice cream (€11.75) and gilthead carpaccio with cuttlefish stew (€9.75).

Código de Barras Highlights

Perhaps I should have opted for the a la carte or menú degustación as the menú clásico left very few positive highlights. The kitchen clearly possesses technical skill. Our first appetiser named “Our Olives” is a duo of “olives” marinated in olive oil. On closer inspection these are cherry tomato-sized, verdant orbs of spherified olive juice shattering under the slightest touch like savoury M&Ms. This is impressive cooking delivering a one-ingredient dish and re-engineering it to be better than its original state.



Our dessert of French toast with thyme ice cream is made by a chef that just understands the purpose of a dessert. A dessert is the last act of kindness a chef sends their guest. Pudding or sweets are a plate of joy and fun. Our French toast more closely resembles a hearty slab of moist bread and butter pudding cascading gently spiced milk with every forkful. The wedge of toast is coated in a sticky, semi-set caramel as if it is dipped in the best part of a creme brûlée. The thyme ice cream matches the milky pudding and delivers a herbaceous note to soothe the high sweetness of the caramel. This would stand as one of the best desserts devoured during my time in Spain — a trick better restaurants like Sobretablas may want to observe.

Código de Barras is a Tale of Skill Over Balance

Yet olives and cake a tasting menu does not make. I want to be impressed with Código de Barras as there is technical skill abound. Yet the kitchen’s ambition to impress outstretches its discipline. Many dishes were 60% there but 40% lost. The talented chefs have so obsessively fallen in love with the dark arts of cooking and imagining that they’ve forgotten to stand back and ask: does this work? Is this the best version of this dish? What should the diner walk away with and have we done the best version of that?

The guiltiest culprit is the langoustine with a dash of dry sherry: a wildly misdescribed dish that arrives under a blanket of indiscernible fat curls. These whipped butter-like cotton balls coat the mouth in a layer of fat neutralising any sweet langoustine flavour. They want to impress with langoustine under a rubble of amorphous saturated fat leaves no clear understanding of what we are meant to experience other than bewilderment.



The Origin of the Tapas delivers a crisp Iberian ham crisp covering a warm broth in a sherry snifter. It is a tribute to tapas originally being a “lid” or “cover” over drinks. The history does not overcompensate for the thin broth that imbues little discernible flavour that perishes under the bolder Iberian crisp.



The love child of prawn toast and a biscotti arrives rising out of a rock answering the age-old question of what that would look like. These shrimp fritters are described as traditional but clearly some imagination yielded a duo rectangular spears crunchy and deeply rich with a shrimp flavour that comes with using the whole crustacean. Sadly it’s very greasy and this lets the dish down like running a marathon to only collapse 100 metres from the finish line.



I trust you get the point. I could go into detail about how the Iberian pork steak with wild mushroom; a delicious dish should have stayed there. Instead, it brought an unwelcomed ice-cold, lumpy bland mashed potato salad (not described on the menu). A turn of events so bizarre to decidedly serve a cold side dish on the same plate as a hot pork steak. I looked around for cameras around this modern monochrome restaurant floor hoping I was being Punk’d and all would be fine. A TV show host would emerge, we would laugh together and my real main course would arrive. Nothing of the sort took place.



The brioche, cured egg yolk and marinated sardines are unbalanced as a hostile raw onion taste goes to war with oily diced sardines in the smallest of bowls. No amount of smooth cured egg yolk nor hollandaise-like sauce will diplomatically bring these foes together. I cannot finish the dish.