Dinner blind in a luxury palace: smell, touch and feel what they put on your plate

By the time the entree is finished, you've already forgotten that you can't see anything.

The blackness prevails fast and you quickly get used to it.

The game begins a few minutes before, when they cover your eyes with a mask at the entrance of one of the rooms of the majestic

in Madrid.

Luxury surrounds everything, but you will not be able to bear witness to it.

, or what will be on the other side of the door.

Only at the end of the night do you discover what the couple sitting next to you is like, who owns the deepest voice at the table or whose contagious laugh is.

Only at the end of the night, when you can remove the mask from your eyes, do you discover the exotic color of the dessert you just ate.

If there is any trace of him, because the chef

and the journalist and food critic

make it difficult.

Jonatan, who has lacked vision since he was born, is the master of ceremonies throughout the night.

He is in charge of guiding the diners in each of the five passes that make up the menu, of giving them the instructions to put what the chef has prepared in their mouths, and he is also the one who encourages them in the fun challenge of guessing what. contains every bite.

They call it

, but in reality it is a sensory, temporal and spatial journey in which the least important thing is the absence of vision. "We use blindness as a vehicle to force the diner to smell and pay attention to the dishes, because sometimes we take the photo for Instagram and we do not care what we have eaten. We seek a gastronomic experience in which the diner forgets that they are not go, "Armengol tells

.

And they succeed.

By the time the starter is finished, we said, you've already forgotten that you can't see anything, and touch, smell, hearing and flavors take on another dimension.

, but that small, rough, diamond-shaped lump that is placed a quarter to minus next to the plate;

, but that sometimes intense, sometimes mild, sometimes dry smell that the waiter places at ten minutes past.

The surprise with the small ball that explodes in the mouth as soon as it begins is also inevitable, but for the game to be a game, we keep the secret accomplice of the proposal that during

It will be available at the Westin Palace hotel, within the V edition of the Madrid Hotel Week that is being held these days in the capital.

We can tell that there is a good dose of renewed Madrid tradition and another portion of

that takes us back to childhood and to the most typical dishes of family feasts. We can also say that there is room to satisfy the

that we all carry inside and as a culmination, we find a proposal

enough to satisfy any type of palate. For the pairing, five other wines from

complete the experience.

José Luque, executive chef of the hotel advised by Jonatan, has been in charge of designing this trip full of aromas, textures and flavors that has

.

"The priority when planning the menu is that the diner feels comfortable and that the dishes can be touched and eaten with their hands as much as possible."

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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