El Bulli, Cala Montjoi, Roses, Spain

'El Bulli here we come!' With that carefree sign-off, I ended my review of Tom Aikens' restaurant last year, after a memorably good lunch with Doreen McInerny. Doreen was the Independent reader who bid a sizeable sum in our Christmas charity auction to go on a restaurant review with me. At that lunch, she joked that she would bid again this year, in the hope that we might be able to swing a table at El Bulli, the world's most famous - and oversubscribed - restaurant.

'El Bulli here we come!' With that carefree sign-off, I ended my review of Tom Aikens' restaurant last year, after a memorably good lunch with Doreen McInerny. Doreen was the Independent reader who bid a sizeable sum in our Christmas charity auction to go on a restaurant review with me. At that lunch, she joked that she would bid again this year, in the hope that we might be able to swing a table at El Bulli, the world's most famous - and oversubscribed - restaurant.

Our Green Shoots auction rolled around again last Christmas, benefiting charities working in Africa, and Doreen was as good as her word, pledging a magnificent winning bid of £1,250. Now, we had to be as good as ours, and secure that table at El Bulli. The Spanish restaurant, crucible of the extraordinary and influential gastronomy of Ferran Adrià, is open for just six months of the year, for dinner only. During the winter, the entire team decamps to a laboratory in Barcelona to work on new ideas. And on the day El Bulli's booking line re-opens, the rush is so enormous that the restaurant could sell out for the entire summer, many times over. This year, a predicted 500,000 enquiries will come in for just 8,000 places.

By the time the Indy got in touch, every table was gone. Sorry, came the e-mail, but there's nada. Doreen absorbed the blow womanfully, and we were busy making other arrangements when a second message arrived out of the blue: we may have a cancellation in May.

I was booking flights quicker than you can say Stelios Haji-wotsit, while Doreen tracked down the nearest five-star hotel, the Hotel Vistabella in Roses, about 10 kilometres from El Bulli. As the date drew near, Doreen started sending me e-mails containing links to various culinary forums. And that's when we both got a little scared. There are people out there who would eat their own hands for a chance to dine at El Bulli. Plus, we were actually going to meet the maestro himself, Ferran Adrià, the chef that most other chefs acknowledge to be the most brilliant in the world.

Talk about intimidating. It was as if we were about to be granted an audience with Beethoven, and all we'd ever listened to was Girls Aloud. Mind you, I had a suspicion that as an opera buff and former restaurateur, Doreen would probably acquit herself rather better than me in either scenario.

It's a two-hour drive from Barcelona to Roses, a pleasant but unremarkable seaside town on the Costa Brava. And El Bulli is a hairy 15-minute drive from Roses, via a narrow and perilous mountain road. The first of many surprises is the restaurant's location - it's in the middle of nowhere, perched on the cliffs above a small bay, shared with a snack bar and a campsite.

An hour before service, the place was humming with activity, but not in the way you'd quite expect. The kitchen, a light-flooded modernist space more stylish than most restaurant dining rooms, was eerily quiet, as umpteen saturnine young males applied themselves intently to their mise-en-place. In a corner, a photo shoot for Adrià's next book was taking up most of the maestro's attention. As he prepared plates for the camera, I whispered to Doreen, "Look! He's taking a special knife out of a box." She gave me a forebearing look. "All chefs keep their knives in boxes," she replied.

Adrià joined us for a brief chat between set-ups, but the language barrier meant that our questions were only as complex as our rudimentary French could accommodate. Thus, my planned enquiry about the laboratory's current project to identify the genome of cooking was downscaled to "So, do you live around here?" Doreen fared rather better, prompting Adrià to explain how each of the 15 tables in the restaurant gets a different menu, usually consisting of around 30 dishes. "We ask each diner what they can't eat, we know if they've been here before, so we can avoid repeating any dish they may already have experienced. Each of those tables is special."

A meal at El Bulli is a synaesthetic experience; Adrià's kitchen plays with texture, taste and temperature, often using techniques developed in the lab, such as his pioneering of the now inescapable foam. I wondered which of this year's scientific innovations we should be watching out for during our meal. "The most important thing this year is lyophilisation," was Adrià's reply, to which Doreen and I nodded sagely. (It's a process of freeze-drying, I have since discovered.)

That kind of question clearly made him impatient. "Everyone focuses on technique, what's new, but the important thing for me is the emotion," he explained. "People want to know how everything is made, they ask questions. But it's like knowing the plot before you watch a film. Cooking is f emotion. That's the most important thing about El Bulli. Emotion. After all, when you're eating a good steak, you don't ask for the history of the cow."

Time next for a quick Winner's Dinners-style photo call, something to which Adrià is obviously accustomed. He does around 200 a year, he explained as we posed. "One's enough for me," muttered Doreen through gritted teeth. Then we were ushered through to the dining room, with a parting "à la fête!" from Adrià.

It's hard to believe that these two low, comfortable - whisper it - almost rustic-looking rooms can be home to a legendary avant-garde dining experience. Some good paintings and the odd chandelier apart, we could have been in any provincial Spanish restaurant. Then a waitress appeared carrying a coffeepot, from which dry ice was pouring like something out of The Sorcerer's Apprentice. "Oh my goodness!" gasped Doreen. And we were off.

The cocktails, which arrived first, were a version of pina colada, only the glasses were piled high with coconut-flavoured iced candyfloss, and there were tiny beads of pineapple suspended in the pineapple juice. Then came the first of a succession of tasting dishes - a single green olive on a spoon, only it wasn't an olive at all, but a smooth olive-coloured meniscus, which burst to flood the mouth with an intense garlic and olive oil. It was just the first of many dishes we were to sample over the next four hours that played with form and expectation to brilliant effect. With no menus to anchor us, and no idea of what was coming next, we trustingly opened our beaks like baby birds and gave in to pleasure.

Black lacquered boxes opened to reveal perfect, jewel-like white coils, like watch-springs - "olive oil spirals", the waiter called them. As instructed, we didn't drink anything for a minute after placing them on our tongues, and the effect was extraordinary, as the taste gradually morphed from oily to sweet, through sherbet and chive. God knows what they were, but they were unbelievable. Next, El Bulli's version of tapas; six dishes brought to the table at once, the single most beautiful display of food either of us had ever seen. Highlights included wobbly white "marshmallows" of Parmesan; "Oreo cookies" made with black olive and sour cream; and ruby-coloured communion wafers that dissolved on the tongue in a vivid burst of raspberry and thyme.

"I'm so enjoying this!" erupted Doreen, as further waves of small dishes arrived, a few minutes apart. Shiny teardrops of caramel sprinkled with gold leaf flooded the mouth with pumpkin oil; individual caviar tins were filled with tiny deliquescent balls of melon; a "popcorn cloud" left us with white muzzles; a ham "bocadillo"crumbled to reveal itself as wafer-thin pastry, instead of a bread roll, wrapped in Iberico ham.

About 14 dishes in, and we realised that we were only warming up, when cutlery and bread rolls were placed on the table. The dishes which followed were the most formally experimental, and also the most delicious, of the meal. A polystyrene box came filled with an aerated, frozen foam, flavoured with Parmesan - "Parmesan air" was the only way we could think to describe it - on which we sprinkled, from a zip-lock plastic bag, a "muesli" of dried raspberries and nuts. Another favourite was described as "foie gras soil", an unattractive looking assortment of different-coloured powders and grains which exploded in a fireworks display of taste and textures, from sweet to nutty, via a rubble of freeze-dried foie gras (lyophilisation, I presume).

Maybe because the dishes often referenced popular, everyday food, even junk food, there was nothing intimidating about all this, no feeling that we should have swotted up on what we were eating. It was just great, great fun - and the tastes were out of this world.

There were a couple of dishes we weren't so keen on. One, which partnered lamb brains with sea urchin and algae, was an overly challenging reinterpretation of surf and turf, while a deconstruction of the baked potato in a skin-flavoured broth made us realise that it's the texture which is the great thing about a baked potato, rather than the taste.

There's no room to describe everything else we ate: the sea cucumbers with rhubarb, the butter ravioli with sea urchin, the asparagus "egg yolk". Or the desserts, including the giant, honeycomb-like chocolate confection, which magically shrank to nothing when you put it in your mouth. Or the wonderful Spanish wines and sherries chosen by the sommelier. But for four hours, we were blissfully happy, an emotion which was obviously echoed around a room full of diners notably more casually dressed than is customary in three-star Michelin establishments.

We came to understand what Adrià meant when he talked about El Bulli being all about emotions; the meal was a roller-coaster ride, encompassing humour, surprise, expectation, nostalgia, trust, inspiration and happiness. "I see now why they've compared this place to Wagner's concept of Gesamtkunstwerk," as Doreen (obviously) put it. And when we asked for the bill, one final emotion came into play; gratitude. Because instead of bringing it, the manager asked us whether it would instead be possible for The Independent to donate an equivalent amount to the African charities being supported by the appeal.

There's normally a sweaty moment when I'm coming to the end of one of these reviews, when I have to compress some restaurateur's dreams into our clumsy star ratings system. But on this occasion, I have no such problem; full marks in every category. El Bulli truly is as good as everyone says it is. And according to Doreen, our dinner was worth every penny of her donation. "It's an absolute high point!" she enthused. "It's going to be very hard to go to any other top-class restaurant after this." Sorry, Doreen, have we just ruined your life? "Well it makes me very keen to try the Fat Duck ..."

El Bulli, Cala Montjoi, Roses, Spain (00 34 9 7215 0457) www.elbulli.com

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Menu €155 without wine