As I sit in the Pep Guardiola-financed Catalonian restaurant Tast, one of Manchester’s newest, most forward-reaching dining experiences, I ponder how, during the recent culinary wars over cultural appropriation, one country that remained curiously silent is Spain. So, while Jamaicans have been audibly irked by Jamie Oliver’s jerk rice, and the Japanese take umbrage over our cackhanded tribute to katsu, the Spanish have stayed shtum about the piles of oily patatas bravas and pil pil prawns presented along Britain’s high streets as “a real taste of Catalonia”. It’s almost as if they’ve enjoyed the 40-year self-own. “Let them eat their king edward patatas doused in ketchup and chilli flakes!” they seem to have laughed since the 70s. “Give them their chor-it-so boiled in red wine with garlic bread to dip!”

All this, however, makes it trickier for delicate, thoughtful, educational places such as Tast to tempt in large crowds in 2018. And this it will need to keep bums on seats across its capacious three floors. Tast is a high-end, imaginative, occasionally edgy “taste of the Catalan kitchen” by Paco Pérez, a chef of two Michelin-star calibre.

In the “pinya” level, on the ground floor, we sit along Scandi benches and order a couple of tramuntanades – small-bite dishes from Pérez’s restaurant Miramar in Girona: “Duck’in Donut” and “sandwich de formatge trufat”. The former is an Instagram bear trap: a small doughnut filled with foie gras mousse, dipped lightly in white chocolate and dusted with vivid powdered raspberry. It costs £3.80 and tastes like a satanic Quality Street.

The trufat, a cheese and truffle sandwich, is two tiny pieces of geometrically askew, prawn crackery-style meringue sandwiched together with an inner layer of tou de til-lers cheese and confit truffle. The innards are a feisty slap of cheesy, feety funkiness. The whole thing tastes, I imagine, like a Tuc sandwich cracker would if you’d been on Bear Grylls’ island for four weeks. Whether I would want to eat either of these things again is debatable, but if Pérez’s intention was to bring elements of Catalonian molecular gastronomy to King Street in Manchester, well, he can consider that a job boxed off.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tast’s liver-filled Duck’in Donut ‘tastes like a satanic Quality Street’. Photograph: Shaw & Shaw for the Guardian

In the pinya level, guests are invited to range freely over the single-sheet menu of plates divided into sea, land, garden and bakery. Upstairs, there’s a more formal dining room, and a private dining area that promises to take guests “on a culinary adventure across Catalonia, on a journey for the senses”, which to me reads as “similar dishes but with more waiter chat, served with bigger gaps” – a sentence that, after years in this job, I find, as the kids say, deeply triggering.

On safer ground, namely the ground floor, we range through half a dozen or so plates. A long, sweet slice of tomato-topped coca bread comes doused with olive oil that’s poured theatrically from a glass teapot: warm, fresh and crunchy, it’s devoured and we order another. Aubergine chips, for want of a closer description, arrive on a bowl that looks like an emoji. They’re drizzled with a dud anchovy mayo, molasses and sesame, and are oddly moreish while not being entirely delicious. Red pepper croquetas, however, are fantastic: fluffy, crunchy and with heavenly, sweet innards. They’re a true work of art.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tast’s monkfish and red prawns in a saffron mayo: ‘The mayo is saffron only in colour.’ Photograph: Shaw & Shaw for the Guardian

Still, we are now 50 minutes into lunch and Tast has never quite stopped being dainty and somewhat muted. A larger bowl of shredded king crab appears in a pink, wobbly, marie-rose-flavoured blancmange, to be eaten, I supposed, with a spoon, just like Angel Delight. A plate of monkfish appears. Or, rather, four small pieces of cold monkfish and three prawns on chilled, rather anonymous, beige sauce flecked with a saffron mayo that is saffron only in colour.

It is one of those lunches I call time on – we have eaten and eaten and not really eaten – so I go straight to puddings, which are where glory lies.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tast’s xuixo de crema: it’s a showstopper. Photograph: Shaw & Shaw for the Guardian

Xuixo de crema is showstopping: a warm, plentiful wodge of fresh puff pastry filled with custard, and lying in a slovenly manner in a puddle of dark chocolate. We order crema catalana, too – a rather humble-sounding vanilla custard with a smattering of berries – and end up talking about it for days.

We eat in the window, where tourists pose for pictures beside Pep’s “new signing”. I leave feeling that Tast is important, uncompromising, at times lost in translation and possibly not all that much fun. And perhaps, like many wonderful, authentic foods from other cultures, we probably don’t quite deserve it.

• Tast 20-22 King Street, Manchester M2, 0161-806 0547. Open Tues-Sun, noon-2.30pm, 5-10.30pm. About £35 a head, plus drinks and service.

Food 7/10

Atmosphere 7/10

Service 8/10

Instafeed