The Future in Gastronomy in Europe is called Bagà, Ynyshir and Casa Leali
A slow death of the so-called “New Nordic Gastronomy”, a stagnation of “Basque revolution”, the dust on the French cuisine and their replacement with extreme fine dining, and the Mediterranean
Having lived on the North Sea shores for a very long time, I was never excited by gastronomy there. Oh yes, seafood is good and lichens and fermented everything and droplets of buttermilk and deers are fantastic.
And hopelessly boring.
Up north you need very complicated architectures to achieve edible tomatoes, and despite climate change being a benign influence here, I was never completely fine with their greenhouse hydroponic aftertaste.
No restaurant caught me emotionally or intellectually. No version of Noma could relieve me from thinking that it was all a bit bullshit.
Fermentations come from the east, and having mingled with enough Balkans and Central Asian and Russian and Bulgarian people, I wasn’t blown in my mind when Noma and all the rest started fermenting everything.
Ditto for the use of buttermilk and infused oils. Or the need to create an extreme theatrical around a meal like what’s on the plate was not enough.
So it was easy for me to identify the southern quadrant of the northern hemisphere as the real focus of European gastronomy. As it has been for the past 10000 years, at least according to Yale’s clay tables recollecting a wealth of Babylonian recipes that are the basis of all gastronomy around the Mediterranean.
With the oceanic travels, alas, we forgot the importance of the Mediterranean.
Instead, it is the home of our classical philosophy of thought and all the rest that comes with it. We should not be ashamed of it, in this time and age where decolonization is a keyword.
It is the belly-button of our current European and Mediterranean civilization and we should be prouder of this. Nothing about being Caucasian, or Western. This is south, has not a thing to do with Anglo-Saxons, and is as remote from the US and whatever that embodies as it was before the Americas were “discovered” by wandering sailors.
This is where Al-Andalus, the marvellous kingdom of Frederic the Second in Sicily, where the Ottoman Empire and the Europeans mixed, mingled, collided, and created what are our lives and gastronomies today.
And so, back to gastronomy.
Spain, France, Italy. But also Lebanon, Portugal, Israel, Palestine, Greece, FYROM, and then Romania, Bulgaria, the Balkans, and all the northern African coastal states till Morocco and the most remote Macaronesian Islands.
The shift is coming and yet few have understood it.
Nothing new or interesting is happening in Northern Europe, just a lot of wealthy press outlets touting the graces of a cuisine based on importing half of the ingredients from sunny places and pedalling on the same bicycle as in the past twenty years.
Noma is closing and that era with it too.
Ah, no, not closing - that was yet another publicity stunt so that we talk about it. How ingenious, interesting, innovative and above all, relevant.
Right?
The New Mediterranean cuisine is here to take us back thousands of years and yet, project us into the future.
One of the epitomes of this gastronomic (r)evolution is without doubt Bagà in Jaén.
A place so iconic and vital in contemporary gastronomy. A place where an extreme terroir connection is paired with an extreme vanguardism in preparations. It’s impossible to describe Bagà, said once as a journalist.
Because Bagà is an emotion.
As cosy and tiny as a domestic and almost motherly kitchen, with few tables (few as in three) and a couple of spots at the counter. Three in the kitchen, two in the service.
Essential and quintessential.
Pure in its form but revolutionary in the plate, or the most talked about town plate of the year wouldn’t be algae prepared and served à la Meunière. This is simple, without long discourses about sustainability, blue fisheries, Horizon funding, customer readiness and all that jazz.
Pedro Sanchez serves it without a word and it’s all implicit.
This is what a Maestro does: he orchestrates everything and we, the public, absorb it all without needing to read the music as it’s written.
“It is necessary to understand gastronomy as heritage and culture and to attend to and care for it as such. To achieve this, it would be advisable for it to stop being seen as mere food and merchandise or consumption”
says Fernando Huidobro on BonViveur and I deeply believe he is right.
“Bagá is a miracle. I prefer not to write much more, because the important things are impossible to explain” said recently Spanish journalist Toni Segarra.
And I agree.
Bagà is an emotion, and also something that enters your soul changing it forever. There’s no way back once you sit at the minuscule counter or one of the very few tables. Gastronomy will be changed forever for you. It’s urgent to go, and urgent to go back.
Because gastronomy is first and foremost culture, not consumerism.
Despite what you see on Instagram.
But what will happen up north, in this decline of the new Nordic style?
We will probably be back to extreme luxury dining, sourcing products all over the world and forgetting words like “sustainability” in fine dining, in favour of “hedonistic pleasure”.
Take Ynyshir, for example.
It’s the epitome of extreme location summed with extreme search for the best and most expensive and most perfect ingredients, to bring them in a very remote corner of Wales.
It takes hours of driving through a natural reserve populated by sheep and the random down-to-earth pub serving ale and mince pie, to get to the closest cities and yet, this restaurant manages to be a bellybutton for luxury dining.
And sure Welsh-local this restaurant isn’t (safe for some butter and fats), but the rest is as cosmopolitan as the dreams of a child born in the wilderness, dreaming of dining atop the Empire States Building. Arranged like a school with tables facing the kitchen and a wild crystal ball blasting music, this restaurant is exactly what I thought fine dining could be when I was a child living in a tiny alpine village - as remote as this Wales hamlet.
It’s a pilgrimage towards an extreme luxury eating comfort zone, combined with a tingling feeling that below a homely cottage feeling, there’s a punk rock soul. And then, when you sit at the table, you are served the absolute best in the world.
Including a Big Mac because that’s what we, provincial children, dream of whole running wild in nature. We crave otherness and cosmopolitanism and the world.
And yet, as The Menu clarified in its final scene for the thickest of us, our taste is liked forever to what food pleasantly connects our memories.
What’s the non-conclusion we can take?
We could say that it takes a spark of divinity to be a truly genuine innovator and a dash of geniality to make something that is worth the trip for just itself. A completely different star category: places of pilgrimage.
Places where the acolytes of the gastronomic cult flock and humble their tasting buds to the high priests and priestesses of the culinary arts.
And this has nothing to do with fancy articles, middle-aged models who reinvent themselves as gastronomic imperators, or wealthy elderly in search of an adrenaline kick.
And now to a very pertinent example.
Here is a plate by Ristorante Orto, in Puglia. Puglia has become a target for mass tourism, with a sharp increment of overseas visitors after the Stanely Tucci video series. Tours for 5000 euros and above per week are being marketed to foreigners, and they are invading a region that twenty years ago was as forgotten as Molise nowadays.
The plate is simple: one ingredient, extremely worked. Enzo, a local gastronomic journalist I like a lot, describes it perfectly as a bell pepper roasted to resemble a piece of roast beef.
Pure umami.
Wait. I have seen something like…
Of course.
The iconic Nori algae is a fruit of the restless and innovative mind of Pedro Sanchez for his Bagá in Jaén. An algae, prepared to resemble a slice of à la Meuniére. With fried capers and brown butter.
Pure umami, too.
And the bell pepper, let me think quickly.
Oh, yes. Of course. Andrea Leali, at Casa Leali, has been developing consistently and innovatively on vegetables. Charred bell pepper, with the umami and the smoke and peperonata sauce.
Innovation is like a spirit, that travels across cuisines and lands wherever it may be finding itself to be fit. There is, however, a special connection here around the Mediterranean.
Andrea Leali is a quiet force of change, a steady wind of innovation with a restaurant in his hands that is one of the few gastronomic restaurants devoted not only to innovation but also to leaving us customers with the feeling that we could make of those tables a comforting, weekly appointment throughout the year.
And in the end, this is what every restaurant owner or chef wants the most.
Returning customers, aplenty.
And this is my wish for these three gentlemen of the best gastronomy in Europe. May their restaurant fill with joyful, returning customers.
May their customers truly enjoy sitting in their spaces (dancing and wiggling in some, being part of the cuisine in others, being comfortable under a pergola in others).
May this gastronomy, centred on the product as a vehicle for a dialogue with the customer, win.
Noma is closing (yet again) 🙄
I was so excited to see Ynyshir pop up on my screen as the 'future of fine dining' (or 'fun dining' as head chef Gareth Ward calls it). Loved you piece, thank you. I hope you don't mind me sharing my write up of our meal there in 2018 - a celebration of 3 years of running our deli/coffee shop in mind-Wales. I'm no food writer but I had a bit of fun writing this.
https://www.feastsandfables.co.uk/field-notes/our-best-meal-ever
Barrie