of yellow tiles –like Dorothy, the one from the Wizard of Oz–, and find new meaning in a profession that, due to sophistication, distance and media stardom, they were beginning to not recognize as theirs.
Doll kitchen (II)
Benjamín Lana 9/28/2020Comments
An article works when it excites or is useful to someone. It is not about how many have seen it, but how many have been of some use to it. There is nothing as scarce in this world of ours as time, so if we steal a few minutes of that precious treasure from someone, we must give them something worthwhile.
There are occasions in this profession in which several readers or many readers tell you in person or through the 'digitalia' that you have put in writing what they thought, that you have read their minds, and they thank you. Those days taste like blessed glory because they come to confirm that the chosen topic was necessary and the focus was correct.
Last week's cumin was one of them. The text ended by leaving open the question of whether the new gastronomic force in the country, -the transformative one, the one that is beginning to be empowered with alternative proposals and sustainable businesses and on a human scale-, is the one formed by the heterodox chefs who seek in their homes the hand to hand, direct cooking and contact with customers, those who use their dolls on a stove every day.
With so much professional and amateur information, so many media outlets and so many different formats dedicated to telling about gastronomy in this country, it does not seem very logical that most of these houses have hardly appeared as they deserve on the big television programs or are have gone up to the stages of the great congresses. We have not done something right, probably me the first, and it was time to settle that debt.
A documentary
In recent weeks we have visited several of these chefs in different corners of the country to collect their testimonies in a documentary that will be released on Tuesday, October 6 at the San Sebastián Gastronomika Euskadi Basque Country congress (this year it can be followed for free from its website for the first time in 21 editions). The security and illusion with which they defend their homes are a breath of hope in the cooking that is being done in this country. Some are young people full of projects who have found their way to earn a living with dignity and other veterans with thousands of hours in the kitchen who have refocused their interest, returning to what is understandable and sincere in search of a more authentic life, valuing the account above of the necklace.
Says Pedrito Sánchez, the soul of Bagá, perhaps the heterodox that orthodoxy has fallen in love with the fastest, that "a cook cannot become obsessed with perfection and stop enjoying". That is why he set up his project in a 45-square-meter room. Enjoy and make enjoy. That seems to be the key. Rafa Peña, the owner of Barcelona's Gresca, is not looking for perfection either. She recognizes that her cooking is simpler than before, but not worse, and she defends the authenticity that resides in cooking what you would like to eat.
Pedrito must be pleased to have earned the freedom of being able to say 'none' to all the investors who pass by his house, offering to leave his small place to pilot a tailor-made ocean liner that will give them chests full of gold, feel happy in the decision to voluntarily tie himself to his Jaén, to his people, to his affordable expenses and to enjoy cooking what he wants, "without having the obligation to make salads or croquettes" in order to meet the objectives.
César Martín is another who has reached nirvana in his own way at Lakasa: a fixed and dedicated clientele that gives the restaurant stability, the possibility of cooking quality products always in the wave of the seasons and... working only from Monday to Friday. And so we could continue with many more who have considered cooking and living as two complementary and inalienable actions and are showing that it is not a chimera but a real possibility.
All these and many more also share a gastronomic intention and vocation and do not deny culinary pleasure, hedonism or luxury. What happens is that, for them, contemporary luxury is not the almost non-existent beluga caviar, but the point of an expert hand that cooks live for you. The expert gesture that skips the recipe and treats each portion he cooks differently, the magic of a stir-fry different from that of all other cooks, and what the great photographer Cartier Bresson called "the decisive moment."
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