Adrià’s Proposed Mexican Restaurant
A couple of days ago, I had a sharp “oh no!” reaction to a Facebook thread where lots of people I respect were enthusing over the prospect that the famous Catalan chef, Ferran Adrià, was thinking about opening a Mexican restaurant in Barcelona. And since I’ve been trying to figure out why my first reaction was so negative.
After all, I am an enthusiastic advocate of fusion cuisine. I am ready to say that cuisines rarely map on to nations and that, in any case, nations don’t own cuisines. Althought I never ate at El Bulli, Adrià’s restaurant, I have in the last four years lived in both Barcelona and Girona (sixty miles away and capital of the province in which El Bulli was situated) so I have had a chance to enjoy the markets and restaurants. And I have no reason to question Adrià’s culinary intelligence.
I think I am working my way to an answer. It goes something like this. At the heart of every cuisine lies a series of techniques, usually associated with the making of sauces. Often these depend on particular ingredients but it’s the way of treating those ingredients that really matters. This creates the character of the cuisine and is the contribution it can make to the world’s culinary heritage.
So, to take a somewhat dated but probably familiar example, at the heart of classic French lies the use of emulsions, gels, and starches to make sauces, combining meat stock, fat, flour, and acids in a huge variety of ways.
Now perhaps what bothers me most about the “Mexican” cuisine that I have encountered in the United States, in England, and in Girona is that it fails to capture the techniques used in Mexico. Although I have lived in Mexico for the past fifteen years, I venture the following characterization with some trepidation because my Mexican friends may just say I am talking through my hat. But I will plough ahead anyway.
Mexican sauces, of which there are an enormous variety, are pureed vegetable sauces that play on the flavors, the textures, the colors (and to a lesser extent the piquancy) of an extensive range of fresh and dried chiles combined with the acidity and textural additions provided by tomatillos, tomatoes (and to a lesser extent by other ingredients such as lime, vinegar, xoconostle, etc.) plus onions, garlic and often cilantro. The more complicated of these sauces also employ other thickeners and spices including the notorious chocolate, but also allspice, cinnamon, fresh ginger, raisins, capers, toasted tortillas, and a host of others.
To become a really competent cook in the Mexican tradition is to become quite at ease with all the implicit rules of combination of these basics.
In my opinion, these sophisticated sauces can make a huge contribution to the world culinary heritage. Delicious, with a huge range of applications in the kitchen, as well as inexpensive and healthful, they are unappreciated gems that go way, way beyond the better-known pureed tomato sauces.
So, if Adrià could capture this repertoire and showcase its virtues, he would be doing all of us a huge favor. If not, then for my money however great the food it would be an opportunity lost, one more of the exploding number of “Mexican” restaurants worldwide.
Update Sunday March 18th.
Thanks to all those who have picked up on this. Following up Elatia Harris’s comparison to Indian food, Mexican sauces are not just tomato sauces with chilies added any more than Indian sauces are bechamel sauces with curry powder added (as happened in nineteenth-century France and England). Nothing wrong with tomato sauces with chilies, nothing wrong with bechamel with curry powder. Both can be just fine. But neither introduces new culinary techniques.
The one description I have seen of the mooted restaurant seems vague and not reassuring. (Carmen “Titita” Ramírez’s El Bajio is terrific by the way but it’s not a taco spot).
“Albert [Ferran’s brother] has mentioned before that the team has considered opening an outpost of the traditional Mexican restaurant El Bajío or at least collaborating with its owner Carmen “Titita” Ramirez, but nothing to that effect is confirmed. He told Eater last year, “It won’t happen next week, but maybe I’ll open an authentic ceviche bar in the neighborhood, or a taco spot with the lady from El Bajío. Who knows?””
via Ferran Adrià to Open Mexican Restaurant in Barcelona – Adriawire – Eater National.
I think, also, that there is a possibility that a knee jerk reaction against a Spanish chef opening a Mexican restaurant in Spain might need to be examined for opinions running more along class lines then along culinary lines.
Class is always lurking behind food choices!
How very penetrating. Many thanks. If Ferran Adria intended to open an Indian restaurant in Barcelona, you could switch out a few ingredients and have an analogous argument for why it could be a dull idea or a good one. Straight to the heart of what makes a cuisine that may or may not translate well to radical revisionism.
Thanks, Elatia and for linking on FB. I need to post an update on this now I know a bit more. And I am always happy to be called penetrating.
A friend in Paris says Mexican food is quite topical there. Can the Adria brothers be catching a wave? Class and food — Rachel is the one to decode it!
I had heard that. It’s trendy in London too though it’s understood as tacos and tostadas. American-Mex basically.
Class and food in general I’m happy to go on about. I’m not so sure I want to spout off on Spanish-Mexican relations.
It’s a shame that restaurants have to be classified, even before they open. It would be fun if the food were to remain a mystery until eaten. Patrons could form their own opinions on what type of food they are enjoying. Don’t call it Mexican! Don’t call it Spanish! If we think about menus as being ingredients driven rather than by region, maybe we wouldn’t eat with preconceived notions in our heads?
Just a thought.
Jane, good to hear from you. I’m not even a trendy restaurant goer, too expensive, too much a matter of fashion. But they do have clout.
I can see that particular slant on things might be a sticky wicket for you!
But has anyone written about food — solely food — in the way Paul Fussell or the Mitfords treated class? My late collegemate Ernie Mickler wrote a cult classic of the 1980s, _White Trash Cooking_. It’s a valuable contribution to the lit. And it was PC because Ernie felt he embodied his subject, sharing many family recipes. I’m from Texas, and could animadvert for days on the Texan aspect of this (but it would make me deeply unpopular). Please give it a whirl, bypassing the Hispanic Old and New World!
Well most of the book I am writing is about food and class one way and another.
I appreciate your comments on this matter very much. As a US citizen who loves Mexico, Mexican cuisine and Mexican culture, I am still not qualified to say what is and what is not classic Mexican. But I am afraid the possibility lurks for something akin to Jessye Norman (who is a native Georgian like me) singing gospel. She should stick to opera.
Thanks, Doug. I appreciate the comment.
Can’t wait for the book, Rachel. I am not a patron of most of the restaurants I know about — too busy cooking! If you cook and research all day, it’s doubtful you want to focus intensely on food that demands high attention at dinner — kinda leaves El Bulli out.
Doug, I hear you.
Catching up on many of your posts that I had missed … an update from Albert Adria on Yaguarcan ( formerly announced as Jaguar) see link below.
The research that has gone on is now three years old with a young Mexican chef Francisco ( Paco) Mendez as the executive. I admired Paco in his career development from directing the restaurant at Centro Culinario Ambrosia to stints in kitchens in the DF to being the executive at Tapas Bar DF.
Hopes that between them they can “recreate” some of the magic of Mexican cuisine is high …
http://blogs.ocweekly.com/stickaforkinit/2013/03/pakta_albert_adria.php
Thanks ruth. Adria enterprise meets well trained Mexican chef. Could be very interesting.
To take a completely Structuralist perspective on this subject, the sharp lines of cuisines are really formal “grammars” in the Roman Jakobson sense of the word.
The technical apparatus what you call “series of techniques, usually associated with the making of sauces” is nothing more than a formal grammar that allows you to encapsulate the universality of food.
After all, all food is universal. So when the French prepare “brussel sprouts with mustard” as opposed to the Indians, only the grammar can have changed. Not the ingredients, not the equipment, not the people consuming the product. Only the grammar has changed.
The variation in cuisine is the variation in grammar not ingredients (= vocabulary.)
That’s why you can effortlessly make “Japanese” food using only local East Coast ingredients none of which are found in Japan. (In fact, that’s the mark of a “great chef”.)
Agreed that this is one useful way of looking at cuisines. At the risk of sounding repetitive, I’ve explored those analogies from time to time. I really appreciate your chef’s perspective though.