Spain's gastronomy revolution turns cuisine into high art

(China Daily/Agencies)
Updated: 2008-10-06 15:56

For the affluent gourmets dining at Spain's top restaurants these days, a sugar ball flavored with oak smoke might constitute a nice little novelty.

Tobacco ice cream might also make the bill of nearly 200 euros ($296) worth it, as would lamb tail cooked in ravioli, a deconstructed omelette or liquid croquettes.

Irony, play, surprise and provocation are the mottos of avant-garde chefs in the country whose haute cuisine has risen to compete with that of France, and where gastronomy is being classified as science and art.

The celebrity status of top chefs reflects a cultural revolution in which hedonism and buying power reign supreme, according to analysts.

For a long time, Spanish cooking was regarded as rather simple though healthy peasant food.

But a gastronomic revolution launched in the 1970s under French influence has turned the country into a gourmets' paradise, known for its exquisite small restaurants, especially in the northern Catalonia and Basque regions.

The best-known is El Bulli on the Costa Brava, owned by Ferran Adria, dubbed the world's best chef, who has six-month waiting lists.

In such places, "we do not try to nourish," but to "create a (special) moment," Andoni Luis Aduriz, who also counts among Spain's top chefs, says.

In kitchens resembling laboratories, chefs and their assistants are constantly experimenting with the most unexpected ingredients, measuring them with surgical precision and using the very latest technology to prepare dishes they compare with works of art.

Food must not only appeal to taste, but also to the other senses with its smell, appearance, texture and the sounds it makes when consumed, according to chefs who are being described as revolutionaries or visionaries.

Adria, for instance, was invested doctor honoris causa by Aberdeen University for his contribution to contemporary thought.

The creations of the likes of Adria, whose restaurant is closed for half of the year to experiment with new dishes, have turned them into celebrities running business imperiums comprising books, shops, culinary products, catering chains and publicity contracts.

Some Spanish chefs are now offering such outlandish dishes that "they themselves would not eat them," quipped Santi Santamaria, a Catalan top chef whose book Cuisine in the Nude sparked a storm in the Spanish gastronomy world.

The astronomical prices of exclusive restaurants made them inaccessible to the vast majority, Santamaria pointed out, also accusing his colleagues of forsaking their national gastronomy traditions in favor of a commercial, rootless and globalized cuisine.

In their eagerness to use scientific methods, Santamaria claimed, chefs were using unhealthy additives.

That charge was refuted by the health authorities, and Santamaria's colleagues accused him of sabotaging the haute cuisine that was becoming one of the trademarks of Spain.

Haute cuisine is not elitist, its advocates argue, because it influences traditional cooking in the same way as haute couture inspires off-the-rack clothes designers.

Some of the clients at El Bulli cried and even knelt after their meal, kitchen chief Albert Raurich said at the restaurant which Adria describes as making people happier.

Whether haute cuisine is art or "the apotheosis of banality," as one commentator put it, remains an open question.

"The satisfaction produced by a good meal may be comparable to that given by a movie, but the two are not in the same category," art journalist Alicia Murria says.

In a world where people in poor countries suffer from hunger, the post-modern cuisine is "a reflection of our society," historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto says.

It reflected the wealth of Western society, its search for novelty, its celebrity cults, and "how we want to turn everything into science," he explains.

(China Daily 10/04/2008 page10)