PortAmerica 2022 has once again demonstrated that food and music can share stage masterfully. What's more, this Galician festival is proof that haute cuisine can also be Comanche territory. Going hungry in PortAmerica: hunger for more PortAmerica.
—I know, what a joke.
I hear it when accessing the huge kitchen of the festival, which stands as a stage in itself behind the Portas sugar factory.
They have announced electrical storms in Galicia. However, by the time Dani begins to sing her Look On the boards, PortAmerica is still green and blue. « This is the Galician Ibiza », I had been told on BlaBlaCar. I believe it. First time in Pontevedra and I come across the Mediterranean.
I sniff inside the space destined for the ShowRocking , the gastronomic section of the musical date, first discreetly because I know that open kitchens also keep reservations. Then briskly.
"Look at those, how well they live and how little they have cooked to get high" she sings meanwhile the one from Vigo, and it is ironic to be here, seeing how the fires of an appointment whose lineup of chefs does not detract from that of the musicians at all.
Xanthi Elias.
And it is that every festival must have its service station . Fortunately, there are more and more bets that refueling is done with good fuel. The truth is that gastronomy pulls and a worn pizza or a subsoil hamburger add little to the musical events that multiply and compete in national territory.
Of these derivatives we will see little in the algorithm that those of Esmerarte have marked between the localities of Portas and Caldas de Reis.
you know until the octopus that has been tattooed Pepe Solla on his left arm, it looks like he's going to start moving his tentacles at any moment. I don't know if to the rhythm of the music or the dishes.
Pepe Solla on guitar.
Which is gastronomic section curator of the festival since the first edition -it is now in its tenth- has made it clear to the chefs: «Think about where you are going to be, but never lose sight of who you are».
And between that being and being he is going to boil everything in PortAmerica: Michelin stars, Repsol suns, supernovae and even black holes.
If it rains, let it rain. He will, and sure enough, no one will care.
DAY 1
Outside and inside the bar everything rotates. The gastronomic route that Solla has set up is a roundabout. As a flâneur gastronomic , the festival subject will not stop rolling around that bar in which there is north and there is south, there are Europe, America and Asia , there are youth and maturity.
He will go round and round unable to choose the right way out, because they all will be. PortAmérica has something of a curse, an unattainable goal.
The twelve of Carlos Oroza , the hotel management school in Pontevedra, start by paying full attention to Francis Paniego (Gateway of Echaurren**), Nagore Irazuegi and Rodrigo Fonseca (Arima) and xanti elias (Finca Alfoliz) among others.
Francis Paniego red-handed.
They will work as kitchen skewers during the three days of the festival . —This is amazing! - Luis, one of them, manages to say, while he follows the instructions of Eneko Atxa.
He has given them the task of flour diced hake while he and Matteo Manzini, executive chef at Azurmendi ***, they drown them unceremoniously in the fryer.
Shake your hips to the rhythm of the Russian Roulette of Capsule . The oil boils and the sun attacks. Manzini has placed a cloth on his neck so as not to get scalded and he looks like an Italian recently arrived from the Bilbao festivals. In Galicia.
He is more paternalistic with their elaborations angel lion (Approach***). The stagiers just watch their team slide a few creamy grilled sardines of olive pits on toast with smoked aubergine, a classic chef from Jerez.
Finesse at four euros in this mess of mouths that eat and sing and kick a kitchen in which I am nothing more than an elephant in a china shop.
Pickled acacia on Mugaritz roast beef.
In that chaos that for them is gear, the Echaurren croquettes they are honeyed pause to cling to. They come out two by two like dozens . It will be the same with the Straws Maite , best of ham in Madrid Fusión 2021, which I will not get to taste.
There's no room to run but here people fly . Iván Ferreiro hits the keyboard above our heads on the small stage of the ShowRocking space and neither Nagore nor Rodrigo, nor the ear of his delicious taco with apple and piquillo peppers, they miss a chord of the Galician musician.
I managed to catch some scandalous tomatoes with almadraba tuna with whom the man from Finca Alfoliz and Eli, one of his companions in the kitchens of solidarity World Central Kitchen They have traveled from the south. They are all smiles -them and the tomatoes-. They have been saving the ingredients of the rest of their companions from the sun.
—I here cutting tomatoes by hand all afternoon and these people with their little shoots. Oh, what to see, today's cooks! - jokes Elijah, who buried his star underground so that those stars would be born from it. tomatoes, courgettes, new recipes and children's books culinary education.
At the last minute, after Diego Lopez's knives (La Molinera), the bowl of Hake from Celeiro by David Abalo (The Radio) and a fine caramel cookie of the Peruvian Valeria Olivari , Xanty Elías will pull out of the sleeve a leg of acorn-fed Iberian ham that has been smuggled in to the delight of all ShowRocking.
A festival without a dinner is not a festival.
Be cool, what cool.
SYNCHRONIZED: CHAVELA AND A SIOUX BEFORE THE FIRE
It's Friday afternoon. Javi Olleros' son helps prepare the mise en place for his father at the bar. Alvaro Garrido (Mina*) puts her Bakio blood sausages on guard, and Emanuel Carlucci and Alejandra Herrador (Atalaya*) unpack their very veined Iberian pastrami Behind the scenes.
Outside, in the kitchen, Julián Otero (R&D Mugaritz**) cheerfully gives instructions to a couple from the training center . They position carefully roasted peppers on corn tortillas , pinch blue cheese, make bullseye.
"Have you just met?" I ask Otero.
—People know each other before, always.
It disappears between vapors. I need an oak tree to feel that I am in Mugaritz.
Begoña Rodrigo's paella (La Salita).
his boss, Andoni Luis Aduriz, will be lucky enough to iron those synchronized ones while Chavela, reincarnated as Rozalén and the Asturian Marisa Valle, sing your crybaby on the Showrocking stage where Solla, guitar in hand, appears from time to time without warning.
"Cover me with your shawl, weeping woman, because I'm dying of cold" is heard, and the Basque sweating profusely in the kitchen.
And there is no sommelier who can fit songs and snacks here. Imagine, for example, that a topic of The Parrots pair with a plate of spinach stewed in chestnut milk It would have been too much to imagine, but that is what this festival has to offer.
Also Olleros dishes, which tame more fierce than music. "You have to try this," a guy tells me from the bar as he catches me watching him gesticulate as he takes a spoonful of his ration.
He has gone ahead of his group that arrives later brandishing beers without deciding on one of the ten skewers of the turn . The guy knew what he was coming for.
Vicky Sevilla (Arrels) preparing oysters at PortAmerica.
Because there are two types of public in PortAmerica: the one who comes to burn everything under the boards and the one that comes to stay like a pepe, as they say around here.
In fact, there are not a few who do not separate from the gastronomic area and that at each request he also takes the opportunity to take a photo with Vicky Seville (Arrels*) or with Begoña Rodrigo (La Salita*).
Vicky and Yelko Suárez fill buns for their titaine chimo -stuffed and fried rolls typical of Castellón- and oysters dipped in pesto and feta cheese side by side. The Arrels sommelier swims just as well between crystal glasses as he does between paper plates.
While the tomato tartare, spicy squid and coconut white garlic by David García (El Corral de la Morería) takes us off the ground, in the background, everlasting, Joan Fuster dance around the Josper like a Sioux at the stake.
Spinach from Javi Olleros (Culler de Pau).
His pincers stir the air, slide muffins for Benito (Bardal), they bless the chicken for Roberto (MXRR), they fan cabbages for Artur (Aürt).
On the last day, the chef and salesperson for the oven brand will appear with his left hand bandaged by a flame attack , but he will maintain the same gracefulness in his movements. Fuster doesn't sweat, he smokes.
The gastronomic journalist lamented Jonathan Gold way back in the first 2,000 Californians that food had replaced music as the topic of tabletop conversation. His past as a music critic made him debate between the two disciplines.
—In PortAmérica it happens the other way around —, Pepe Solla tells me, — we talk about music in a kitchen space . The number of things that have come out of this coexistence! This spirit is contagious.
I imagine Gold, shaggy-haired Guns 'n' Roses, going crazy in the Azucarera de Portas. His chimney heralds a storm.
Arima's ear taco.
THE VILLAGE PARTY
"If Begoña [Rodrigo] wants to start making a paella, that's what I want to happen," Solla had told me in reference to that transfer the spirit of each chef to the festival . And that's what happens.
The three paella pans that the Valencian has brought bubbling from seven in the afternoon and are noticed in the surroundings with that security that comes from a well-done stir-fry. In a while, the orders for the power pop of Walloon Arrow Y rations will scoop out . We will get to traffic with them.
those of Roberto MX shoot daisies with a water gun anyone who dares to open his mouth and those of Diego Guerrero are an avalanche inside the bar, behind the curtain, on stage.
The Cook has closed all its stores from Madrid and has come to Galicia with the whole team DSTAgE . Also with its juicy meatballs , which go straight into the diners' hole like golf balls.
Those of DSTAgE in PortAmerica.
The lacquered and smoked bao bao of the enigmatic Lucía Freitas cushions the blow. Also the libidinous Chinese double chin siumai that Gonzalo García and Luis Gómez-Bua (Nakeima) They've been riding ten hands for hours , including those of Aduriz and his wife. They are all mouthful.
In the ShowRocking kitchen there is no time for rubbish. Still, if you ask them, everyone will tell you that this festival is like a retreat , that they "should pay Pepe Solla for participating."
PortAmerica 2022 has not yet finished and they are already staying for next year . They've gotten the hang of the musicians' encore on stage. — It's the town party, but to the beast ! — Solla's octopus tells me. The truth is that The tablao hooks them too.
Food in the stomach absorbs sound. The bar begins to clear . Also the doubts about whether haute cuisine could be continuing to travel along dirt roads, being inshore fishing out of here, after here. Distances are deceiving when swimming out to sea.
PortAmerica is running out. Naty Peluso perrea on the stage and we drink like dogs. He no longer rains. And, yes, he has given us completely the same.