Carme Ruscalleda: the conquest of the easy
You spend your life looking for the difficult. The applause, the elevation, the yes from the audience, the most-difficult-yet . One spends one's life searching for answers to questions that one invents -something that needs to be done. One more kilometer, a medal (another) in the chest of our nonsense. I suppose that, deep down, we are looking for a speech. A way of being.
Sant Pol de Mar. Forty-eight kilometers beyond (or closer, depending on how you look at it) from Barcelona. The Maresme, Sant Pau, the train tracks, the sea, the garden facing the Mediterranean, the symmetry, the beauty, the silence, the bougainvillea and the wrought iron of the tables in front of the open kitchen. There is in the kitchen of Carme Ruscalleda something so far from this day to day full of ego , objectives, noise and appearances that even bother. Something (they tell me) so linked to his Villa de Sant Pol de Mar and his Catalonia that there is no way to tie it -and I want to.
Sant Pau restaurant
His kitchen - which is his way of being, is restrained, small, almost Spartan . There are no sequence shots or symphonies of John Williams raising plates to posterity (what posterity?) in this film. Not a trace of philosophy -those great gastronomic speeches- in his menu; only trade, simplicity and tenderness. His connection to Tokyo and his second home in Coredo-Nihonbashi must not be casual. , or that line (is it my thing?) that unites the Catalan bonhomie with the speech of the "well done" of Japan that he discovered from the hand of Yuji Shimoyama.
Ruscalleda: the conquest of simplicity
Sant Pau's menu is not eternal. Appetizers: parsley and tarragon petit choux, tomato, watermelon and sardines with lemon and a little wonder, a wink -more- turnip and bonito dim sum . Four more dishes star in the bulk of the dinner: transparent seawater cannelloni stuffed with al dente vegetables, lobster on a tiger's milk foam (one of the dishes of the night), romesco dashi (broth with seaweed and tuna) and as a blunt dish, Challans duck roll with chard and yuzu . Dishes (all) that work more as harmony than as contrast. The Stilton and the railway arrive with the desserts and petit fours, again in the terrace full of flowers that embrace this old house in the Maresme.
Product, trade and simplicity
Product, trade and simplicity . I think of the Iki aesthetic and of John Maeda (author of The Laws of Simplicity), I think of his ten laws in this garden in this Catalonia that -they say- I don't understand. I think so: reduce, organize, time, learning, differences, context, emotion, trust, failure and essence.
"You are what you do, and wherever you are, you live in what you do" , affirms Munoz Molina. And I also. And I suspect that Carme too, so I toast (in silence) to the easy and to this gastronomy that escapes us.
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"You are what you do"