Your new favorite salad.
William Salazar He is of Andalusian origin, spent his childhood in Venezuela, trained as a cook and lived for many years in New York and now lands in Madrid at the head of the Wilhelmina restaurant, a luminous space in the glazed patio of the The Pavilions Hotel (a few meters from Colón). Like so many other chefs, Salazar has transmitted this vital trajectory to a gastronomic proposal that is also very aware of the place in which he presents himself.
“Guillermina is a Mediterranean-based restaurant in which all the dishes have a little international wink because of my experience abroad,” he tells Traveler. From New York, where he learned cooking, he has a knack for mixing cultures. “At Guillermina we try to do something very similar, always being clear about where we are and where we are from. I have been very lucky in that it has not hindered me when it comes to cooking, but above all I have been cooking dishes that I like and that I think were adapted to the offer in Madrid”.
The bright and quiet patio.
Despite the short life of the restaurant and the hotel, Guillermina has already penetrated into the most difficult: with the best-known dishes of the capital, such as the Russian salad and, more recently, the steak tartare. In both you can smell and taste those personal journeys of Salazar: his salad is spider crab with seafood mayonnaise and spider crab; and the steak tartare accompanied with Jerusalem artichokes (a root vegetable also called Jerusalem artichoke) and seasons it with Korean flavors.
Steat tartar with Korean flavors.
“The salad is a very personal dish for very simple reasons”, he explains. “I am from Seville where the salad is a religion, but my grandmother, a great cook, is from Bilbao, I have worked a good season in Donosti and obviously the spider crab is a tradition there. I have only sought an intersection of both to pay homage to my origins”.
For its part, "The steak tartare is pure New York." “I lived for a long time on 31st Street and Fifth Avenue and right on 32nd is Koreatown, where restaurants are usually open until very late. When leaving work at night, several friends used to go to eat something and I have very good memories of a dish called bibimbap tartare, which was white rice with a beef tartar on top, mixed with Gochujang, which is a paste of fermented chilies, "he continues. Salazar. "In this case, I have taken Spanish raw material -for the meat-, but I season it with these fermented chiles and the classic ingredients of a steak tartare.”
A room that is also an art gallery.
And so it could go on: behind each dish there is a story and, probably, a memory that has been adapted to products from Spain mixed with international spices or techniques. “The luck of being in Madrid is that products from all the autonomous communities pass through here so I am not closed to any in particular, but it is true that the fish comes a lot from Galicia and Andalusia. On the other hand, vegetables and meat come more from Extremadura and Castilla y León”.
Pumpkin curry sea bass.
WHY GO
We have already told you: for the spider crab salad (served in the spider crab shell on a bed of ice, so that it is very cool) with seafood mayonnaise and spider crab. But also for the steak tartare or the sea bass with pumpkin curry.
ADDITIONAL FEATURES
The space itself is a bonus. Designed by the marincola Studio, The Guillermina restaurant is inside The Pavilions hotel and is reminiscent of cosmopolitan venues in the world's great capitals. The entire roof is glazed so that in good weather it can be opened to the Madrid sky. On its walls, as in the rest of the hotel, paintings hang from the Álvaro Alcázar gallery that can be bought.
Chef Guillermo Salazar.
Address: Calle Amador de los Ríos, 3, 28010 Madrid See map
Telephone: 913 10 75 00
Schedule: Every day from 7:30 p.m. to 11:00 p.m.
Half price: €30