Is contemporary cuisine forgetting the pleasure of eating?
Not so long ago that 50Best gala in New York and we are all waiting for the Rumors around the Michelin Guide (Will Ángel León win the third? Nerua or Enjoy the second? Will Atrio be the surprise?). Actually, it doesn't really matter if you're for or against this whole circus, because The Show Must Go On and to Show he is interested in both the stingy and the sycophants: it's all part of the game. And so it must be.
There is supposed to be Rain of Stars, but the team of Benito Lamas (Chief Editor of the Guide) remains true to his secrecy and I'm glad: I sincerely believe that all these fireworks put the focus of the rest of the world on a sector in need of headlines and new guests for so many prime time cooking shows but the question is another: Isn't that creative contemporary gastronomy (the one with the headlines) moving too far away from the cuisine we enjoy in our day to day? I mean so many honest restaurants, bars and taverns and without much pretension to feed well. Chefs, room professionals and waiters (there are still, believe me) still believe in the happiness of the client —and not so much in the award on duty. Food houses, neighborhoods, trips, markets and, most importantly, people .
About this divorce between the contemporary gastronomy Y folk cuisine A good friend of mine, editor-in-chief of an important fashion magazine, alerted me so long ago: “Isn't what happened to ours happening to your sector a little? There came a time when haute couture lost its connection with real clients, and mutated into a circus of taxable clothes: haute couture shows as a stage where the designer can 'express all his creative freedom'. And of those muds, these muds: only the circus has remained, we have killed the crafts”.
The truth? Is right. We already talked about a certain exhaustion of haute cuisine, about how the lists and guides that we know ( 50 Best, Michelin and Repsol ) live absolutely far from gastronomic reality —from our day to day— and while simple and honest restaurants like La Cosmopolita, La Buena Vida, Tribeca, Marcano, A Fuego Negro, Tandoor or Rausell stay away from the catwalks of this “Gastronomy Show” , the distance between the sector and the public will grow and grow, and there will come a time when the chefs we respect today will become caricatures of themselves (time after time); there will come a time when contemporary gastronomy (that which occupies the covers) becomes a stupid race for the most difficult yet. For the most “creative” performance or the most radical project.
We've got one way left before we screw this all up. Just one. And it has to do with that definition that he gave us diego warrior : “Haute cuisine does not exist for me. In any case there is good cooking and bad ”. The good kitchen. The only one we should talk about. Neither the 'high' nor the 'low': the good one. Everything else is noise.
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Let's not forget the important thing: the cult of the table