chard of the yaya
It costs that the vegetables enter the concept of haute cuisine with the well-deserved recognition they deserve. Madrid is a city that rises and falls on meaningless fashions and pays attention to them only when they come disguised as a trend. They have always been there, in slow stews and classic recipes , in the family pantry and waiting for the maturity of the palate to recognize and appreciate them.
The Calagurritan cook, Lucia Gravalos , she does it daily and for two months in Gastronomic Mentica , a restaurant in which the products of the Riojan garden find their maximum defender.
Her cuisine is based on vegetables, the main protagonists of the project, which beats thanks to the traditional recipes of her grandmother Anna Mari . "I am always with her in mind. It is she who writes her recipes by hand and then I am the one who 'destroys' and deconstructs them. My kitchen has that touch of tradition and modernity which I think people are understanding," says the cook. "When you eat them, they take you back to that childhood memory, to the pot at home. But this time with an elegant presence and more refined flavors."
Grávalos was trained at the catering school in Benasque to then learn from the hand of Martín Berasategui. She also worked with Dani García in Calima and worked as a pastry chef in her homonymous restaurant, later making the leap to Álvaro Salazar's kitchens in Mallorca.
During her confinement, her boredom led her to devise a gourmet hamburger delivery, a springboard to open, in June 2020, Mentica by Lu . "My partner has a pub in Calahorra called Menta and he didn't use the kitchen. As it was unfeasible to open the bar when the restrictions began to relax, I convinced him to do the delivery there. Then we moved to the kitchen of the pintxos bar in a friend, who left it for us on weekends", confesses the chef. "With the money we managed to save, we paid the rent, we continued with the delivery and we managed to do a little work to open our own restaurant." A gastronomic concept in which she, along with her partners, Steven Zuluaga and Alejandro Gonzalez , they serve eight diners every half day.
Lucia Gravalos
Madrid It was inevitable to be able to bring her kitchen to more people, but also to be able to count on a larger team that would allow her to focus only on cooking. "In the capital there were fewer restrictions and it was time", she explains why moving was her next step. "In Calahorra we pay many bills and we have very little money , so we had to look for a place in Madrid that did not have a transfer". They found it in the Sagasta street , next to another temple of vegetables: La Manduca de Azagra.
Her menu – with an average price of €50 and a tasting menu for €75 – has regular guests such as yaya chard , a recipe in which the product is cooked and mixed with a light bechamel sauce and fried ham, chorizo and paprika. "I dot a circle of roasted garlic cream, powerful and fine, and in the center I put the chard leaf sauce, filling the leaves with chorizo and adding a few spherifications ham liquids," she shares.
Her star dish? The stewed cauliflower . "It is the vegetable that is most harvested in Calahorra, it even has its D.O. It is a dish that we have all hated as children because when we returned from school the landing always smelled of boiled cauliflower," she jokes. She recovers it as it used to be presented for children to eat: au gratin, with bacon and white sauce... but her way. "We have smoked bacon with vine shoots that we infuse for a long time in a bechamel very fine with sturgeon caviar . We confit the cauliflower in toasted butter (noisette) to remove the odors and serve it with a crispy vegetable.
Animal protein is not undervalued given the magnificence of the vegetables that reign here, and they are present in some chops of lamb –"Typical from alla"–stuffed with lecherillas and roasted, accompanied by a spherified Rioja cheese and artichokes.
Calagurritana cauliflower stewed in noisette butter
All served in a small place decorated by the mother of one of the partners, owner of a decoration shop in Calahorra. "She made us lamps , which are vine shoots, the knobs in the shape of grape clusters and the vertical garden . At the entrance of the premises and before crossing into the dining room, the restaurant has a vermouth where the aperitif is drunk with Mon Dieu and eaten with vegetable and artisan preserves from The Navarrico , transformed by Mentica with airs, juices and spherifications.
Cocktails are also incorporated into the plant world with Steven Zuluaga , thanks to purees and syrups that exalt a Moscow Mule with a mashed artichoke, a Vodka Sour with peas or mixing peppers and raspberries with egg white, gin and lemon juice. The wines on the other hand, they are linked to the season with 80 references and representing eastern Rioja, a great unknown with limited productions but little by little they are getting ahead.
El Navarrico preserves with a Mentica touch