It has just opened its doors very close to the Puerta del Sol and it is already making waves as the new "go to" place . Considering the amount of possibilities that they give to a simple –but complicated to master– culinary invention like the puff pastry It's not surprising either...
How barbaric! Don't stop! PLAY! If the life of Mr Bonet If it were a basketball game, the journalist and commentator Andrés Montes would have had no respite from Javier Bonet's career, one of the most ingenious minds when it comes to gastronomic concepts.
And less so now, when the creator of Patrón Lunares (Mallorca), Sala de Despiece and Muta (both in Madrid), makes his triumphant return to put himself on everyone's lips with an idea so simple, it turns out to be incredibly wonderful: revive and revalue the power of puff pastry in a cafeteria-restaurant on Calle Virgen de los Peligros under the name of puff pastry .
And the fact is that if Javier Bonet knows how to do something, it is to go to the deepest part of the taste memories of your guests , search among those nostalgia dishes and give them a 360-degree turn to update them and give them a whoosh in the mouth! with recipes that we never before imagined could exist but that, nevertheless, do.
“Puff pastry is born from a love story, since we find Estela Gutierrez Fernandez when she falls in love with a person who has been wanting to work with me for a long time and who lives in Madrid. We really wanted to do something with the sweet but thinking as pastry chefs and not as chefs who want to make desserts , it was there that we imagined puff pastry as a wire with which to maintain the balance between sweet and salty. When Estela gave us a taste of what she did in her family bakery (Pastelería Pedro) in Cabezón de la Sal (Cantabria), we couldn't believe that the puff pastry would turn out so delicious in a place with such marked adversity from the humidity”, says Javier. Bonet about how the idea for Puff Pastry was born.
And he emphasizes: “Because of its lack of moisture, Madrid would be the best place to work puff pastry , a fact that was confirmed by seeing the shine in Estela's eyes when she saw that it remained intact and perfect almost a week after coming out of the oven. Therefore, the perfect puff pastry would be the one that is assembled just before being consumed”.
That was done but where to mount it? After having opened the ban on Calle Ponzano (remember that Sala de Despiece was the first place that attracted the public to the street), he fell in love with a place very close to Gran Vía and Puerta del Sol.
“It had been a cafe specializing in soufflé potatoes. You could see how they were cooked without any use of thermometers and everything by 'eye'. Curiously, they embroidered them”, recalls Mr. Bonet about the first time he visited the premises.
“When we met the family that worked here, they told us that they had been the owners since the beginning of the construction and that during almost 100 years it had been a creamery ”. The floors, baseboards and furniture are the decorative link to the butter, while the walls – covered with photographs by Javier Salas – symbolize the flour and the water is idealized with a strip of specks that reflect the color of the ceiling.
"In fact, this color was present in the centennial creamery , something that we discovered when demolishing the premises”, says Bonet.
Butter, flour and water is the base of the puff pastry, a basic element for those Christmas dinners in which the vol-au-vents were moistened with mushroom sauce, in which the snacks offered them in delicate and crunchy sheets covered in vanilla or chocolate.
Having been the kings of luxury stemming from French decadence , puff pastry was relegated to catering establishments that took advantage of it to serve it in bland bites.
But if Mr. Bonet knew how to revive a tomato as a sirloin in what was once a neighborhood butcher shop, How could he not be able to make us remember the reason for the success of an artisan dough?
This is what he shows in breakfasts and snacks with puff pastries made in their own workshop –located in the basement of the premises–, with glass crescents filled with cream, chocolate or angel hair, little palm trees or tartlets such as white chocolate, fresh raspberries and sorbet, accompanied by coffee or chocolate made in (this) house.
In the lunch and dinner section , there is an offer of dishes with or without puff pastry and with the opportunity to create your own menu: roasted endive with pomegranates and blue cheese churro; Wellington burger with puff pastry potatoes , the star of the house; burrata salad with tomato and basil or a grilled bluefin tuna with citrus, angel hair and fried puff pastry.
This site promises and the imprint it will leave on a multitude of Instagram profiles throughout this festive season will be true proof of it.
Address: Calle Virgen de los Peligros, 8 See map
Telephone: 910 59 91 53
Schedule: Monday to Wednesday from 08:30 to 20:00. Thursday and Friday from 08:30 to 00:00.
Additional schedule information: Saturdays from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. and Sundays from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Half price: Lunch and dinner: €40 / Breakfast and snacks: €10