Madrid catches up
NEW AGE: SPANISH CAPITAL’S YOUNG CHEFS HAVE DEVELOPED A DISTINCT STYLE
It is Friday night at Fismuler, one of Madrid’s trendiest restaurants, and the din of conversation and laughter nearly drowns out our server’s rapid-fire descriptions of the various dishes that arrive for the table. Fismuler’s food is simply presented, but there is quite a bit of narrative behind its preparation.
When it comes to food, Madrid has always been more conservative than Barcelona or San Sebastián. But in recent years, a crop of new restaurants began offering updated versions of local classics.
Leading the pack is Fismuler, where we tried a meltingly tender brisket that had been brined for 10 days and then dry-rubbed with a mix of powdered coffee, cumin and brown sugar before going on the grill, and an outstanding tortilla that oozed a creamy egg-yolk foam mixed with fried sea nettles, which taste like crunchy algae.
As Spain began to recover from the financial crisis of 2008, dozens of new restaurants started cropping up all over Madrid. Yet many seemed to follow a similar formula, hiring fashion-forward designers to create photogenic interiors and sprinkling their menus with international crowd-pleasers like fish tacos or beef carpaccio.
There have been a few standouts, such as Triciclo, known for its high-quality market ingredients and expertly cooked game meats, or Dstage, whose chef, Diego Guerrero, accrued two Michelin stars despite his aversion to formality, but the emergence of a strong contingent of talented young chefs who have developed a distinct style is quite recent.
Unlike some of their counterparts in northern Spain, Madrid’s rising culinary stars tend to have an informal attitude, seen in casual dining rooms and unfussy plating. Their emerging style tends to balance innovation and tradition.
Simplicity drives the kitchen at La Tasquería, where chef Javi Estévez has earned acclaim with a menu that reads like an ode to offal. His dining room in Salamanca is contemporary and youthful and his food often arrives atop flat stones or inside glass jars. Estévez’s signature dish does not need plating: it is a suckling pig’s head, served whole, after being poached overnight in olive oil and deep fried. Patrons typically eat it with their hands.
A few blocks south, just steps from Retiro Park, is KultO, a restaurant that experiments with a fusion of Spanish, Latin American and Asian flavours, while keeping a small roster of faithfully executed classics like callos a la madrileña (tripe stew). Its cheerful décor was inspired by the most prized ingredient on the menu: almadraba tuna from southern Spain, which is caught using methods dating back 3 000 years.
KultO’s chefs, Laura López and José Fuentes, are particularly imaginative when it comes to tuna, offering it skewered as a Thaistyle satay, raw as a spicy tartare interspersed with creamy guacamole and crunchy fried corn, and stewed with mushrooms in a fricandó, a Catalonian specialty traditionally made with veal. “Madrid can certainly become one of the world’s food capitals, if it isn’t already,” said Alejandro de la Rosa, a writer who chronicles the city’s latest openings on a popular blog and Instagram account called Que No Me La Den Con Queso.