In Ana Irie
's WhatsApp contact information
there is an ideogram: 入江 あけみ.
You have to use Google Translate, and the pastry chef's other name is revealed:
Akemi Irie
.
One name in Spanish, one in Japanese.
A tradition of Nikkei families, the one that appears on the Argentine DNI and the one that a grandfather or grandmother usually chooses at birth, to continue ties with that island
18,000 kilometers away
.
These two worlds, the Argentine and the Japanese, come together in it.
It took time and a journey (which included several others): the one that allowed him
to claim his origin, appropriate it and redefine it from his profession
: the possibility of uniting the classic Western pastry with the increasingly fashionable Eastern one.
47 years old, very low profile, Irie is today
one of the most prominent and creative pastry chefs
on the Buenos Aires gastronomic scene.
She is the creator of the now legendary “little boxes” at the Masticar fair (which will be talked about later) and now she has done it again: at the same time she has just intervened with small desserts on the Amarra cocktail menu, the project in which changed Chila, the restaurant where he has worked for almost 20 years and where he created
an unusual dessert with 1,600 combinations
.
It was 2006 when Soledad Nardelli, her teacher at the gastronomy school, recruited her among the best students in her class to open
a disruptive restaurant in Puerto Madero
.
Argentine cuisine, but not the “usual” Argentine cuisine.
Chila became one of the spearheads of the renewal of Buenos Aires gastronomy that is now reflected in 50 Best rankings and Michelin stars.
With Pedro Bargero as head chef after Nardelli, Irie was always commanding the sweet segment of the menu.
She says that here she was able to do what she wanted and that is what she hopes for what is to come: “Continue having that freedom to be able to do things that I continue to be passionate about.”
One of the last was
Choose Your Own Dessert
, a tribute to the eighties collection “Choose Your Own Adventure” that little Ana devoured in the book club in which her mother had enrolled her and her three brothers.
Methodical, she wrote down each option she chose so as not to take the same path twice.
Now, she thought of
a dessert that each diner could put together however they wanted
.
Go with the Amarra dessert cart, which offers 1,600 possible combinations.
Photo Guillermo Rodríguez Adami
“There are five bases.
A yogurt cake, a dulce de leche crème brûlée, a ricotta panna cota, a chocolate mousse and a cheesecake.
You choose one and add creams, sauces, toppings such as fruits or crumbles,” explains Irie, who details that there are 35 ingredients that participate in the multiple combinations that can give 1,600 different desserts.
“It's statistics
,” the pastry chef clarifies.
The one she would choose?
“The cheesecake, which is made with Lincoln cheese and has a slightly salty feel, with sweet sweet potato and peach coulis.
It’s like a version of cheese and sweet,” she says.
Argentina-Japan
Ana returns to her early years in her native Corrientes, to her childhood in the countryside near Paso de la Patria, where her father had
a houseplant nursery
.
“Being the daughter of nurserymen didn't influence me because even a cactus dies,” she jokes.
Until they were ten years old, their mother took the Iries to and from the capital every day to go to school: then they moved directly and, when they finished high school, they came to Buenos Aires to study Biochemistry and live in
a residence for young people of Japanese descent
.
Ana Irie baby in her mother's arms, with her older sister in the family nursery.
Photo Courtesy Ana Irie
There he felt part of it for the first time.
The second was when she entered a kitchen.
“In my house we didn't speak Japanese, but we had many customs.
In Corrientes there were very few Nikkei families.
I remember that they made fun.
It wasn’t so cool to be different
,” she says.
At the residence, he found many others with the same codes.
“For example, we eat white rice instead of bread with meals.
Or the way our parents are... my dad is quite Japanese, very undemonstrative, and my friends in Corrientes have nothing to do with it,” she explains.
Following the family mandate to
study a university degree for your own good
, she always liked the exact sciences and chose Biochemistry.
She studied until the fourth year and she was blocked because she didn't see herself working on it all her life.
At that time, gastronomy was not considered, as it is today, as a profession.
The pastry chef in Amarra's kitchen.
She defines herself as meticulous and obsessive.
Photo Guillermo Rodríguez Adami
“I always liked to cook, but I don't have the history of my grandfather or my mother... Yes, she was very neat with the cuts.
As a girl she didn't know that she was a brunoise, but she would make you a fruit salad all in brunoise,
and my dad got nervous because she didn't feel like any fruit!
It was a fruit hash,” she laughs with a broad, frank laugh.
“Meticulous and obse”, her destiny was written:
the pastry shop
.
She couldn't escape the pressure of career change.
“She felt that she had to be the best student, the best in everything, to show that it had been the right decision.
I didn't enjoy the first years of the profession very much.
She demanded a lot from me.
She was too Japanese, now I'm a little more Argentine
-She laughs again-.
“I continue to demand myself, but I enjoy it much more.”
In Japan.
In a temple in Saitama, surrounded by the ema tablets where wishes are written.
Photo Courtesy Ana Irie
That union between his two worlds was largely forged in
his three trips to Japan
.
The first, barely received, was with a scholarship from the Akita Prefecture, where her grandfather was from, and she did an internship in a five-star hotel.
When she returned, she didn't enjoy it: “I spoke very little Japanese and I was very embarrassed, if you speak to them in English they are embarrassed.
So I stopped doing things because of the language,” she returned again as a tourist and a third time in 2019 with another scholarship from the Japan International Cooperation Agency in which
a revelation opened up for her: wagashi
.
The wagashi
Wagashi is the emblem of Japanese pastry
.
In recent times, little by little, it began to get into the Buenos Aires taste (a move for which Irie is also responsible) and today you can find wagashi in a cafeteria or closing a menu at a Nikkei restaurant.
Ana was dazzled
by the precision and enormous work that goes into these sweets, which use, among other ingredients, beans, rice flour and sugar
.
And with all the back of her years of work in the techniques of Western French gastronomy, “I got a lot more out of it.”
Wagashi, traditional Japanese sweets.
Photo Courtesy Ana Irie
“I always separated in my head what is Japanese from what is Argentine.
But with the wagashi the two worlds came together
.
Akemi and Ana joined me. Japanese pastry made me rediscover Japanese culture and gives me a tool to spread it,” Ana emphasizes about that reunion with her origins.
Being different was no longer a bad thing.
“I don't know whether to say that it was a revenge, but what at one point in my life, being different led me to negative connotations,
is now a plus
, something to take advantage of and value and it is great,” he rescues.
In black and white.
Go with Soledad Nardelli (first chef) and part of the Chila team.
Photo Courtesy Ana Irie
Thus, during the pandemic, with the restaurants closed, he began to produce
boxes of wagashi
and today sells about 50 per month, each time with a different theme and of course inside a furoshiki, the fabric used in the Japanese tradition to wrap gifts. .
Their customers often buy it out of interest in the theme of the month, there are other faithful followers of every month, and there are many eager to know more about Japanese culture.
Each box costs $22,000.
“When you don't know the laborious process involved, you eat them in two bites.
But when you see all the manual work, you take more time,” explains Ana, who also
teaches wagashi classes
.
Ana Irie's famous little boxes.
One of the versions of it arrived at the Masticar fair and was a success.
Photo Instagram Ana Irie
And, true to his Japanese origins, Irie is also
a fan of origami
.
And that other wonderful art, that of folding sheets of paper, was even brought to the pastry shop.
This is how the little boxes made with rice flour arose,
a classic of Chila desserts
: a literal box that was eaten and that inside had creams, fruits, and crunchies.
In 2019 he took them to the Masticar Fair and they swept them away.
“I made a thousand little boxes and I got so stressed... But I took it as a challenge.
Chila was always a restaurant that not everyone could go to and Masticar was a good opportunity for a dessert that we served in Chila to reach more people.
The objective was achieved
”, he emphasizes.
Today, Amarra's seven-course menu – the one that ends with the Choose Your Own Dessert cart – costs $84,000 plus pairing.
The Amarra dessert cart: 35 ingredients for 1,600 combinations.
Photo Guillermo Rodríguez Adami
The first box, the original, was dulce de leche with banana foam because Ana loves desserts with banana.
But
it had seven versions
, including those served in the restaurant, the “traveling boxes” that it took to pop-ups in other places, and those that remained in the testing phase: there were hibiscus, matcha, topinambur, passion fruit, cocoa and carob.
Now, origami is part of another plan that has her fascinated, and that is
the intervention of the cocktail menu
: thus, a peach butterfly and paper like the one on the box finishes a drink that is inspired by gin and tonic.
These challenges, she says, amuse her and are also when she feels that her brain is not “so divided.”
When she embodies that union of Argentina and Japan.
Ana and Akemi, the same different girl who chose to live her own adventure.
ACE