Dani García: "The conceptual kitchen is a brutal job for an excessively smaller audience"

Dani García (Marbella, 45 years old) is happy. Happy and free of pressure. With age, he has learned to shake off stress and, in the last year and a half, he has lost weight. "If you are concerned about having a three-star that bears your name and where you are expected to be —because the one who goes there and pays 250 euros pretends to see you—, you are mentally obliged to always be there," he says when asked what has Personally gained since, in November 2019, a year after becoming part of the triestrellados, Dani García restaurant closed definitively, in which he reached his maturity and recognition as a chef. It is precisely there, in that same place in Marbella where, still in the middle of de-escalation, in June 2020, he opened Leña, his project dedicated to embers that now also arrives in Madrid.

García has just landed in the capital. The opening team finalizes the details for the first dress rehearsal before the opening this Thursday. The place, located in the Hyatt Regency Hesperia hotel and previously occupied by the two-star Sant Celoni restaurant, now looks less sober but elegant. Black color, presence of wood and golden reflections for a

steakhouse

updated. In his break with haute cuisine - although this is also so - he has also gained the freedom to make things to suit him. “Using a certain type of crockery, cutlery, glassware, staging in a concept like this having a three stars ... is something that I did not consider. If you are paying to go to a three-star hotel and you pay 50 euros to go to Bibo [one of its brands] it has to be noticed ”, he clarifies. He has gotten rid of that too. “At Leña we launched ourselves. The same staging, the product, the knives to cut the meat ... The part of props that a haute cuisine restaurant requires can be found here, but at a price three times less ”, he adds. The menu, practically identical to that of the local in Marbella, is a festival of international cuisine on the grill with Andalusian nods. Avocados from Malaga,

smoked

brisket

,

kebabs

,

yakitoris

- a type of Japanese skewers - and aged meats.

More information

• Dani García, the chef who sees beyond the stars

• Firewood, a grill to forget the world, Dani García's new bet on meat

But also, the opening comes with a surprise. At the end of a black corridor located in the back room: Smoked Room. There, 14 diners will be able to enjoy live smoke and firewood in an exclusive bar and lounge, where an

omakase

menu will be served

- at the chef's choice - at a price of 135 euros per person. "We understand that the future of

fine dining

or haute cuisine goes towards a more direct, exclusive kitchen with a product that not everyone can find and treat in a special way," he says. "Although I insist, it is my personal appreciation." A nuance that, anticipating criticism, introduces several times throughout the conversation.

Disciple of Martín Berasategui, García achieved his first star at the head of the Tragabuches family business and continued his rise to stardom among chefs in Calima. For more than 20 years he devoted himself to haute cuisine, a stage that gave him fame and professional satisfaction, but which he decided to leave behind in search of what he understands as the true meaning of sitting at a table: enjoying. "I am more and more convinced that eating is something pleasant, period", he defends, to explain the vision he has of his previous stage. “I ended up tired of all the excessively conceptual part, although we were the first to sign up. If you ask me about the menu of my life, I would probably tell you the one from

The Little Prince

[year 2015, inspired by the work of Saint-Exupéry]. There was no more conceptual and cool menu than that, but did people get it? I am not very clear about it. It is a brutal job for an audience that is too small ”. And clarifies again: that's just your opinion.

With the restaurant just closed, the arrival of the pandemic truncated the plans of the Dani García Group, but the chef took advantage of it to rescue a project that he had kept in a drawer for a couple of years. The great Mediterranean family, his food delivery firm, saw the light thanks to the time that the coronavirus confinement returned to him and not only has it been consolidated but, he warns, "what is coming is brutal." Now, in step with the reactivation of the economy, expansion plans have taken a new run. Leña Madrid is the tenth restaurant in operation - and the fourth in the capital - of an extensive list of establishments of its five brands: Bibo, Lobito de Mar, Dani Brasserie, Leña and Smoked Room, in Marbella, Doha, Tarifa or Ibiza. which will soon be joined by two more in New York and a Bibo in the London neighborhood of Shoreditch.

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For the moment, García has made his commitment to casual cuisine and the "updated chiringuito" a formula for success, but he still has not found the gift of omnipresence.

Nor does he want to.

He himself rebels against the idea that the cook must always be in the kitchen.

“Someone has to cook mentally.

Many times it seems that only the one who does it physically cooks.

I am cooking all day in my head ”, he assures.

He cooks ideas, concepts, and then with his team he makes them come true.

Those around him are an indispensable part of a perfectly oiled machinery for, despite the magnitude that the group is taking, to ensure quality standards: “The first important thing is that the team has grown with you and knows how to do things as if you were your".

The Malaga chef, who speaks with the same fluency about cooking techniques as he does business, sleeps peacefully despite having gone from feeding 50 diners to doing it for hundreds and leading a group with a legion of workers under his charge, although the management falls on the businessman Javier Gutiérrez, "the one who executes and organizes the plans." He remembers that he had financial difficulties for a long time, but that from that, as from his immersion in casual gastronomy, he also learned. Now García shows his chest and assures that he has never had "a payroll problem" and that his restaurants "work every day." Something that if it didn't happen wouldn't paralyze him either. “I learned nine years ago that you always have to keep your business healthy. This was unexpected [the pandemic], but crises are cyclical and you have to be prepared for them.The second most important thing is that if a crisis hits you and your business is not healthy, you have to have the courage to cut the bleeding as soon as possible. We Spaniards have a very negative thing in that sense and it is the sense of ridicule or shame if we fail and that should not be the case. In life everyone fails at some point ”.