Never before have the culinary foundations of our country been established on such firm pillars.
Whether it is recognized or not, in Spain people eat better every time.
The upward trend that the hotel industry has been experiencing for decades is now encouraged by multiple circumstances.
Nothing is more eloquent than the growing business figures of this large part of the service sector.
effervescence and monotony
In the area of our large cities, especially in Madrid, business openings of various styles follow one another.
The latest urban kitchens proliferate along with
fast food
in all its variants.
It does not matter.
In the background and in the forms, a sum of multicultural, traditional, fusion and mestizo offerings in an endless dispersion.
Models in many cases inconsistent from a gastronomic point of view that arrive boosted by constant media smoke.
With the progressive irruption of investment groups and funds, the sector has been affected by a renewed dynamic.
New designer restaurants emerge daily with thoughtful cooking styles, predictable expiration dates, and calculated payback cycles.
More or less ephemeral restaurants that raise a storm among clients eager for novelties.
Thriving examples of the new hospitality where music and interior design weigh as much or more than food, which is relegated to the background.
Restaurants that in general terms suffer from a tiresome monotony: the same specialties with different statements everywhere.
Challenges and commitments
Under the effect of an apparent euphoria, however, the world that brings together the sector is facing many structural challenges and sectoral commitments, including digitization and training programs, and the inalienable work-life balance policies.
Challenges that throb in tune with terms worn out by use.
Concepts such as the hackneyed sustainability, respect for nature and the environment monopolize part of the concerns of those chefs who embrace new currents without being aware of the commitment they entail.
Something similar to energy efficiency, resource management and waste disposal, values of a present future that the Michelin and Repsol gastronomic guides, in an exercise of opportunism and in tune with our time, are quick to award with pictograms.
In defense of the producer
Now more than ever, in haute cuisine the rural, the natural and the artisan prevail, terms worn by use.
Concepts related to small producers, farmers or fishermen, converted, with more than enough merit, into the new stars of the gastronomic scene.
From the obscurantism in which they have remained for years to a deserved rehabilitation.
They are awarded on digital platforms, by financial institutions and gastronomic academies, although their names hardly appear on restaurant menus.
From one day to the next, haute cuisine is attributed a relevant role as the engine of the rural world and the survival of families linked to agricultural habitats.
“Without his contribution, haute cuisine would not exist”, affirm Joan Roca and other greats of the trade.
The small versus the industrial.
The countryside opposed to the city with the background of the rooting to the land.
In his name, and by dint of such reiteration, the artisan, the village, the natural, and incidentally also the ecological and organic, have become fashionable concepts that frequently hide false attitudes.
Restaurant menus review many labeled products whose origin and characteristics do not correspond to what is attributed to them.
kitchen with story
A subject as recurring as that of the "story" that proliferates in so many diners on a daily basis.
That multitude of discourses that restaurant customers endure every time they sit down at the table, intended to justify cooking styles and lines of work with variable foundations.
Repeated allusions to local groceries, private orchards that do not exist, cheeses from their own herds, and inshore fishermen with whom many claim to work exclusively.
And, in a similar vein, the resort to mentioning invented family history or historical recipe books for no other purpose than to create a common thread that supports each of their dishes.
The true and the false in a race to legitimize themselves through stories that are mostly unsubstantiated.
Influencers
and other tribes
The excesses of the sector are not alien to the incidence of social networks.
The number of calls is growing steadily.
Influencers
and spontaneously generated clappers who extol professionals, make hyperbolic comments and issue excessive opinions as a result of memorable experiences.
Communication agencies operate along parallel paths that intervene in the areas to which they have access in defense of their clients, guided by their legitimate economic interests.
Mediators who overwhelm with press releases and information that is not always accurate.
"Opinion is free, but knowledge is something else," said the Greek philosopher Plato in comparable terms in his work
De él La República.
The publishing world, which generates dozens of mostly irrelevant cookbooks every month, is also not immune to the effect of the current gastronomic euphoria.
Works in many cases self-published paid to third parties commissioned by the cooks themselves whose contents become hagiographies of those seeking recognition.
Additional testimony of that conjunction of egos that proliferate in the gastronomic galaxy as reflected daily by Instagram and Twitter in equal parts.
Cooks vs. Chefs
"Now that everyone wants to be chefs and receive applause, we declare ourselves cooks," said Uruguayan Matías Perdomo with flashes of good sense at his Contraste restaurant in Milan not long ago.
Compared to the professional chefs who spend the year in promotional campaigns for themselves, and dream of stars, suns and podiums, those chefs who give broad support to the sector remain almost invisible.
The same ones who without fuss or fuss carry out their daily work naturally.
A task that is no less exciting than that of so many young chefs and pastry chefs better trained than ever who manage their own restaurants with state-of-the-art techniques and renewed illusions.
Free professionals in increasing numbers, the greatest capital of contemporary Spanish cuisine, who without external ties defend their own cooking styles with a seriousness that excites.
manage well
Even before the pandemic broke out, creativity in haute cuisine had diminished its innovative drive in favor of improved management methods and the multiplication of businesses.
Chefs in transition arose who, without ceasing to be, became entrepreneurs.
The phenomenon of second and third brands currently affects dozens of restless professionals with an expansive desire that is not without risk.
And by distant paths, although parallel, the incidence generated by the delivery of food at home, of exponential growth (7% of total spending on restaurants in the last year), an activity to which some of the most important restaurants joined during the pandemic and that have subsequently been abandoned.
Figures that reveal the evolution of the consumption habits of the Spanish and their distancing from domestic kitchens.
Change in lifestyles that, on the other hand, bring us closer to vegetarian diets and the growing devotion to green.
Still minority trends that are beginning to permeate with health and environmental arguments in all kinds of kitchens that are increasingly sensitive to the green movement.
We are going through moments of transition in which professional kitchens advance conditioned by the digits of inflation, the scarcity of raw materials, the need to innovate in many professional fields and, ultimately, return attention and prominence to their clients, sole reason for his work.
José Carlos Capel is a food critic for EL PAÍS and author of the
Gastronotas de Capel blog
.
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