Spanish Chefs Go Cabeza a Cabeza
Chef Santi Santamaría is not okay with liquid nitrogen in the kitchen. In public attacks on Spanish avant-garde chefs, Santamaría has denounced the use of additives like dry ice and methyl cellulose, advocating a return to simpler, more natural cuisine. Santamaría even got personal, saying that he feels Ferran Adrià, Spain's most celebrated chef and owner of El Bulli, "is headed in a direction that is contrary to my principles." Yet Adrià and other Spanish chefs feel that there is no conflict between cooking locally and avant-garde techniques, and even Slow Food Spain agrees with them. Is high-tech cooking innovative or unnatural?
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4 Comments:
Innovation is constant, no? I mean, everything from gas stoves that you turn on with a dial, to iodized salt is, in a sense, "unnatural." I don't know if people will routinely have xanthan gum and methyl cellulose in their houses or not, but it wouldn't surprise me.
BangieB at 2:42PM on 06/02/08
Please tell me that the NYT didn't get their info from this blog and a phone call to Santi Santamaria, a man who denounces snobbery yet charges $375pp for a tasting menu in his kitchen. Hutzpah, I say, on both accounts.
The backstory reads like a run of the mill pissing contest between two chefs whose food most of the world, including myself, will never taste. Maybe the hue and cry will go up once McD's comes out with a foam-based McRib, but until then I'll keep both feet on the ground.
jayfallon at 3:04PM on 06/02/08
can't it be both innovative AND unnatural?
sarah at 5:16PM on 06/02/08
When one has been dining in fancy pants
Their tongues and minds become dreary
They look at the same food and say "I can't!"
While everyone looks at them queerly.
Invent something new
And call it Art
Some say "pooh pooh"
But it's dollars, in carts.
foodvox at 9:02AM on 06/03/08