Santi Santamaria

The sad death of Santi Santamaria had me reminiscing about meeting and interviewing the great Catalan chef. It was 2009, he'd just opened Ossiano, the stunning seafood restaurant in Atlantis, The Palm, and I'd been invited to dine with Santi and a number of other guests. The food was as great, as you'd expect, incredible Spanish seafood cooked with heart. Santi was very keen to learn about the restaurants of Dubai, but I'm not sure if he ever had time to explore the places we talked about. Either way, he was a fine host with a genuine passion for food, and in particular, his food.

I interviewed him before dinner. It had been one of those interviews where we forgot the dictaphone was running, and just talked. Of course, Santi didn't speak English, and my Catalan was rusty, so an interpreter was on standby. The bulk of the interview was about molecular gastronomy. Santi was in vociferous opposition to it, and while he respected the work of fellow Catalan chef Ferran Adria, he was a passionate advocate of a more natural style of cooking. 

The excerpt below is nothing if not passionate, but it was also very prescient - the following year, Adria's El Bulli restaurant was knocked off the top spot of the San Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurants list by Noma, a restaurant that's dedicated to the use of natural, locally sourced ingredients.  

Take it away, Santi...

“I really think that this style of cooking (molecular gastronomy) will destroy the brains of the people. People who eat this will end up with something like mad cow disease. It’s not honest to take a chemical powder and put it in food that people eat. It’s not a natural ingredient. This is a big mistake. You don’t need chemical gimmicks to make good food. When you eat natural products you really understand what they are, the fish or the vegetables, you understand where they are from and why they have the flavour. 

When somebody asks you what is the best cuisine, you would probably say it’s the cuisine you remember - it’s the one your mother or grandmother made for you. It has a personal connection. But in following molecular gastronomy we will kill all the traditions that our mothers and grandmothers knew. In the future the people’s food of memory will be chemical food. I want to pass my cultural richness onto my sons, and their sons. We can always add creativity in cooking natural ingredients. I am always open to finding new ways of treating and cooking natural products, I’m open to innovation. But I will always respect the natural products.

I’m afraid that molecular gastronomy can go on for generations because there’s a lot of money behind it. Martin Berasategui, the chef from San Sebastian with three Michelin stars, said last week that the magazine (Restaurant Magazine) which named El Bulli the best restaurant in the world is only made by a handful of people. It’s a marketing operation. The people who vote for the moleculars might know that they are not the best, but there is such a marketing pressure behind this that they are not interested to say otherwise. It is very sad that the chefs need a gimmick to make themselves noticed by these people. 

In the past, when chefs acquired three michelin stars, there was a mutual respect between all of them. It was like a professional standard or qualification, like a doctorate. But for some chefs that is not enough. In the past there would be sixty or seventy in Europe. But there were some chefs who said they wanted to be the best of the best. There was a marketing push to name the best of the three-Michelin star chefs. And they created a lobby or pressure group, who are a danger to the real cuisine, because they are saying the best are the moleculars. 

I respect the desire of molecular gastronomes to evoke memories and emotions in food. But I do not respect the method. I’m really against the (Spanish) government, which gives money and subsidises molecular gastronomy. When the government of Spain takes molecular gastronomy and says this is the representative cuisine of Spain, it’s about marketing, money and publicity - from only one way. The government doesn’t represent me, or many other more traditional Spanish chefs. Any cuisine can represent Spain - the traditional, the classic, the modern - but not just one, it is a mix. From my point of view, I am really upset about this. 

In my cuisine, what’s most important is the product and the way it is cooked, the precision, the details. With molecular gastronomy, they substitute the chef for machines. With traditional cooking, a chef invents a dish, he believes in his creation, he cooks it and he puts it on the plate. To make this recipe, you need a chef. With molecular gastronomy you don’t need a chef, you just need someone who puts the powder in a machine, who injects a chemical solution. It’s industrial. It’s like a factory. 

Haute cuisine of the future will not be molecular gastronomy. We will go back to the respect of the products, respect of the fisherman who catches the fish, respect of the farmer who grows the vegetables, respect of the butcher who cuts the meat and so on. In too short a time so many things have happened, and it’s getting out of control. We need to settle things down. It can not go on like this. It’s all about money. What is killing the cuisine is the fact that these chefs are celebrities, and they all want to make it big to get as much money as possible. 

I have respect for the people who create the dishes, who mix this with that to make something new. But after that it becomes a copy of a copy of a copy. It’s always the same - where is the art, where is the creativity? It’s like a musician appearing every night but having the same tape played back. The stage is set, there are fireworks, it all looks very nice, but behind the curtain is a tape machine. It’s always the same. Molecular gastronomy is playback.”

Benihana vs. Blogger: a kerfuffle in Kuwait

“Waiter, where's my pie crust?” 

“It’s a soft opening, sir.”

The “Kuwaitgate” restaurant blogger saga has prompted me to say a few words on food bloggers and restaurants. 

In case you didn’t know, a blogger in Kuwait (www.248am.com) wrote a slightly unfavourable review of newly-opened Benihana, the well-known Japanese restaurant chain. The restaurant responded by taking legal action. You might be in favour of the blogger, or even the restaurant, but in my opinion both are at fault to some extent.

Let’s look at it from the blogger’s side first. If a blogger is serious about reviewing restaurants and wants people to take those reviews seriously, he should never review a place that’s just opened (unless invited to do so). Wait at least a month before going in there and letting off your six-shooters.

The reason I say this is because almost every restaurant in the world needs at least a few weeks to get up to speed - just like you probably did in every job you started. 

As someone who’s reviewed restaurants professionally, I have occasionally been sent to a restaurant too soon by an editor. The verdict was always the same - there were teething troubles, it might get better, it might not. It was a pointless exercise.

There was no sense at all in reviewing the place, since it might improve over the coming weeks - or it might even get worse - but the review would remain online for months, perhaps a year, without a clear and definitive judgement. Or with an unfair one.  

Better to give the restaurant a short grace period, then any judgement you make will be based on a restaurant that’s functioning as well as it’s ever likely to.

Newspapers like the New York Times give a restaurant a grace period before reviewing. They’re a reputable outfit, wouldn’t you say? If you want your blog and reviews to be taken seriously, you should perhaps do the same. In the Kuwaiti blogger’s defence, he did state that the restaurant was newly opened. But he carried on regardless.    

You may argue that if a restaurant has opened to the public, and it’s charging full price, then it’s fair game. Perhaps. As someone who’s been to far too many brand new restaurants, I know to avoid a newly opened place for at least a month, whether I’m reviewing it or not. 

You may call for the restaurant to charge a reduced rate if it’s on a ‘soft opening’. Maybe you have a point. In fact that would be a good idea. But remember those first weeks in your job? Did you work for half your salary? So why expect a waiter to do that, or a chef, or a restaurateur? There’s a case to be made for restaurants - especially ones in the Middle East - to train their staff properly, so that they can hit the ground running. I support that. But I’ll be giving any new restaurant a few weeks to get its act together all the same if I’m reviewing it - and especially if I’m paying for it.  

Perhaps it’s a symptom of today’s society: we all want instant gratification, we want everything now. Be smart - resist all temptation to visit a new restaurant in its first month. Leave that to corporate lunchers who can slap it on expenses. 

I think I’ve stressed the point enough.

Which brings us onto the restaurant. Benihana Kuwait might feel aggrieved that a blogger can say nasty things about its food just after it’s opened. But blogging is just the modern-day equivalent of word of mouth - it just shouts louder. Just think what all the other people who dined at Benihana in its opening week thought about its food, and told their friends.

The way to deal with this was not by threatening the blogger, who has a perfect right to say whether his meal was good or not. They should have left a message on the blog, explaining that they weren’t quite up to speed yet, and inviting the blogger back to the restaurant once things were better. The blogger would no doubt have returned, written a much more favourable update, complimented Benihana on its excellent customer service and everybody would have lived happily ever after. Blogs can help restaurants too, you know. 

Instead, Benihana have decided to drag this through the courts and drag its own name into the mire in the process. It will not win itself any friends by doing this. It has already won itself a load of negative publicity, when it could all have been so different. Conversely, the blog has had great publicity out of this. 

It’s an example of disastrous PR. Yet all food bloggers and restaurants can learn from it. 

Benihana should drop their case immediately, say sorry and invite the blogger back to the restaurant for a slap up meal. We all know passions run high in the restaurant world, but it’s time to cool off. In fact I invite them onto this blog - neutral ground - to initiate the peace process. Prove to everybody that - like all restaurants - all it needed was a few weeks to start firing on all cylinders. Then you’d have a happy restaurant, a happy chef, a happy food blogger and a happy social networking community. 

Everyone’s a winner.

Tsukiji Fish Market, Tokyo - the eighth wonder of the world

Welcome to Tsukiji, the world's greatest fish market. Although market is probably the wrong word - this place is nothing short of a wonder (next to Tsukiji, Machu Picchu is a mound of bricks on a hill, etc). 


The 57 acre site is a city of seafood, where over 2,000 tonnes of the stuff is displayed and shifted each day - that's over 700,000 tonnes a year across more than 1,500 stalls. Over 60,000 people call Tsukiji their place of work, and very few of them can ever claim to have a dull day. 


That's because Tsukiji is an explosion of vivid colour, clattering sound and heady ocean scents that grabs all of your senses at once, shakes them up in a giant conch shell, tips them into a polystyrene box full of ice and sells them to a sushi chef. 


Pull on some shoes that you no longer love, and come wade through the fish guts, as we tour the myriad bonkers sights of Tsukiji.

Baby squid taking a nice bath with some ice cubes and some black ink.

Eels do it in blood-sullied water.

 Huge octopi brazenly showing off their tentacles.

More cephalopods than you can shake a squid at.

When the going gets weird, the 'geoduck' turns pro.

The Tsukiji barbershop singing troupe turns up for morning practice. 

'Salmon in a box' doesn't quite do this pic justice, does it?

"I'm sure I left a white polystyrene box around here somewhere."

Pfffft...your guess is as good as mine.

"Hey, I can see your brain from here."

For the life of them, Toshiro and Dave couldn't work out where the fishy smell was coming from.

There's nothing better than a bucket of eels, is there?

"One day I'm gonna get me an R2D2 unit like Haruki's."

Three men, an ancient looking cart, and a ready-made photo opportunity.

"Mom, which knife should I use to disembowel the nosey Englishman?"

Don't you just hate it when a prawn burrows into your neck?

"Aren't you glad you're not us?"

If you don't want to know what they did with this blood-soaked chopping board, razor-sharp knife and bit of bent coat hanger, don't look below.

It's a cruel world ain't it?

Gordon Ramsay (in Dubai) - The C-word

No, it's not that C-word, in case you were wondering. But neither is it 'cooking', 'cuisine' or 'caramelised sugar'. It's cars, of course. Because what else would Gordon Ramsay do on his first visit to his Dubai restaurant in two years but screech around the local race-track in a fast sports car? 

The restaurateur, star of The F Word, Hell's Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares, ex-Glasgow Rangers trialist and occasional cook was in the UAE for a mere 24-hours, in which time he managed to fend off the press, gee up his staff and launch his chef's table concept at Verre by Gordon Ramsay. As a special surprise for Gordon, his team had arranged for him to spend the afternoon driving fast Audis (Audi happens to be one of Ramsay's sponsorship partners, so that was a stroke of luck). "Driving a fast car around a track is a chef's dream," he told me. 

After interviews at the restaurant, esteemed members of Dubai's press, and me, were whisked off to the Autodrome to watch Ramsay go through his paces on the track. I had the dubious honour of accompanying Ramsay in his car as he did his time trial, which obviously gave him a weight advantage. The above video shows what happened...

Who put the boot into Bhutanese food?

 

The cuisine of Bhutan was once famously given a right kicking by the ex-New York Times restaurant critic and Gourmet magazine editor Ruth Reichl. She called it the world's worst. So when I recently visited the Land of the Thunder Dragon - the mysterious 'last shangri la' Kingdom hidden in the eastern Himalayas - I was intrigued as to whether the food could actually be as bad as all that. I mean, had Reichl ever eaten Welsh lava bread, Filipino balut eggs (replete with feathery duck embryos) or American plastic cheese by Kraft? 

Above is the first restaurant I set foot in - in the town of Paro, not far from Bhutan's only international airport. Colourful, isn't it? It's got everything a cheerful tourist restaurant might need - bright colours, sturdy wooden tables and chairs, nicely folded napkins, some pretty flowers...

  
...  and a load of car steering wheels stuck on the ceiling. Obviously. They might not be big in the west yet, but steering wheel ceilings are all the rage in the Himalayas. Then I had to wonder whether this was some kind of symbol, a private Bhutanese joke, if you like, about the food served up to whiny foreigners (like Ruth Reichl), and the bend that the locals enjoy driving clueless tourists around with their insipid grub.

Then the food arrived. I must confess, it didn't look like the most inspiring spread I'd ever seen. There was loads of it, but my guide, Tshering, refused to join me in a mouthful. "You first," is what I wanted to say, because if I was going down I at least wanted to take him with me. He grimaced a bit and had a spoonful of plain boiled rice. There was a Chinese-style beef dish, which was as tough as a yak's wellingtons, some plain boiled cauliflower, a dahl soup, and some more Chinese style vegetables. 

I asked him where the ema datshi was, the famous national dish of cheese and red chilli. He explained that it was too hot and spicy for tourists. Since independent travel is forbidden in Bhutan, my guide had worked out my entire itinerary, including the food I was going to eat. I told him to inform the waiters to get busy with the chillies, and in no time a bowl of the famous ema datshi materialised. "You like it," enquired Tshering, with a smirk? "Yhhessss..." I rasped, as my eyes welled up and I reached for the water. Tshering just grinned, and I sensed a steering wheel gently turning overhead. 

Although he seemed pleased that I'd tried to immerse myself in Bhutan's fascinating food culture, I suspected Tshering wanted to punish me in some way for my impudence. I can think of no other reason why, while touring the next day, he asked our driver Jigme to pull over at this roadside stall. Those apples look good, I thought, but Tshering made a beeline for this...

It was dried yak's cheese, merrily hardening in the morning sun. When he handed me a block I thought it was some kind of resilient classroom chalk, or perhaps something used to remove dead skin in the bath. 

  
As this image illustrates, it was indeed hard cheese. The thing had to be bludgeoned heavily with a rock in order to break it up into mouth-sized pieces. "Here, chew it," said Tshering as he lumped a piece into his mouth and began chomping away.

Gah, wouldn't you know it - I'd left my titanium-plated dentures at home. It was like catching a plastic bullet in the mouth. Personally, I didn't know whether to eat it or shoot Maoist insurgents with it. Try as I might, my old fashioned human calcium and enamel teeth could not penetrate the granite-like snack. And since I quite liked having my molars intact (call me soft, but I sometimes like to chew food before I swallow it) I decided to suck the yak's cheese instead, to see if it'd soften up. Half an hour later I spat it out the car window, fully intact, while Tshering wasn't looking.  I think it ricocheted off a rock and killed a peasant.

Lunch that day was far more palatable. It began with a spot of tea - butter tea to be exact (po cha to call it by its local name). It was a curiously savoury drink of warm tea mixed with yak's butter and salt. Quite good, in fact, and just the thing on those cold winter nights several thousand metres above sea level in the Himalayas. Apparently the butter provides sufficient calories for working at such high altitudes, and helps prevent chapped lips in the biting wind. Not all cups of butter tea come with a ghostly apparition of a man's face floating above it - that's a reflection of Choki, founder of the Blue Poppy tour company - Tshering's boss.

Today's lunch selection - in a restaurant in the capital city of Thimphu - was much better. As well as a lip-swellingly hot bowl of ema datshi creamy cheese and red chilli, there was white rice with maize, red rice (which grows at high altitudes), fatty pork and boiled radish or phagsha pa, norsha fin or beef with rice noodles, potato with cheese or keaa datshi, and egg with cheese or eggy cheese. I got stuck in.

So did Choki. Some years ago, he married an English woman. He told me that on his first visit to England, he couldn't get out of the London underground station as he'd never even seen an escalator before, let alone used one. Bhutan only recently got its first mobile phones and satellite TVs.  The capital city Thimphu has no traffic lights.

A few days later, back in Paro, Tshering (above) took me to a farmer's house for lunch. The owner, also called Tshering, said the place was 3-400 years old. It has been owned by his wife's family all that time, but these days it's open for tourist lunches. They even have a couple of rooms available.

Lunch was a simple but surprisingly tasty affair. There was weapons grade ema datshi, beef, potatoes, white rice and asparagus sauteed in butter.

As I ate with a wooden spoon, Tshering translated the farmer's tales of 'night hunting' when he was a teenage lad. This didn't involve shooting yaks after sundown, but climbing up the runged windows of farm houses to look for young girls. If there was one inside, he would hop in and get saucy - all while the parents 'slept' in the same room.

He even showed me the worn rung on the window, used for over three hundred years of the bizarre and very Bhutanese courting ritual of night hunting.

There he is, now a humble farmer and a capable cook, but once a night hunter. I could tell he was getting nostalgic and starry eyed while he was talking about his teenage exploits. But I never expected this...

 
He grabbed a handful of leftover boiled rice and began nimbly fashioning a strange object in his hands. He seemed very adept at making his model, squeezing and folding. Looked like he'd had plenty of practice...

And then this. Yep, it is what you think it is. A little on the modest side, I'll grant you that, but still not a bad representation of a Bhutanese John Henry Thomas. Needless to stay at this stage, it looked a little less likely that I'd take the room.

I thought perhaps the above bottle of Jack and the half empty bottle of Chivas Regal might have had something to do with Farmer Tshering's impromptu handicraft session, but no. Apparently the phallus is a good luck symbol offered to travellers. I said I needed a bit of luck, as my football team Aston Villa were playing Chelsea later that night. 


We got shafted 7-1.


Like the food in Bhutan, my luck in this fascinating Himalayan Kingdom was hit and miss.