Beyond Paella: The New Spanish Cuisine

One of the greatest pleasures in Spain is the traditional Sunday lunch, often consisting of “Paella Valenciana.” That pleasure can be multiplied by a factor of 10 if cooked and eaten on the beach, as so many Spaniards like to do as a Sunday ritual. While the Sunday paella won’t disappear overnight, other forms of cooking have emerged to put Spain on an innovative course, adding stars to the Michelin guide book.

Like most cultures, Spain has traditional cuisine based on local ingredients and cooking techniques. The Mediterranean Sea also plays an influential role. Olives, olive oil, the Spanish potato omelet known as a tortilla, gazpacho cold vegetable soup, specially-cured hams and paella—the savory rice dish cooked in its own special flat, low pan—have long been staples of Spain’s highly regional, traditional cuisines.

These tasty dishes are still widely available in Spanish restaurants, bars and cafes. But so are some other, newer dishes that have transformed the familiar ingredients into a dining adventure and a handful of Spanish chefs into world-famous gastronomic stars.

Janet Mendel, an American cookbook author who has lived in Mijas, Spain, for several decades, says a technique of the new cuisine is “deconstruction,” taking the elements of a traditional dish and “putting them back together in novel ways.” To illustrate the concept, Mendel says that in the hands of some chefs, “the traditional potato tortilla got reinvented with for example, potato foam, onion dust, and egg yolk custard.”

Innovative techniques, such as freezing and exposing foods to nitrogen or other chemical treatments, also play a major role in defining Spain’s new cuisine. The most famous new cuisine chef, Ferran Adrià, captains El Bulli restaurant in Roses on the Costa Brava, north of Barcelona, near the French border. El Bulli attracts travelers from all over the world, who must try to reserve months ahead and still may not secure a table. Once there, diners are treated to approximately 30 courses of small, unique dishes such as the popular “spherical olive,” an olive filled with intensely flavored olive juice; or a frozen “gorgonzola (cheese) shell,” which looks like an egg and when cracked, open, offers succulent flavors of apples, nuts and celery.

Diners from all over the world also flock to several temples of the new Spanish cuisine in the Basque region on the coast of the Bay of Biscay bordering France. There the city of San Sebastian has a long culinary tradition that includes private cooking clubs where groups of men would retreat to cook and eat together—without benefit of female company.

In the last two or three decades, several of the city’s long-time restaurants, such as Arzak and Akelarre, have also been leaders in the movement to convert traditional ingredients—especially and seafood, such as hake and sea urchin—into innovative fare, often by pairing them with other seemingly incompatible ingredients. One example is the “scallop and sea urchin custard with soya sprouts, coffee cream, cinnamon and curry” served at Restaurant Martin Berasateguí in Lasarte, outside San Sebastian.

Outside the Basque country, other restaurants whose chefs have made their mark in Spain’s culinary reevaluation include Alkimia and Commerç 24 in Barcelona and La Terrazza del Casino and Nodo in Madrid.

So is the only place to try the new cuisine in super-expensive restaurants in or near big cities? Definitely not, says food writer Mendel. “There’s a trickle down effect so that chefs in less expensive restaurants are more experimental. And the new cuisine is making a mark in trendy tapas bars throughout the country.” She says a case in point is a modest bar on the Costa del Sol where the chef, who formerly worked in a top restaurant “serves up creative food in small portions---lollipops of quails’ legs—at prices low enough so that clients dare to sample something out of the ordinary.

Quail leg lollipops, in addition to being tasty, symbolize the playfulness of the chefs who continue to invent the new Spanish cuisine. As food writer Penelope Casas reported in the magazine Foods from Spain not long ago, Ferran Adrià said at a recent food conference in Madrid, “Cooking should, above all, be fun.” So should eating—and at Spain’s new cuisine restaurants, a good time is guaranteed.