For the first time, the awards We’re Smart They have flown to the Catalan capital, where this Tuesday the best vegetable restaurants in the world have been known within the framework of the Barcelona Gastronomic Forum, which brings together the best of gastronomy until Wednesday. The title of best vegetable restaurant has fallen to the Dutch By Nieuwe Winkel, by chef Emile van der Staak, who has received this recognition enthusiastically defending his radical commitment to “botanical gastronomy”. In second position was the Madrid restaurant El Invernadero, by Rodrigo de la Calle, who has also achieved position number 18 for his brother from Barcelona, Virens, who is ranked fourth best in the top 10 Spanish green restaurants and receives an award for the best Spanish discovery. Xavier Pellicer, who holds the title of “untouchable” for the guide —given to chefs who spend two years at number one on the list—, has acted as master of ceremonies at the awards ceremony together with the founder of We’ re Smart World, Frank Fol.
“You never know what the judges are looking at, but I think they have taken into account that we have gone from a vegetarian cuisine to a totally plant-based cuisine.” By Nieuwe Winkel opened in 2011 following “a philosophy of more plants and fewer animals”, says Van der Staak, but three years ago they decided to take a “more radical approach” to the plant world, delving into their concept of “botanical gastronomy”, which they synthesized in a local, plant-based, experimental and seasonal cuisine. In the heart of the municipality of Nijmegen, his restaurant has two Michelin stars and one green star from the renowned French guide, which introduced this distinction a couple of years ago. Van der Staak has no doubt that the world is changing. Precisely, tomorrow he will give the workshop Botanical gastronomy, the era of plants at the Gastronomic Forum.
With a smile from ear to ear, Rodrigo de la Calle has received three awards for his restaurants El Invernadero, second best in the world, and Virens, fourth best in Spain and also as a revelation restaurant. “We have been working for many years. Now that is resilience”, acknowledged the chef, referring to the years “pilgrimage in the desert in a country like Spain”: “Where the whole world feeds on steaks, croquettes and seafood salads, and vegetables are those things of colors that people separate with the fork”. A path full of curves, which even ended in a cliff when the Rodrigo de la Calle restaurant, opened in 2006 in Aranjuez, had to close. “I was a pioneer in putting a vegetarian menu. The restaurant had a Michelin star, we changed the concept to vegetable cuisine and I had to close it because people stopped coming”, he recalls.
“I’m not a vegetarian but I got tired of cooking meat and fish,” he says, while remarking that he is happy cooking vegetables. “Now it is called flexitarian, but it is what was always done here”, he clarifies: eating basically vegetables and some meat and fish. After a brief stint in a hotel restaurant and when he was about to throw in the towel, the late French chef Joël Robuchon arrived and hired him as a consultant to put a vegetable menu in his restaurants. He also opened a restaurant in China and when he had enough money he set out to create El Invernadero in Madrid, where more than half of the clientele is international, just like in Barcelona. “I would love to have an idyllic restaurant, on the outskirts, with a vegetable garden, but this is not feasible in Spain if you want to earn money,” he assumes. In this odyssey, his companion dish has been the beetroot tartare, which has accompanied him throughout his career and is part of the menu of those of Robuchon, the chef with the most Michelin stars in history who died in 2018. It is the dish that he will prepare in the workshop that under the name green haute cuisine will offer tomorrow at the Gastronomic Forum.
We’re Smart makes a list of the 100 best restaurants in the world, where behind By Nieuwe Winkel Y The GreenHouse is the Italian Piazza Duomo in third position and the Valencian Ricard Camarena in eighth place. Also included in this top 100 are Virens (Barcelona), The Green Spot in Barcelona; La Salita, in Valencia; and Gatblau, also in the Catalan capital. In addition, there are classifications by country and the 10 best vegetable restaurants in Spain are: Xavier Pellicer, El Invernadero, Ricard Camarena, Virens, The Green Spot, La Salita, Gatblau, Azurmendi (Larrabetzu), Uma (Barcelona) and Riff (Valencia). ).
Xavier Pellicer, host of the event in Barcelona, was very satisfied after the award ceremony. “It has been a symbiosis with Frank Fol”, he said, referring to the promoter of the awards that want to value the green kitchen movement. “It was necessary to recognize restaurants where vegetables reign and respect for nature is returned,” says Pellicer, who has been exploring vegetables for seven years, first with Céleri and for almost five years with the restaurant that bears his name, since where he has observed a “brutal change in people, especially in the new generations.” Oddly enough, the dish they serve the most is cauliflower. But what a cauliflower. “It is an emulsion of cauliflower with olive oil, the key is in the product, ecological and fresh, and the way of cooking it, with a short steam cooking in a high pressure oven”, he describes. Frank Fol has said that he knows Barcelona well, with its wide range of restaurants based on plant-based cuisine, and the idea of bringing the awards here had been around for a long time. Next year they will be delivered in Italy.
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