Back to the roots seems to be the motto amongst chefs and more customers. A gastronomic universe that got tired of trying tasteless tomatoes, apples they suspect are drenched with pesticides and beautiful but unripe strawberries that are out of season. Restaurants are starting to build their own gardens and there seems to be a trend of eating healthy fruits, vegetables and herbs that have enough flavour to flood the customer’s palate.
At first, the search for organic foods led the master chefs to tour farms and fields to find the best products. In recent years many restaurants chose to bring the crops near their chefs: either with a garden on the terrace or beside the restaurants: it’s a worldwide phenomenon.
Crossed by novel and flamboyant concepts, such as gastrobotany -the study of old and new plants and their components-, the restaurants with their own garden trend can be traced to the history of chefs who bowed almost thirty years ago to cook based on the use of fresh vegetables and herbs without forgetting the seasonality of each food, such as the French chef Michel Bras or the Spanish chef Carme Rusculleda. Almost simultaneously, in Italy, in the early nineties, the slowfood movement, based in the use of regional foods and respecting the environment, sowed the seed for what, years later, would influence thousands of cuisines to become healthier.
There has been a proliferation of restaurants aimed at a growing vegetarian clientèle and the people that are curious about organic food in the new century, particularly in the last decade. The trend, which started with plants and fungi as its essential ingredients, has grown and now large and renowned restaurants are also cultivating their products, driven by chefs impatient to have the best products for their dishes.
Such is the case of Noma, the Danish restaurant, first in the Restaurant magazine ranking, with its chef René Redzepi, an influential person that seems to be starting a green revolution supported by the local, organic products from his garden. The sixth position corresponds to the Spanish restaurant Mugaritz in San Sebastian: its huge Baratza (Garden) filled with fennel, ginger, carrots, radishes and 125 different varieties of plants isn’t the Garden of Versailles, but it has nothing to envy from other large green and multicolored spaces.
The Argentine chef Mauro Colagreco, owner of two Michelin stars, is the Argentine exponent of a restaurant with its own garden: his restaurants Mirazur, in France, and Unico, in Shanghai, China, have gardens and the daily menus vary depending on what was collected on the day.
Argentina is in tune
Argentina has been in tune with the latest trends for a while and it is slowly but steadily adding its gastronomic models to the wave of restaurants with their own garden.
"It is beautiful to go cut a couple of leaves when you need a plant," said Nicolas Darzacq, the French chef who directs the vegetarian cuisine of the Algaia restaurant, located in the Colegiales neighbourhood. "It is a great pleasure," he adds enthusiastically. "Gardening is a therapy for me: every so often I isolate myself there, I clean the garden and put my hands in the earth." Even though they still can’t be self sufficient, each dish has a touch of what the garden offers: basil, tarragon, jasmine- for the tea-, and even mauve, a violet flowers imported by Darzacq from France.
While it would be normal to associate the resurgence of the orchards to vegetarianism, the reality is that what’s natural does not discriminate: Los Girasoles, in Carlos Keen, is the restaurant of the Camino Abierto Foundation that brings together children from youth custody societies and the countryside in the kitchen. All the products they use come from the farm and the orchard, showing anyone that combining the fields and the gourmet experience is possible. "We realized that the project couldn’t just be a restaurant, that we had to do something to support ourselves," says Susana Esmoris, president of the foundation.
How does she explain this trend? "It's not a fad, it's a need to return to the sources. I call it conscious food, and it is where gastronomy is headed. "
Source: turismoinformativo.com