Is fine dining dead? Of course not! Ferran Adrià, a great master of cuisine, shares his thoughts and reflections on a particularly hot current issue, offering valuable insights into the present and future of fine dining.
Cover photo: Madrid Culinary Campus
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In recent times on the pages of the most important food and wine publications nationwide a big question has found space: is fine dining dead? There have been numerous interventions by recognized chefs and leading figures in the industry with more or less discordant opinions. The health status of fine dining is, at present, a much-discussed topic and transcends Italian borders.
At the Madrid Fusión Alimentos de España even Ferran Adrià, one of the fathers of the Spanish and world gastronomic revolution, expounded his thoughts. According to Adrià, fine dining is far from dead, but alive and well and should be analyzed from its deepest essence: sociology.
"It seems that only today we are discovering that gastronomy is everything. The pleasure of eating in a restaurant, but also the food itself. The great attractiveness of the industry has stemmed from haute cuisine. What is needed is a strategic plan at the national level that takes into account the impact that fine dining and its exponents have had on society. It is an analysis that requires very good work at the sociological level, clear examples can be found outside of Spain: Peru, is the emblem. It is a case I know very well because I participated in the process in which a man, Gastón Acurio, generated social change through cooking, empowering his country. Today, boys and girls want to become chefs rather than soccer players,", he tells Sietes Canibales.
Adrià aims to emphasize how the gastronomic phenomenon strongly influences the economy of every state, whether one considers the commercial and tourism aspect, or all the sectors that cascade benefits from the strong appeal and fascination that cuisine has on the entire system today. He cites, then, the power of Redzepi in bringing Scandinavian cuisine to the forefront as well as the revolution that saw him in the 1990s. "There should be a giant statue of René Redzepi in Copenhagen, next to the Little Mermaid. Twenty-five years ago, Denmark was a country where the last topics you could talk about were gastronomy and haute cuisine. This is something shocking when you think about it, and the same considerations must be made to understand what happened in Spain in the 1990s. Why then did a dozen Spanish talents-which time has proven to be extraordinary-come together at that time? What was accomplished is crazy, having four Spaniards among the best chefs in the world, is comparable to having Federer, Nadal, Djokovic and Sampras on one team. This revolution was very important because it made tapas bars, for example, start serving wine by the glass. But there is more: MasterChef would not exist if this revolution had not had an impact on society. Most of the techniques used in the kitchen today are our own. The coming together of us chefs, all of us friends, was fundamental to that revolution, which should have been extended to public administrations and private companies. This is not populism. This is reality. You can be competitive without being a bastard. Respect, honesty, generosity and gratitude have been and are our values".
With the excursus into the last three decades of world gastronomy Adrià wants to emphasize the importance of traditions and their study, as well as a deep awareness of all that has gone before. "It is necessary to make an inventory not only of creative haute cuisine, but also of the extraordinary traditional cuisine that exists in Spain. The idea that a congress like San Sebastián Gastronomika focuses on tradition is an achievement. In the past, neither the necessary time nor study has been devoted to it. Everything needs to be enhanced-I am very insistent on this point, a strategic plan needs to be developed that takes all this into account.".
