Every day was like opening a new restaurant. The menu was reinvented daily, and guests were direct witnesses to the process of preparing the dishes. At Ernst, Dylan Watson-Brawn's restaurant, the menu was based on what was available that morning. And not an easy one. It consisted of about 40 dishes to be eaten in two and a half hours, prepared in front of the customers. A maximum of nine people a day sitting in a Japanese bar in Berlin.

But even though the dishes were very simple - consisting of one or, at most, two ingredients served at just the right temperature and texture - the preparation was very complex, as the chef explained during Madrid Fusion. In this restaurant, which remained open until last year, the dishes incorporated techniques to really bring out the quality of the product, something they had put a lot of effort into.

The chef tells us that Berlin is "a very unique city because of its history and its lack of history in terms of gastronomy". The German city was culturally divided, and when Dylan arrived in Berlin, he realized that the capital lacked a cultural identity compared to other European cities. So he allowed them to start from scratch. They worked with a network of farmers who arrived in Berlin in the 90s, which allowed them to restore Berlin's primary sector without having a refrigerator in the restaurant.

In this peculiar restaurant, there was only one dish, or bite as they called it, that never left the menu. It was dashi, an element they used to enhance the flavors of the ingredients they used. A technique that allowed them to showcase the complex nature of quality ingredients.

But their minute-by-minute cooking style opened the door to playing with the texture and temperature of each dish, enhancing the natural flavors of each ingredient. But while the pace was overwhelming, with two minutes between courses, presentation became increasingly important. They looked for presentation techniques that would pay homage to the products to create natural and intuitive dishes for diners. "Customers had a very personal connection to what they were eating at any given moment," says the chef.

From the orchard to the table

From a product that used to be wasted by the ton, chef Miguel Ángel de la Cruz has built La botica de Matapozuelos, a restaurant in Valladolid whose founding principle is the use of local produce. A movement that seemed to only happen in Denmark but which this man from Castile-León developed in Spain, without much publicity. He would go to the countryside and collect. Until he became a gathering chef His vocation is in his blood, his father is a chef and he spent his childhood close to the stove. He is a chef who follows his instincts rather than fashions or trends. His priority is to capture the landscapes that surround him in his dishes. It is in this search to find nature on the plate that Miguel Ángel has become a foraging chef, discovering new ingredients in acorns, pine cones, herbs or whatever the Valladolid countryside has to offer.

In this way, one of the products he works with the most is the stem of the mushroom, an element that was previously wasted and that now forms part of a tasting menu. A product that he also serves together with a cream that is ideal for people who suffer from dysphasia thanks to the texture with which it is served on the plate.

An award-winning sauce is not the only thing cooked in this restaurant that uses vegetables giving them a new life, or a different life. They left behind the idea of hydrating them to use them in a stew and became interested in the components they have inside. In this way, using traditional methods, they blend the dried chickpeas, obtaining a juice with some of the water used to hydrate the chickpeas, which carries away all the starch. From this they make an emulsion and obtain a chickpea cream that they serve with mushrooms. But it doesn't stop there. For dessert, they also use legumes, the legumes of their land. He believes that a chef should always look to the local area but also to the culture and history of the place in which he works. That is why the history of vegetables also leads them to that sweet moment after a good meal. And so the menu ends with a dessert based on legumes and mushrooms. Local produce from start to finish.

Madrid Fusión Award for Spanish Food in Defense of the Product

Nacho Manzano, chef of the restaurant Casa Marcial, was awarded the Madrid Fusión Award for Spanish Food in Defense of the Product, after 30 years of work in which he has transformed the rural world from an asturian village, where he has valued the local food produced and collected by farmers, ranchers and fishermen from his land. Products that he has elevated to the highest levels of cuisine and that he assured that without these professionals, chefs would not be chefs. “All we do is praise the products,” said the chef, who received the award from the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, Luis Planas.

For his part, Planas emphasized the importance of Madrid Fusion for getting to know the good chefs that Spain has to offer and, not only that, but also everything that makes it possible for a dish to reach the guests in a restaurant.

Deep into Catalan cuisine

As Jordi Vilà, Chef at Alkimia* (Barcelona), says, when you look out to sea you see crystal clear water, but when you dive in everything is different. That is what he tries to capture in his cuisine. And the fact is that he does not consider catalan cuisine to be delimited by the geographical division of the autonomous communities, which is why he tries to deepen his roots and the catalan recipe book to elaborate his dishes. In other words, he keeps his hands, body and heart in the same place so that ideas can flow.

That is why he responds to the criticism that he does not cook traditional food that it is “relative”. “I have always made things that emanated from feeling,” said a chef during his presentation at Madrid Fusion, who denies that he goes to Italy to eat a hamburger. ‘You have to value the culture of each place,’ said a chef who defends the unique DNA of each restaurant. ”It's beautiful to be able to identify a restaurant by its flavors.”