Mara, Waterford
The Spanish play a different game
Think of the Spanish chefs you know who are working in Ireland, and marvel at how they are able to embrace the avant garde as an essential element in their armoury of tastes.
Rebeca in St Francis Provisions in Kinsale will pair cauliflower with XO sauce. In Vanessa and Anna’s La Gordita, in Dublin, chef Maria offers crab salad with crispy chicken skin, whilst in Cork’s Paradiso chef Miguel reckons a strawberry gazpacho is just what summertime evenings call for.
Meanwhile, down in the Sunny South-East, Luis Martin in Waterford’s Mara restaurant takes the avant garde into surreal territory.
Beef tartare with sushi rice is standard fare in Mara, a characterful, post-modern-style room in which you could imagine some intrepid soul staging a Lorca play. Pork presa with dashi and chimichurri shows not just how Luis melts away culinary borders, but stages lightning raids on entire culinary continents. A sweet kelp millefeuille to finish is technical virtuosity on a grand scale, all in the service of the humble seaweed. These are Daliesque imaginings but delivered with Rodri-like discipline, and they are a joy to eat.
In the post-El Bulli world, none of this is a surprise. Ferran Adria’s molecular avant gardism may not be fashionable any longer, but Adria’s influence on younger chefs throughout the world has been momentous.
The long tail of Spanish avant gardism long predates El Bulli, however, extending back to Juan Arzak and his Basque acolytes and their radical work back in the 1970s. Today, a fourth generation of Spanish chefs are driving their country’s revolutionary cuisine.
And if you will forgive a footballing analogy after the football orgy of the soccer World Cup, Spanish chefs seem to us to work like Spanish footballers, who are presently holders of the World Cup for both men and women.
Which is to say that everything they do is thought out, worked out, considered, and then implemented. Spain don’t play like other international football teams, and Spanish chefs don’t cook like other European chefs.
Forty years ago, both of these actors rethought the elements of both cooking and playing soccer, and that’s why their modern game, on the field and on the plate, is so strikingly different.
The great Dutch player, Johann Cruyff, went to Spain and created a new template with his Spanish colleagues in Barcelona FC. Cruyff had a philosophy along with inordinate skills, and he made that philosophy into the new centre of Spanish football. He built it from the ground up, from the training academy to the national squad.
Meanwhile, in places like the Basque Culinary Institute, the same thing was happening. New ways of cooking, new ways of thinking about how you do cooking. When we first saw a parade of leading contemporary chefs at the San Sebastian Food Festival, we thought: look at these dudes! They behave just like a football team!
And that is why, intellectually, Spanish cooking and Spanish football are a thrill, filled with surprises, all built on rock-solid technique, collaboration, and a shared mentality that espouses a shared philosophy.
And that is why Luis offers that beef tartare with sushi rice and nori purée, or asparagus with mushroom custard, alongside old Iberian charmers such as tripe and chickpeas or potato omelette or burnt Basque cheesecake. Tradition, but made modern. The rule book, rewritten. Mara is quite unique. So jump in.
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