Call it reverse snobbery. The expression was not invented by me, but it serves well to describe a certain type of tourist: one who doesn’t think it’s worth traveling great distances (and even bigger budgets) to taste the most sensational dish.
I always get involved with that traveler who doesn’t think he’s a tourist and who likes to say that “he doesn’t travel like everyone else”. But today, after three different recent gastronomic experiences, I want to evoke it again, with a more… gourmet approach!
No, this is not an explicit provocation to the brilliant colleague from SheetMarcos Nogueira, who a few days ago gave another one of his irresistible and intelligent nudges in his column “Cozinha Bruta” against the expression mentioned above, the so-called “gastronomic experiences”.
As always, he was surgical and precise in pointing out the exaggeration of those who abuse these two words together, trivializing the essence of eating well. I, in evoking my last adventures at the table, just want to defend, once again, that there is no single way to enjoy a destination. Not a meal.
I start with Mesa ao Lado, the new project by chef Claude Troisgros. In the name of transparency, I add that I am not only a fan of his, but also a personal and frequent friend—and I write about his work with perhaps dubious impartiality, but never without honesty.
Claude recently opened a small space in Rio, inspired by what he saw around the world as a gastronomic trend. He wanted to create a place where the pleasure of those who visit him would go beyond the food, without taking the shine off what he would serve. And he came close to perfection.
Between one delight and another, Roberta Sá sings “Cabrochinha”: “After that dessert that flambé, we go back to samba”. Camila Pitanga evokes a cafe. Dazzling graphics by Batman Zavareze fill in gaps. And Claude himself tries to put into words what his heart turns on the stove.
I had a fantastic night when a gnocchi with vieras and dashi in tucupi just couldn’t be better than the salmon that the chef’s father, the incomparable Pierre Troisgros, brought from Japan and reinvented French cuisine in the 1960s.
A few days later I went to Notiê, in São Paulo, to try the second seasonal menu of chef Onildo Rocha from Paraíba. He now explores the flavors of the Amazon.
So, I tried duck cannelloni in tucupi, butter beans with yanomani mushroom and green coconut ice cream with an unexpected Amazonian curry. Always between sips of a gin with jambu cachaça, which must be a curupira recipe…
Anyway, two tours through haute cuisine that contrast radically with the visit I made to a certain restaurant in the Pompeia neighborhood of São Paulo called Lardo. And that is also a tallow. In a garage.
With dishes that don’t even touch R$50.00, I had one, um, gastronomic experience as incredible as the two I just wrote about. A fried chicken breaded in cornmeal and cachaça, for example, was immediately catapulted into the category of delicacy. As well as the tuna tartar with ricotta and mustard leaves. All signed by chef Fernando Pedote.
Nines out? For each invention of the Spanish genius Ferran Adrià, who went to the limit of experimentalism with his molecular recipes, there’s a street delicacy that made Anthony Bourdain roll his eyes, it was so delicious.
The foolish quest for the authentic is nothing more than an offshoot of the reverse snobbery I cited above. The true traveler knows that what counts is not what is less or more genuine, but the passion of those who prepare their dish.
