Europe

Last night, a panel of journalists, chefs and restaurateurs comprising the San Pellegrino World’s 50 Best panel confirmed what seemed to me like a foregone conclusion after my first spectacular meal there three years ago: that El Celler de Can Roca is the world’s best restaurant. It’s not a shock by any stretch (after all, El Celler has held the number two slot on the list for the past two years), but now, life for the three Roca brothers and their restaurant is about to change in unfathomable ways as the collective gaze of the gastronomic world rains down on their tiny corner of Girona, 90 minutes north of Barcelona.

My first dinner there was, in fact, my first Serious Meal ever in Europe. And I’ll be back another day to write more about the spectacular, paradigm-shifting cooking they’re doing. But for now, if you’ll indulge me, I think I can tell you something about the brilliance of the place by talking about the other Roca restaurant in Girona.

My earliest memories are of the smells of my mother’s food. —Joan Roca

The day after the first dinner I ate at El Celler, on head chef Joan’s recommendation, I went to have lunch with his parents. The Can Roca that everyone in the culinary world is currently reading about, the Can Roca whose website crashed this morning and whose reservation lines will be tied up from here to infinity, began as a humble blue collar bar called Can Roca run by the Roca brothers’ parents, Josep and Montserrat. The three brothers, Joan (in charge of the savory side of the kitchen), Josep (one of the world’s greatest sommeliers, who lords over a 60,000 bottle cellar) and Jordi (the young pastry wizard), grew up in their parents’ restaurant, working in the kitchen, doing homework at the bar. “My earliest memories are of the smells of my mother’s food,” Joan told me back then, “of being by her elbow watching her cook the dishes she still cooks today.”

The restaurant that day was packed with old men knocking back the day’s news with glasses of Estrella Damn and local construction workers looking for gas to get them through the afternoon. I entered cautiously and slipped into a corner table. When Montserrat came by to take my order, I told her that I was a journalist writing a story about her sons and that I would love to ask her a few questions. She looked unimpressed, maybe even a touch annoyed. “I have a full dining room right now, so I can’t really talk.”

Instead of an interview, I had the menu of the day: an iceberg salad with olives, tomatoes and onions, a plate of fideuà (short pasta) studded with chunks of hot dog and a hunk of fresh cheese with honey drizzled over the top. Classic Catalan, and along with coffee, bread and a few glasses of red wine, it set me back exactly 4 percent of what I paid for their sons’ masterpiece meal the night before.

After my first meal with the Roca family…I knew something had changed.

It might be hard to imagine food as intellectual and genre-bending as the dishes that come out of the Can Roca kitchen being inspired by noodles with hot dogs and iceberg salads, but if you look hard enough, you can draw a straight line from Joan’s best dishes to the humble fare being cooked across the street at their parents’ restaurant. Mom makes an escalivada by slow-roasting peppers, eggplant and onions; son takes those roasted vegetables, purees them, turns them into spheres in an alginate bath, dehydrates them until their skins are wrinkled like real roast vegetables, then serves them encased in a dome of smoke. A high-wire act, to be sure, but Joan’s is the best escalivada you’ve ever had, modeled after the best he’s ever had—his mom’s. There’s a reason why every day at the strike of noon, the staff of 40 at the world’s best restaurant walk across the street and sit down to eat lunch at the original Can Roca.

After my first meals with the Roca family, as I sat on the steps of the cathedral in the old part of town and stared out across Catalunya, I knew something had changed. Three hours later, back in Barcelona, I met my future wife seated at a street corner café. Coincidence, sure, but in my mind, that meal and that moment will forever be linked.

I’ve been back to the sons’ Can Roca a few times since, including this past Friday. I wasn’t alone at the table this time, as I was the first time I ate there, fresh off a plane from the States. Quite the opposite; I ate with a group of 14 out-of-towners, all hoping to sneak in a meal before El Celler became the new media darling and we had to share the place with the rest of the world. The meal didn’t have the same jarring impact on me as the first one (after three years living and eating around Spain, how could it?), but it displayed that same stunning mixture of precision and controlled chaos, studied composition and envelope-pushing technique. There was a black olive gazpacho that tasted like the Mediterranean in a bowl, a mid-meal slab of white asparagus and black truffle ice cream that had grown men licking their plates, and a gently poached oyster bathed in a hollandaise made from various game birds that left every last diner grasping for some kind of explanation: “But…what…I mean…no way!”

It seemed fitting that my dining companions were Danes, as it would be the pride of Denmark, Copenhagen’s Noma, that would soon cede the top slot to the brothers from Girona. On our way out, I wished Joan luck and asked him if he thought they had a shot at being number one. He shook my hand, bowed his head gently, and said, “I just hope you guys had a nice meal.” And that’s exactly what he meant.

If you’re the type who cares about these things (and, for the record, though San Pellegrino may have gotten #1 right, the list itself is deeply flawed for more reasons than anyone cares to read about), you’ll read a lot about the Rocas and their Girona temple of wonders in the weeks and months to come. Some will talk about this being a victory for modernist cooking, a reassertion of Spain’s dominance in the 21st century haute cuisine canon. Some will call it a win for a country desperately in need of a morale boost. No doubt a few proud Catalans will use it as proof of the superiority of their beloved region. But try your best to tune it all out. Because at the heart of all of the hype to come, more than any cooking tale you’ve heard before, this is a story about Mom and Dad. This is a victory for them.

Federico Motos Lajara was born October 3rd, 1930, six years before the Spanish Civil War, in a cave 140 kilometers east of Granada. He stands nearly 6 feet tall, with a wispy wheat stalk for a frame and smooth brown cheeks the belie a life spent under the Andalusian sun. He is a shepherd by trade, a bachelor by choice, and a cave dweller by both love and necessity. And in two months’ time, when I take Laura Pérez to be my lawful wedded wife, Chacho Federo will be my great uncle.

Laura is Catalan-Andaluz, born and raised near Barcelona, but with both sides of her family hailing from the south of Spain. Her father Angel was also born and raised in Fuente Nueva, a community that at its height in the 1950s and 60s had up to 500 people living as farmers, shepherds and craftsmen. Cave communities took root during Muslim rule in Andalusia, the northern Africans finding the Spanish terrain a perfect place to continue their long tradition of countryside cave dwelling. The habit stuck, and 500 years after the Moors were driven from Spain the caves remain, mainly because of a number of distinct physical advantages they provide: not only do they offer inexpensive, effective protection from the elements, they maintain an unexpectedly comfortable ambient temperature year round, taking the edge off the harsh winters and brutal summers that define this desert terrain.

My first trip to Fuente Nueva came in December of 2010, a far-reaching attempt to convince Laura and her family that I was serious about my commitment to this country. In three shorts days, I drank whisky with the local men, hung chorizo with the local women, and helped turn a pig into a year’s worth of charcuterie for strangers I wanted to desperately call my family. Since then, I’ve been fortunate enough to spend a few weeks out of each year with Laura’s people in the south, and gradually over this time, they’ve become my people, too. None more so than Chacho Federo.

The crumbling caves of Fuente Nueva

With the exception of a military stint in Morocco, Chacho has spent his entire life in the caves of Fuente Nueva, working primarily as a goat herder and wheat farmer in the amber plains surrounding the caves. Back in those days, he would deliver his goods to local markets on the back of a horse or a donkey, clad in wool cardigans and flannel shirts and espadrilles before los hipsters were even a concept. Like everybody in Fuente Nueva, he doesn’t speak Spanish; he speaks Andaluz. On paper, they are the exact same language, but leaving the mouth of a native speaker, Andaluz sounds like another dialect entirely, one almost entirely free of consonants. It has taken three years of intense study and concentration, but I now proudly understand about 50 percent of what comes out of Chacho’s mouth. HA

I have learned a lot about life in the south from Chacho over the past few years. I have learned that the respectable hour to wake up is 5 am, before the sun has stirred, in order to turn those waning embers into a waxing fire to warm the morning. I have learned that in the lean post-war years in Fuente Nueva, suicide became an epidemic, and Chacho acted as a catcher in the rye of sorts, rescuing desperate women who had thrown themselves into community wells. I have learned that a man subsisting on a diet of chorizo, fried sardines and hand-rolled cigarettes can be healthier than any God-fearing, doctor-loving relative I have in the States.

But the first lesson I ever learned from Chacho, before the bar crawls and soil tilling and history lessons that would follow, was how to make migas. The word means crumbs in Spanish, and in most places throughout Spain, migas are about a second life, a way to turn abandoned bread into a meal soft and savory enough to sustain workers for the long afternoon ahead. It’s a campo creation, invented by the shepherds who would spend all day moving their goat and sheep from one swatch of land to the next. Migas across Spain abide by a general formula, but everywhere you turn you find local tweaks and adaptations. In La Mancha, migas come laced with garlic and peppered with pork fat; in Almeria, the base may start with coarse semolina instead of refined wheat, and the accompaniments will probably include a few varieties of small, oily fish.

In Fuente Nueva, migas have always been about four ingredients, the most elemental and abundant of all: flour, water, oil and salt. Chacho starts with a liter of water in a special migas pan, a heavy-bottomed iron vessel with an extra handle, the easier to control and transport the final product. When the water is hot, he adds flour, then salt, and later, little by little, warm ladles of olive oil.

Many times I’ve tried to take down a recipe, and many times I’ve been denied.

“How much oil, Chaco? How much salt?”

“Por ojo.” Eyeball it. There are no set ratios; Chacho’s migas are the product of 83 years of careful finesse.

Occasionally, after a glass or two of wine, he might offer up a few breadcrumbs of advice. “The most important thing is to work the dough as much as possible. You have to get the water out of it and cook the raw flour.” For that reason, migas demand a low, steady flame and constant stirring. And done Chacho’s way, they require just three tools: an iron spatula for cutting the dough, an iron spoon for turning it, and a wad of tobacco for smoking away the time it takes to turn raw flour into warm little dumplings.

Chacho with his favorite migas tool, a hand-rolled cigarette

In a world where women do 90 percent of the cooking and 100 percent of the cleaning, migas provide a rare chance for the hombres de Andalusia to earn their domestic keep. The men like to tell themsleves, as Chacho puts it, that migas take muscle—not just for the constant stirring required to break up larger chunks of dough into smaller and smaller pieces, but also to lift the entire pan into the air and flip the bulky mass of flour and water with the same push-pull action a chef might use to keep a pan of sautéed mushrooms in motion.

A veteran migas cook knows how to work the pan, how to coerce from that shapeless slurry of flour and water a golden mountain of perfect pebbles, blessed with an exalted balance of crisp exterior and moist interior. Done properly, a dollar worth of flour and oil can feed a family of 12 happily. The toppings that make the rounds —a mischievous mix of fried pork and salted sardines, orange slices and chocolate chunks—mean nothing if the migas don’t sing.

The eating ritual may be nearly as important as the methodic cooking. Once the women and children have their little piles placed before them, the men grab their spoons, gather around the pan and, not unlike the Valencianos to the north sitting down to a great circle of paella, begin to eat their way to the center. Little is said during these migas moments, most attention devoted instead to mixing the warm piles of dough with the right combination of salty, sweet, savory and spicy add-ons. Give me crispy nickels of spicy chorizo, a blanket of fried green pepper and a wedge of raw onion and you won’t hear a word from me until my spoon lands in the middle.

The only thing as inevitable as the cigarette and wine that precede migas is the afternoon siesta that follows it. On most days for Chacho, that means a little shuteye next to the fire in the living room. But on a warm afternoon, when the wind has died down and the entrance to the cave sparkles in the sunlight, Chacho might just stretch out under the big blue sky and sleep until dinnertime. War, drought, pestilence, Americans: he and his migas have survived it all.

One day, someone else will make the migas

Back to the future: A mixture of New World and Old World coffee gear. Photos by Asher Kohn

“A barista can only fuck it up.”

A bold statement surely, from someone who by the way pays his rent and buys his food with the money he makes pressing shots at an espresso bar. But as befitting the Dutchman who said it (Olivier Vos: buzzcut, with thick glasses, and a determined enthusiasm that would take apart a floor in order to fix loose grout), there is a tremendous amount of logic to what sounds initially like a blustery provocation. Coffee – even the finest, most confident, most edifying – is still just roasted beans and water. There are three young men in the Netherlands who want to take the barista, whom they see as a part-TEDx presenter, part-birthday magician, out of the equation. They want people to make their own coffee, and to make coffee they can be proud of.

Okay, so it might be a bit more complicated than that. The trio founded Koffie Leute calling themselves “personal assistants on the way to the perfect cup of coffee.” For them, the perfect cup is full of “slow coffee”, a liquid made with 21st century supply chains and 19th century patience. “It’s not just taste, but the experience of coffee,” says Olivier. Their coffee is ground fresh and by hand, put into a cup via V60 (a conical pour-over coffee filter used by most serious baristas these days), and ideally enjoyed over conversation (and maybe a cigarette, as Dirk, the most hirsute and least talkative of the bunch demonstrated often during our chat). “Espresso bars are espresso,” explains Olivier. “But Dutch history is just a good cup of coffee.”

You see, the protagonist of the story of the Netherlands isn’t William of Orange, Johan Cruijff, or Vincent van Gogh. The story of the Netherlands is all about coffee. Joint-stock companies formed in coffeehouses brought coffee to East Indies plantations to sell the beans back to the coffee houses, creating the need for enormous banks, even bigger ports, and something to go better with a cup than the native endive. Chocolate and tobacco, Moluccans and Arubans, shipwrights and navigators, were all brought in to an empire and later a nation founded on coffee. This is not to say that it’s a heroic protagonist, and one of the greatest Dutch novels, Multatuli’s Max Havelaar, describes and decries the plantation economy. But until the 20th century, Dutch coffee was Dutch coffee: fresh ground, more brown then black, and enjoyed with friends.

The Dutch trio. (From L to R: Martijn, Dirk, and Olivier)

So what changed? Olivier says that factory owners forced their workers to take shorter coffee breaks, driving the men towards instant coffee. It is more likely that the bombing of Rotterdam, the World War II occupation (and starvation), and the subsequent loss of the Royal Dutch colonies did as much to coffee culture as modernization. Coffee was no longer a Dutch right but a commodity to share with the rest of Europe. Though Koffie Leute is attempting to reject the commodification of coffee, they are sharp enough to realize that much of coffee’s history is best left in the past. Bringing an Old World coffee culture back to the city while embracing ethically-grown coffee is tricky. A question about the beans’ origins led to a short if impassioned soliloquy by Martijn, the lanky Frisian with a Skrillex haircut. “The roaster knows the plantation. People tend to forget that…do you know if the guy who sold these beans to you went to the farm to get these beans?”

The beans we shared when I met them were Colombian by way of a Danish roaster, and at events Koffie Leute sells beans that are, if not from friends, from friends-of-friends. They have their origin stories memorized and are always ready to share this knowledge. It’s what they believe separates them from the standoffish irony that coffee people are infamous for. Knowing the beans’ story, the equipment’s story, and the country’s story – along with the enthusiasm to launch into well-timed expository – demands a dedication to the craft that purveyors of quicker coffee usually don’t have.

Slow coffee is different, perhaps because it comes from beans. Most coffee comes from tins or from coffee-extruding machines, known in the Netherlands as a Senseo. Martijn explains this and his distaste for the latter is palpable. Palpable distaste is a familiar reaction if you’ve ever had Senseo coffee. “It’s easy to sell something faster, not to sell something better.” The highfalutin espresso machine is even stranger to him, a Rube Goldberg contraption full of bells and whistles that purports to make the best coffee but is most notable for needing a jockey. The barista.

“All these people go to the expensive espresso bar with a hipster, rockstar barista. That’s not what we do. We want people to relearn what was lost.” Martijn and his friends thought the first step in this reeducation was breaking down walls. Particularly, the one between the front and back of the counter. Koffie Leute doesn’t hand customers coffee, it hands them the beans. The customer then pours the beans into a hand-powered burr grinder, closes its hatch, and gives the thing a good minute of spin. Next up is a trip to a specially rigged table the Leute made in the backyard, where filters are wetted and placed in V60s, with a fresh cup waiting on the gravity end. A few steady pours later and the coffee is ready to drink. This takes time, yes. But so does the thousand-euro rig on a matte-black counter. And here, the coffee masters are guiding and chatting every step of the way.

The spare beauty of an antique grinder

The grinders are all gorgeous pieces of mid-century carpentry. The little wood boxes were all bought at yard sales or spirited away from friendly attics. Refurbished by the trio, the chests hide the blades deep inside like pearls. A few spins on the brass handle leave one with a box full of fresh coffee grounds. Koffie Leute’s hand-ground beans are set to be a bit coarser, the better to be used with the slow-funneling V60. Most importantly, the hand grind with its dramatically lower revolutions-per-minute prevents frictional heating, which “pre-heats” the beans and gives them a slight – but noticeable – microwave effect. As one can expect from machines with generations of on-and-off use grinding coffee, they smell and look fantastic.

Olivier talks of grandparents seeing the grinders and coming up to him, telling stories of how they used grinders like these to make coffee for their grandparents in foggy old days. He tells the story of a guy who walked towards their booth and paid to grind coffee beans and pour cups, giving away the coffee he made. At festivals people mill around for the smell, and then share cups with complete strangers. The magic of the beans and the beauty of the grinders make for a heady brew on their own, but Koffie Leute isn’t averse to a bit of stagecraft either. Set up on a beach, they heat their water supply by bonfire and supplied a music festival with electricity-free coffee.

“It’s a coffee counter without a bar. Just a table,” Dirk explains. “We are searching for something more creative and interactive. The baristas don’t share their knowledge. I noticed that when I talked to customers at a bar, they really enjoyed it. We want to use this customer curiosity for good.” There is an idealistic bent to this, Dirk admits, and Olivier adds that they make a point not to wear a special uniform so that they’re on the same level as the customers.

But they are still Dutch, and they are still practical. Coffee has always been an at-home tradition in the Netherlands; the first espresso bar in Utrecht, the country’s third-largest city, opened six years ago. The number has grown, but people still tend to make their morning cup at home and their afternoon’s at the office. It’s for this reason that Koffie Leute has partnered with Roast.nl to mail the roasted beans to peoples’ homes. Of course the Senseos make things simple, but they’re expensive and they confuse coffee with a coffee-like product. The trio may be lacking the capitalistic drive and its many million reasons to suffer through acidic sludge – Martijn chuckled at the thought, saying “it’s not a venture capital thing” – but to paraphrase a young Ewan McGregor, who needs reasons when you’ve got coffee?

Coarse grounds for a better brew

When it finally makes it to the cup, the trio’s slow coffee is going to be much less hot than a Senseo’s near-boil, and far more complex. Different notes play out as the coffee can sit on the drinker’s tongue without fear of burning it. It’s almost an unfair trick after you start with better beans, super-freshly ground, but it is another way to set slow coffee apart as good coffee. Martijn jokes that most Dutch like their coffee super hot because it seems fresh, even though it’s only just “fresh from the machine.” The filter and fresh grind let the grinder influence the cup the most, and it makes more sense for Koffie Leute to let the drinker do the grinding. Olivier explains that it is a week after roasting when a coffee is at its best, that the flavors are at their peak. But after two weeks, the coffee is flat, without all the extras. “And that,” Olivier sighs, like a man after a search and rescue mission gone awry, “is a shame.”

All three bring a tinkerer’s inquisitiveness to the coffee equation; any mention of a way to improve – or even just mess with – a basic cup is considered. Martijn has logged hours in a roastery learning how to determine the beans’ flavor by color and sound of the roast. He thinks customer-roasting is the next step after customer-grinding. Reading about how starving Dutch thinned their coffee with chicory (a la New Orleans’ Café du Monde) during World War II, they are trying it out to see which beans the root tastes best with. When I mentioned Stockholm pour-over institution Drop Coffee’s focus on the water, tittering of approval and possibilities swept around the table. All avenues are welcome, save one. “Milk is just used to hide imperfections,” spits Olivier. “We don’t mind sugar – it is your coffee – but milk is frowned upon.”

Smelling the coffee

So how is the coffee? It’s…different, of course. Brown more than black and without any sort of lemony scorch. Koffie Leute has a handmade flavor chart for their customers that ranges from knoflook (garlic) to teer (tar). Their focus is on the Spring side of the spectrum; notes of cilantro, anise, jasmine, and basil. It seemed so impossible that my first thought was “these guys have no idea what they are doing with their coffee.” After another few sips, though, I noticed that I was not just holding the mug in my hands to warm me up on this still-chilly March morning but rather resting it against my cheekbone—the easier to smell, the quicker to sip, and the more to immerse myself in the coffee. I then realized that these guys knew precisely what they were doing with their coffee. It’s the sort of coffee that makes traveling worthwhile; so cocky and comfortable in its own norm that I, initially disgusted, grow quickly to admire it. The next step is bragging to all my less-cool friends back home.

This coffee is not a “reinvention” of coffee. It’s a reminder of what coffee is, was, and, arguably, should be. As seen in Stockholm, Berlin, and Brooklyn the future of coffee is here, it just needs to be distributed a bit more evenly. It does not need packets, pipes, or a pulsating machine. It definitely does not need a sleeve-tatted, standoffish sort to abracadabra a wad of Euros into a cup behind a curtain wall. In fact, hand-ground, poured, and shared over a low table, the future of coffee looks an awful lot like its past.

—
Asher Kohn is a student currently brewing in The Netherlands. He is the editor of The Tuqay and can be found tweeting as @ajkhn. He usually writes about West and Central Asia, but he supposes that Utrecht is close enough.

For another look at the rise of coffee obsession, Strange Brew tells the story of the modern coffee movement as filtered through a very small, very serious coffee shop in Stockholm.