NEW YORK TIMES
By PETE WELLSMiguel Sánchez Romera, the Barcelona chef who has set his sights on Manhattan with his restaurant Romera New York, is a highly articulate, cerebral cook.
As my review suggested, I often found the flavor of the food more pleasant than pleasurable. But all of the dishes were compelling visual events, and most of them elicited a kind of heightened attention that could be rewarding in itself. A meal at Romera New York practically demands that you at least make an attempt to understand the thinking behind the plate in front of you. That there is a great deal of thought was already clear to me before I spoke to Dr. Romera earlier this week, but it’s safe to say he surprised me by having even more to say than I would have imagined.
The notes below are culled from our roughly 90-minute telephone conversation about five of the dishes on his current 12-course, $245 tasting menu. Since he is more comfortable in Spanish than English, his assistant, Amanda Fanoun, translated for us. The titles of the dishes below, with their parenthetical descriptions, are taken more or less verbatim from the menu, where the dishes are given Greek or Latin names.
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Unda (Osetra caviar, sweet and sour vinaigrette with extra virgin olive oil, chives, carrots, ginger and house made cinnamon rose vinegar over smoked potato purée with rosemary butter, giant clam, oysters and wakame seaweed.)
Potatoes and caviar are a time-honored pairing. Here, Dr. Romera introduces any number of new partners to the marriage. Beneath the potato purée are raw giant clams and oysters. The purée itself is enriched with rosemary butter. Just before serving, the caviar on top is splashed with a vinaigrette made with rose water, which cuts the acidity of the vinegar. (Dr. Romera makes his own Chardonnay vinegar, by the way, with a mother he brought from Barcelona. He has been tending it for years.)
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Mare (Slices of fish and shellfish, finished with onion creamed rice with salmon, red tuna, hamachi, octopus, shrimp, cockles, mussels, razor clams, oysters and seaweed.)
At first I thought of this dish of raw and gently cooked seafood with creamy rice as a variation on paella, but Dr. Romera called it “an homage to sashimi, and to sushi in general.” First he makes a broth of kombu, dried and fresh sardines and baby shrimp, and this broth becomes the cooking liquid for short-grain rice. At the last minute, he adds onion-infused milk. I liked the subtlety of this dish; the rice was essentially an aromatic foil for the seafood. There were some temperature inconsistencies in my visits to Romera New York but when this dish was prepared the way Dr. Romera intends it, the warm rice barely cooked the tuna, salmon and hamachi, and the effect was very delicate and gentle.
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Actinium (Organic king salmon marinated in beets, orange peel, bay leaf and ginger, over spinach confit with nutmeg aroma and king crab cream, with trout roe marinated in beets, sweet curry, tandoori, rosemary and soy.)
Dr. Romera said that he created this dish “in honor of Chinese cuisine,” particularly the Chinese predilection for combining land and sea flavors in one dish. Here, king salmon is marinated with beets, orange peel and bay leaves in a salt and sugar brine. Because the fish is very fragile after it comes out of this bath, it is placed in a little basket to hold it together while it slowly cooks in olive oil at a low temperature. Finally it is given a glaze of beet and kombu; what makes the glaze shine is the cassava extract that Dr. Romera uses throughout his kitchen.
I found the flavor and texture of the salmon a bit wishy-washy, which I think is due to its having been farmed rather than wild caught. The element of the dish that appealed to me most was the trout roe. The kitchen uses five marinades to make five flavors of roe: beets, curry, tandoori spice, rosemary and soy. I may be reading into it but I took this as a sly response to Ferran Adrià’s famous spherification technique. It’s as if he’s reminding us that nature was making spheres long before El Bulli opened. By infusing the roe with different marinades for 48 hours, he can manipulate the flavor, while still keeping the original taste of the trout roe intact.
The salmon sits on top of spinach that is slowly cooked in cream with grated nutmeg; a king crab cream covers the rest of the plate.
Dennis Yermoshin for The New York Times
Kales (A Romerian mosaic of powders, candy drops and sauces of tandoori, garlic, black truffle, turmeric, ginger coconut and aromatic herbs with squab en crochet stuffed with coriander, garlic, parsley, pepper, nutmeg and chopped black truffle served in a table top barbecue, finished with a squab and black truffle sauce.)
This course is the most complex on the current menu, I think, and it’s by far the most theatrical. First the servers set down a plate with a geometric grid of powdered spices and seasonings. These come in five colors and flavors: tandoori spices, curry powder, powdered black truffle, ginger-coconut and “aromatic herbs.” Those flavors will be repeated in three more incarnations: as little candies the size of red lentils; as compound butters; and finally as shiny sauces made, again, with cassava.
Meanwhile, a tall silver tagine from Morocco is set up on the table, and some powder is spooned over hot coals within: incense, myrrh and benzoin, the aromatic resin of an Asian tree. Suddenly the table smells like a Roman Catholic mass.
Roast stuffed squab is placed above the coals, and the tagine is closed for a few moments — not enough to smoke the meat, just enough to flavor the outside, perhaps, or maybe that’s not the point.
The squab, having completed its time in the smoker, is transferred to the plate. A squab reduction with black truffles is poured over the plate, where it covers the mosaic pattern. The butters begin to melt (well, in theory they do; I’ve had this dish when neither the plate nor the sauce was warm enough to melt the butter. It’s far more pleasant when it melts a bit.)
Dennis Yermoshin for The New York Times
Denique (Chocolate tablets and traditional dark chocolate ganache bonbons, meringues of coconut with strawberry and black currant cream, tandoori with mint cream and sweet curry with orange vanilla ginger cream.)
What the menu calls meringues are more like macarons, airy meringue sandwich cookies. They’re good, but what’s most interesting about the mignardise course at Romera is the chocolate. It’s made in-house from cacao beans. If there is any other restaurant where this is done, I’ve never heard of it. (Many restaurants that “make” chocolate use couverture chocolate they buy from a company like Valrhona or Tcho.)
Dr. Romera gets his cacao from Xoconusco, in Chiapas, Mexico. He said that he makes around 30 pounds of chocolate every two or three weeks. It’s a production that involves every cook in the kitchen. First the beans are roasted, they are cracked, to break the shell, and passed through a winnower to remove bits of shell. “Then everything is done by hand. When we pick the cacao nibs we clean them one by one, and all of my cooks help out with the process.”
The nibs are then ground into a paste, first fairly coarse, then much finer. This can take 24 to 48 hours. When it’s ready, cocoa butter and sugar are added, along with a small amount of vanilla.
Chocolate has a way of becoming an obsession — certainly for the people who love to eat it, but even more so for the people who make it. As Dr. Romera talked about going to Chiapas to watch the cacao beans being fermented, of visiting the forest where mango trees grow so high they pierce the canopy to let in the sunlight that ripens the cacao pods, I knew he was hooked.
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