We are witnessing, in recent years, some novel phenomena in the Spanish gastronomic scene. The first of them, surely the one with the greatest significance for the future, has to do with chefs and other professionals in the sector who, at a certain point in their career, choose to design their own businesses on a more modest scale than usual in high-end kitchen.
In many cases, they are proposals that are backed by people with years of experience in restaurants that are more ambitious in this sense, chefs and room staff with important professional background who opt for conciliation, for a change of pace that allows them to develop other facets of your life easier.
Sometimes it has to do with maternity/paternity, in other cases with a return to rural areas or smaller cities and in some others, simply, with a certain feeling of being exhausted and with the need to face new professional challenges from different approaches. .
This is the case of Garbo, the restaurant that Berta Rueda and Giorgio Peis opened in Santander a year ago now. She from Madrid and he from Sardinia, installed in Rome for years, decided during the pandemic to change course, find a place to settle and develop their family project. Madrid passed through their heads, but they finally opted for Cantabria, with which Berta had some previous relationship and for the quality of life offered by the coast and a medium-sized city.
Three years after making this decision and with a son just over a year old, the couple opened the doors of Garbo, that human-scale project built around their vital needs; a small, manageable restaurant, where Italy and Cantabria shake hands.
This meeting of gastronomic cultures, however, does not exploit the trick of fusion in an obvious way, but limits itself to adapting, to promoting the meeting between the recipe book and the pantry. Garbo is, essentially, an Italian restaurant, but it is an Italian restaurant in Cantabria and that marks the seasonality and the choice of products in a way that is natural.
Opening an Italian restaurant in Spain, in 2022, may seem like a safe bet, hackneyed even if we look at the number of establishments dedicated to this cuisine that open week after week, spreading through every neighborhood and almost every block.
The difference with this case is, despite that possible first impression, abysmal. If many of the neo-Italians in Spain tend to exploit clichés, sometimes shamelessly – from the apology of the mafia, which one day we will discover is actually quite unfunny, to the display of an entire imaginary that refers to a more or less idealized Amalfi Coast and taste, let’s say, relative- leaving the gastronomic in a second or third place, things here go the other way.
Garbo must be understood within a group of Italian restaurants that are not so gimmicky, but surely much more interesting, such as Agreste, Noi or La Piperna; Real Italian cuisine venues, each with their own personality and ambitions, but with a common vocation for interpreting tradition and avoiding the easy cliché.
All this translates into a small place in the Puertochico neighborhood with an undeniable charm. Berta, in charge of the room, runs a service designed for a few people, with a personal and close treatment. In the culinary, recipes that are based on tradition. “My mother’s recipes. Everything comes from there”, says Giorgio, who divides his time between the kitchen and the bar.
Creativity is glimpsed in the details. In the vitello tonnato that they present as Cantabrian, to which is added a gilda foam that provides a fresh and spicy touch; in the monumental pasta burro e alici, which is the best example of well-understood fusion; a traditional basic dish that combines pasta, those tonnarelli from the Lazio tradition, with butter and Cantabrian anchovies to give rise to a recipe from here and there, tasty, elegant, finished off with a few crumbs with dill and a touch of lemon.
Fusillone with broad bean cream, mussels and toasted hazelnut powder. The pasta, sautéed in the shellfish cooking water, is powerful and elegant. Saltimbocca “quasi alla romana”, as it is presented on the table. A classic reinterpreted without prejudice seeking to respect each of the ingredients as much as possible: beef in wine, clarified butter sauce, speck that replaces ham and that is added at the end, already on the plate, to avoid the usual concentration of salt, a touch of hazelnut and the result is a dish, a deconstruction, as Giorgio explains, in which each ingredient gains prominence and takes the recipe one step further.
There’s more: tortello with cime di rapa (grelos), pasta alla gricia with carciofi, a pasta soup, ceci e baccalà in which chickpeas are cooked in a pig’s trotter broth. And there is also room for pure and simple tradition, represented perhaps better than by any other dish by the carbonara that is presented on the menu “just the way it should be made: rigatoni, egg, guanciale, the right amount of Parmigiano and Pecorino Romano and black pepper”. Also knowing where to stop, keeping some dishes faithful to orthodoxy, as witnesses in an archaeological excavation, is part of the identity of the house.
Desserts follow the same line, jumping from tradition -the classic Sicilian cannolo- to the controlled innovation of crostata scomposta with homemade jam and spicy fiordilatte ice cream or tiramisu della mamma.
All accompanied by a well-selected Italian wine list, the possibility of making the classic aperitif, of trying the house’s seasonal vermouth, flavored with herbs and seasonal fruits, or of prolonging the night at the hands of Giorgio and his cocktail bar From author.
A proposal, in short, Italian and personal, traditional and contemporary at the same time. And, above all, without pretensions, without demonstrative excesses, within that human and manageable scale that the couple chose to settle here and in which lies the strength of their proposal.
Garbo’s is a modest but profound project, an example -probably unintentionally- of tendencies to watch out for in Spanish cuisine and, above all, it shows that talent, creativity and fresh air. More than enough reasons to get closer to meet them. And to repeat.
