In recent years we have been immersed in a certain rural revolution. Surely insufficient, but developing and, above all, capable of generating unprecedented dynamics that transfer a part of the media attention to that area that is generally underrepresented in terms of visibility, despite assuming an overwhelming percentage of the territory.
It is not something new, although it is recent. The emergence of small artisan cheese factories in recent years was pioneering in this sense: names such as Molí de Ger, El Teyedu, Airas Moniz, Calaveruela, Los Corrales, Elvira García, Quesos y Besos, Mare Nostrum, La Jarradilla and many others marked a path in which food production was not only developed in rural areas, but also began to have recognizable hands and faces.
Perhaps a second step was marked by bread, with workshops scattered throughout towns and villages that were gaining a certain name. Les Preses, Cangas del Narcea, Fisterra, Villamalea or Gomeznarro thus appeared on an increasingly diverse gastronomic map of the Peninsula.
This is something that enriches us in general terms, but also from a more specific point of view. It generates job alternatives and economic movement in areas often in need of them and, at the same time, relocates, gives rise to product tourism and becomes a substrate for small gastronomic ecosystems that tend to emerge around it.
Frequently, these pioneering projects become an engine, a factor of change that gives rise to new initiatives or, at least, a growing sensitivity towards quality agri-food production and, with it, towards fair prices, spreads. and decent and sustainable working conditions.
Restaurants, for their part, tended to be left out. It is true that there have always been places like Casa Gerardo, Els Casals, Las Rejas or Les Magnòlies that have been, and in many cases continue to be, places of pilgrimage. But they were still exceptions. Today, however, restaurants in rural areas are becoming more frequent and possibly also more interesting in their diversity; they have become poles capable of retaining -and generating- talent, something that until not so long ago was a true rarity.
Monte – San Felíz, on the outskirts of Pola de Lena; Landua, in O Fieiro, a village on the Costa da Morte; Fuentelgato (Huerta del Marquesado, Cuenca), Mesón Sabor Andaluz (Alcalá del Valle, Cádiz), the Quatre Molins in Cornudella de Montsant, Arrea! (Kanpezu, Álava), La Lobita (Navaleno, Soria), OBA (Casas Ibáñez, Albacete)…
They are names that, little by little, are changing dynamics and to which we must pay more attention. I sincerely believe that those of us who write, who give our opinion in public, have a certain responsibility in this regard and can help reinforce or generate new dynamics. Or at least we can try.
The representation of these rural restaurants in the media continues to be low, with very few exceptions. Particularly if we take into account the difficulty of defending proposals like these in towns with less than 10,000 inhabitants, sometimes only a few hundred, perhaps more than an hour from the nearest medium-sized city.
A restaurant is not an entity outside its context, so I think that this is definitive when assessing the greater or lesser interest of a proposal. At least from our point of view. We are not guides, we do not have to judge only what happens behind closed doors. I believe, in fact, that our contribution is, if anything, to understand what happens in a certain place, why it is interesting there and disseminate it to the best of our ability. When talking about restaurants we are not just talking about restaurants.
Posts to ask, I would like us to turn our eyes, in addition to those mentioned businesses and many others that have opted for the same line of work, towards those who, sharing with them the difficulties of working in environments with few populations, often aged Often with not particularly high incomes, they choose other culinary paths that are probably less high profile.
Food houses that keep the traditional recipe book alive, because when the recipe book disappears from restaurants, its days are numbered; hundred-year-old restaurants that remain faithful to their traditional dishes; businesses that a new generation is joining, perhaps educated in prestigious centers, perhaps with a track record in some of the big names we all know and have in mind, to continue doing what their parents did, maybe their grandparents, knowing which is something that is rarely talked about and with which it costs much more to achieve a certain recognition.
I think of places like the Mesón Villa de Frómista, where the young Andoni Sánchez Dublin served me, among other things, a pickled palomino salad that I will remember for a long time. Or in the frog legs and the tongue that Amparo Rodríguez prepares in the Los Poínos restaurant (Valdebimbre, León), in the roasted onions that Teresa cooks in the Bar Camacho de Anieves, in Asturias. I am thinking of the imposing gachamiga from El Candil (Cortijos Nuevos, Jaén), the monumental lamb of the Mesón del Aceite de Bulbuente (Zaragoza) or the rabbit tupina from S’Arravaló, in Es Castell (Menorca).
I think of them and so many others who are far from the cities, on the fringes of the big congresses, which so often go unnoticed, and I feel, in some way, that we owe them something. Because we cannot continue talking about depopulation, about emptied Spain, about the challenge of the rural and always writing about the same places. Luckily, I believe that today’s gastronomic press is wide, diverse and plural enough to have room for everyone. Also for them.
