In the population density ranking of the 50 Spanish provinces, Cáceres occupies 35th place. It is difficult to get an idea without resorting to a comparison: while the province of Barcelona has about 732 inhabitants per square kilometer, Cáceres has 20 and the region of the Sierra de Gata, in its northwest corner, just over 16.
This region, with barely 22,000 inhabitants, is one of the regions with the highest aging rate in Extremadura. In 5 of its 20 municipalities more than 30% of the population is over 65 years of age and in some of them the population has decreased by almost 50% in the last decade. When we talk about the problem of emptied Spain we talk, among other places, about the Sierra de Gata.
Any initiative that establishes population in environments like this, that provides employment and economic alternatives, is of much greater importance than in other areas. And if it does so, also, from sustainability criteria, it is even more so. For this reason, Habitat Cigüeña Negra is a restaurant, but it is, above all, good news.
Let’s put ourselves in a situation: Valverde del Fresno, the municipality in which this project is located, is an hour and a half from Cáceres, two hours from Salamanca or Mérida and about three and a half hours from Madrid or Oporto, which are the closest airports. next. There is no train in the region and a single bus, which takes two and a half hours, connects the town with Cáceres. Starting a project here is, to say the least, a brave bet; deciding to focus it on the hospitality industry and, within this, on sustainability and quality criteria, is even more so.
We have never managed to define in a way that has universal validity what haute cuisine is, although I maintain that it is, to a large extent, something relative, something that has to do with exceptionality. And since what is exceptional changes depending on the time and place, this leads to formats that we traditionally understood as haute cuisine appearing today as outdated, if not openly extemporaneous and alien to their context.
At the same time, this means that other restaurant models can have a more or less comfortable place in what the definition currently includes. Is it haute cuisine, knowing what we know today, to have seafood brought from the other side of the world? world; perhaps a truffle from Australia to put an end, in passing, to the idea of ??temporality; Set up a restaurant that requires your customers to travel there by plane? Is it more than producing a quality organic oil, doing it in an olive grove recovered from a native variety and turning it into one of the common threads of your gastronomic proposal?
Perhaps it is time for us to start thinking about haute cuisine from parameters that are not anchored in a past that no longer exists.
But let’s get back to the story of the restaurant at hand. The Roselló family is from Ibiza. He has been dedicated to the meat business for three generations and decided, more than a decade ago, to look for a place where he could raise his own animals. That place was a pasture known as La Granja, 220 hectares south of San Martín de Trevejo, at the foot of the Sierra de Gata and a few kilometers from the Portuguese border.
The Rosellós recovered more than 40 hectares of olive groves of the Cáceres manzanilla variety and, taking advantage of an old construction in the middle of the farms, next to a pond that has become one of the jewels of the area, they built their own oil mill, which allows them have control of the entire process of making your oil, from the olive tree to the bottle.
In 2015 they bought two Wagyu breed stallions and in 2019 they decided to cross them with Retinta breed cows, giving rise to what they have called Retwagyu, meat of which they are the only producers in Spain. At the same time, they began to take advantage of the pasture so that their Iberian pigs could farm there and to raise lambs, which grazed freely among the olive trees much of the time. All this gave rise in a natural and progressive way to beef, sheep and pork, cured meats, hams, own oils and the idea of ??converting the building of the old livestock farm into a small rural accommodation with a restaurant.
It is there, in this old house on a hill surrounded by holm oaks and olive trees among which animals graze, about 6 kilometers from the nearest town, where a unique gastronomic experience is proposed. Unique because the place is unrepeatable; unique because the accommodation, in which it is highly recommended to stay if you visit the restaurant, has an undeniable charm. And also unique for its proposal.
Haute cuisine is, to some extent at least, a cuisine of the exceptional. And that is guaranteed here. It is also, at least as I understand it, a kitchen with enough resources to know when to stop, when not to intervene to let an exceptional raw material shine.
That’s what happens in the kitchen at Habitat Cigüeña Negra, with chef Jorge Ramajo at the helm. At no point is complexity sought, nor is an exercise in virtuosity pursued that would run the risk, perhaps, of overshadowing the product. Here the first line is given to the raw material, which is touched as little as possible, sometimes subjected to grilling – something that also requires significant technical control, on the other hand – sometimes resorting to traditional preparations and in others simply leaving that the product expresses itself, with no more accompaniment than a trickle of oil.
Meats raised around the restaurant, olives grown just a step away from the table and ground just over 30 meters from the diner. And a small orchard, at the moment almost more of a project, which after being awarded the green star by the Michelin Guide last November seeks to close the circle.
The commitment is evident in the design of the menu: Iberian hams from their own pigs, fed with acorns from the oaks that sneak through the window; cured meats, not too cured, soft, but with an elegant meaty taste in the background and the sweetness of the infiltrated fat, produced from their own animals. The cheeses, always from Extremadura, are as close as possible, such as the splendid Retorta from Finca Pascualete (Trujillo), best cheese in Spain at the World Cheese Awards in 2016 and 2018, or a selection from the Granadilla cheese factory, which makes cheeses from raw milk from goats from their own grazing herd just an hour away from the restaurant.
Focusing now on the meats, the offering is really appetizing: seared Retwagyu sirloin carpaccio, only with a drizzle of oil and a fried arugula that provides a certain contrast in texture; grilled entrecôte, soft and with personality at the same time, far from those bland entrecôtes to which, unfortunately, we get used to at some point; a Tomahawk of approximately 1.2 kg, cut thickly to preserve all the delicacy of the meat. In all cuts the characteristics of the breed can be seen, with a certain intensity provided by the red lineage and the fatty softness of the Wagyu, nuanced here by the free-range breeding of the animals, with well-worked muscles.
Even in proposals in which meat is not the protagonist a priori, it is this, in the end, that marks the differential fact, as happens with leeks at low temperature, served with a veil of Iberian bacon, sauced with a meat stock and topped with truffle.
To prepare goats and lambs, the most traditional technique is used, using roasting in a wood oven that the family brought from Pereruela (Zamora) and installed in the patio, at the entrance of the restaurant.
As for desserts, simple preparations are also chosen, traditional in some cases, as is the case with pears in wine, honeyed but full-bodied, which are accompanied by yogurt ice cream; the Extremaduran cheese cake, with a delicate nuance of blue cheese, or the caramelized torrija.
And the result couldn’t make more sense here. Cuisine of the territory in the heart of the territory, cuisine from the most immediate pantry possible in a truly pleasant environment where you want to stay.
Black Stork Habitat is many things: it is a livestock farm in the pasture, an olive grove, an organic oil mill, a hotel and a gastronomic proposal, but above all, it is a project with soul, which was born almost as a natural branch of a business. familiar and manages to adapt to a unique environment, becoming one of the most interesting restaurants in the north of Extremadura with a simple proposal, without complexes, without the need to prove anything and one more reason to visit the surroundings of the Sierra de Gata.
