In recent years there is a trend that seems to be consolidating: young chefs who, after a professional period in large restaurants and in the main cities, decide to change direction in their career and opt for small towns, areas far from the main tourist flows and of metropolitan areas.
These restaurants usually also have a small scale in common. In many cases these are strictly family projects, a couple, perhaps with one or two more people on staff, who set up a small restaurant, often even in their own home.
This format, which has been consolidated little by little, has undoubted interest from a strictly gastronomic point of view, since in many cases it establishes relationships with small producers in the area, generates flows of customers who travel to new areas and becomes , in some way, in a style exercise in which it is necessary to demonstrate what can be done with the limitations that the place and scale impose.
But it is also a model with interesting social implications, particularly in areas affected by aging and depopulation. In places like this, generating a couple of jobs, becoming a customer of local orchards and consolidating new delivery routes can become, and in fact is becoming, an asset that transcends the space of the restaurant itself.
Plats Forts (Puigcerdà), Gunea (Avilés), Fuentelgato (Huerta del Marquesado), Miguel González (O Pereiro de Aguiar), Monte (Lena), Mesón Sabor Andaluz (Alcalá del Valle), Lándua (Mazaricos)… The list of restaurants that respond to these budgets is beginning to be no longer scarce, which shows that rather than isolated initiatives we are faced with a consolidated, economically viable phenomenon, whose permanence and impact we will only be able to assess in a few years, but which already appears as one of the great changes in contemporary gastronomy.
In O Secadeiro we found many of the wickers with which these types of restaurants are woven: Eva and Fernando studied in Santiago de Compostela, then they visited different hotels in Barcelona (Hotel Juan Carlos I, Hilton Diagonal Mar…) before returning to Galicia , where they worked at the Alborada restaurant, then recognized with one star.
In recent times, Fernando, who is in charge of the kitchen, was head chef at A Estación, in Cambre, also with a star, and at the Bido restaurant, in A Coruña, recognized with two Suns by the Repsol Guide, while Eva, in front of the room, served as head chef at the Meliá María Pita in the same city.
A few years ago they decided to change direction in their career. For this they had Eva’s family home in Banzas, a village of about 80 inhabitants in Outes, in the Muros and Noia estuary. The town, however, is not located on the more touristic coastal strip, but about 15 minutes inland, in a mountain area, which has kept the surrounding landscapes and part of the architecture of the core well preserved, but it is It also translates into a zero presence of tourists and little traffic on the road that passes at the foot of the town.
It is there where two years ago they began the rehabilitation of the old drying room on the family farm to convert it into their restaurant. The works, conditioned by the effects of the pandemic, were prolonged until they were finally able to open their doors last summer.
The result is a space of undoubted charm, a traditional granite construction that looks out from the top of the village to the farms where they cultivate their own garden and, beyond, the landscape of the Donas River valley, which makes you forget that the national highway and the main towns of the region are, in reality, just a step away.
Already inside the small dining room, with just six tables, the true scale of the project becomes clear: Eva managing the room, Fernando in the kitchen and a single tasting menu. That is all they need to shape a project with soul, with a clear sense of place and with tasty cuisine, in which their garden has a special role.
“We are not a vegetarian restaurant,” explains Fernando, “but our cuisine is very defined by the garden, by products that in most cases are homegrown, sometimes as the main ingredient, in others, the least, as an accompaniment” . That’s how it is. Its menu is crossed by vegetable elements that allow it to design a strictly seasonal menu. “We do not change the entire menu, but every 15 days or so we change two or three dishes of the same, so that the regular customer finds new things and, in addition, we can integrate the products that are brought from the season,” says the chef.
In fact, in this strange Galician autumn, marked by very high temperatures and a worrying lack of rain, the menu still revolves around products from the transition between the end of summer and the coldest months. This is the case of creamed corn which, accompanied by freshly made naan bread, serves as a welcome treat. As is also the case with scallop cured in seawater, served with fig and a subtle fig leaf oil.
The menu continues with a true gem: lentellón, a good-sized, buttery, thin-skinned bean native to the valley. “Only a neighbor here, from Banzas, grows it,” says the cook. “Well, actually now there are two of us. We are also planting it,” he emphasizes. It is served in a stew of pig’s trotters, in the style of traditional Galician tripe, with a lot of paprika and a touch of cumin, and is flavored with some coriander flowers. A product and a dish that alone justify the trip; one of the collateral effects that give the restaurant, and its presence in an environment like this, greater depth.
The flame-cooked eggplant is glazed with soy, miso and ginger, served on a hazelnut praline and topped with some katsuobushi flakes in what is the least local proposal on the tour. Next comes a cabbage – a return to the imagination of the valley – roasted and fermented, tender but still with texture, served in a seaweed broth and with a thin veil of bacon, an essential and complex proposal at the same time, powerful but not excessive, loaded with umami, a slight background acidity and the characteristic aroma of cabbage. Really interesting.
Beef raviolo, mushroom stew and truffle bechamel, a friendly dish with which the autumnal pantry is making its way onto the menu. Hake in a green seaweed sauce with cabbage and Galo Celta in stew of its crests on a sweet potato puree are the main proposals, the ones that are furthest from the garden; Tasty stews, with a traditional root that is reviewed without excesses.
The sweet section is made up of two dishes: lemon cream, blackberry ice cream and infusion of roses and tagetes, with which the landscape of the end of summer, the same one that still filters through the large window, becomes very present again, and the white chocolate ganache, chestnut cream, fennel gel and white chocolate ice cream that already looks towards the next season, towards the traditional cooked chestnuts in Galicia, which used to be flavored with wild fennel. Once again the memory repertoire reviewed from a moderate perspective, suitable for all types of diners.
Everything fits. The prices are contained and make the effort of this couple recognized even more. At first one is tempted to think that they are cooking against the elements, against what the average customer would expect in a location like this, but the truth is that, if you think about it, what they are doing is exactly the opposite, it is adapt to the environment and read it from your personal point of view; It is to avoid cooking what surely many restaurants – some, without a doubt, very well – cook in the surrounding area and to propose a current vision of the pantry and traditional flavors.
But beyond that, what they propose is a new way of approaching a restaurant business. Possibilistic, if you will, limited by its own scale, but at the same time, aware of that limitation, it strives to push its limits a little further, to offer something personal, different, that fits there and through what the diner can see who is behind, their baggage, but also their current moment.
O Secadeiro is an example of a growing trend, but it is also a restaurant with its own personality; a different proposal in that place, although not disconnected from the environment and its taste memory. It is a brave and kind project at the same time, one of those places without excessive pretensions. How bad excesses of enthusiasm are and how many disappointments they cause, while projects like this, on a small scale, frequently manage to make you leave with a smile.
