There is a man dressed in black leather on my screen. Impeccable, not a hair out of place. Not a detail is missing. He wears latex gloves, black too. I’m not sure what’s going to happen until he starts working a dough. He is very serious, so something serious must be happening, I think.
After a few seconds, he looks intensely at the camera, puts his finger to his lips to ask for silence and, from a jacket pocket, takes out a pair of scissors. The gesture makes me think more of the Pulp Fiction dungeon than of a kitchen, and it is not an association that particularly captivates me, although in reality it turns out that he is only preparing a pizza.
In another video, someone throws a steak on a board. With an assumed aggressiveness, he works it with blows and a whole handling that would not pass the filter in the first year of any hospitality school, all with effective music and a fast-paced montage. There is fire in the background, ingredients being thrown on the counter with a mixture of anger and contempt. The result, why am I going to lie, does not seem wonderful and I am not very clear where all that choreography wants to go.
They are not exceptions. In reality, they are a sample, not even very extreme, of some of the videos that can be found on any social network under the labels “cooking” or “gastronomy.”
It all started, in some way, with that famous Salt Bae, the Turkish cook who, with sunglasses on, added salt to his dishes in a way that was as absurd as it was successful. When he opened a restaurant in New York in 2018, the level of devastating criticism was such that it is still remembered. And this, in a city accustomed to often unforgiving reviews, does seem like an achievement to me and not just sprinkling salt on your forearm.
And yet, Nusret Gökçe, as the chef is called, today has 21 restaurants distributed in places such as London, New York, Las Vegas, Doha, Mykonos and Dubai. It is evident that it is not the cuisine that is important there, because despite the criticism, that is a few thousand people from any part of the world putting themselves in their hands to eat every day.
Perhaps one of the great changes in the kitchen of the last quarter of a century is one that we have not talked about too much and that, despite this, will mark the future: if at the origin of the contemporary restaurant there is a change of consideration in which From the inn or the post stop he went to the restaurant, abandoning in the process the place where he was fed, without further ado, to go to the meeting place where the client went sometimes out of necessity, but many other times out of necessity. leisure, to participate in social life and to enjoy food, I believe that today we are witnessing a similar process.
If in that first transition there was a leap from service to leisure, from food as a necessity to food as enjoyment, I believe that today we are witnessing the leap from leisure to food as spectacle.
Not long ago someone told me about a restaurant in Madrid where “the dishes were flambéed.” What dishes? All of them, apparently. Because? I can’t find an answer based on strictly gastronomic ones, perhaps because I was probably looking at it from the wrong point of view. It is done, in reality, with an aesthetic and visual purpose that did not necessarily have to do with the culinary. It is done because it looks good in a photo, because it attracts attention, because it is different. It is done for the show, for a show that fills the room daily.
Those of us who write about gastronomy have become accustomed to receiving with increasing frequency press releases about the opening of restaurants in which more is said about the interior design than the kitchen, in which it is easier to find the name of the designer than that of the chef.
We have become accustomed to restaurants where you are greeted by a life-size figure of a newt – as real as a newt can be, that is – with luminescent nipples; to photocalls at the restaurant entrance; to an aesthetic that has more to do with White Lotus television fiction than with real life. Perhaps it is that suspension of reality that calls us.
At the same time, the most successful television formats focused on gastronomy have been accentuating their commitment to spectacle; by an increasing pace, always fast-paced, and by contestants who fit well-defined stereotypes.
Cooking, in these programs, is often nothing more than the pretext for a performance, a show that, through battles, challenges, nightmares and overcoming, has consolidated a series of references in the collective imagination that have little to do with what that happens in a kitchen: rhythm, shouts, aesthetically striking dishes, pressure that is often unnecessary, although very cinematic. The only thing those guys from Tik Tok do is turn up the volume. If you think about it, it’s like a version of television full of steroids and in 30-second capsules.
My natural tendency leads me to perplexity and complaint. But I resist. I make the effort to try to understand a phenomenon that surely catches me as an adult, trained in another way of understanding gastronomy. And I think that not everything, far from it, is bad in these formats. There is a part of frivolity and exhibitionism, it is true, but that is not new either. It is something that we have associated gastronomy, a certain form of gastronomy, with for decades, the only thing that has changed is that it now has a much larger speaker.
They are symptoms, I believe, that we are facing a fracture, a bifurcation that we should assume and that leads to a distancing between gastronomy as we understood it until now and gastronomy as a format that interests more and more people. It is the same thing that happens with music with electric guitars, which is still alive, but has long ceased to be in the center or to be interesting for an immense layer of the market without that saying anything bad about the music sector or music. as an industry.
I wonder if we could learn something from all this, if instead of adopting the role of the old man yelling at the pigeons in the park, we should accept that this is where an increasingly important part of the shots go and adapt , assuming that the cook who does things with salt on the screen, the one who takes out a pair of scissors while looking like he will spare your life and the one who punishes a steak because you don’t know what sins are, only collateral damage, excesses of enthusiasm within of a new trend.
I remember the reluctance, similar to the ones that assail me today, when the blogs arrived; those that existed after when Twitter appeared. And later with Instagram. There is no difference with this case, so the fact that all those who complained then are today on some of those platforms, if not on all of them and actively, makes me think that gastronomy, in reality, is also there and what we need is to accept it.
Perhaps there is a certain excess in some of these early examples, it is true, some extra testosterone here and there, but that does not detract from the potential of the format nor, in any case, invalid tendencies much deeper than a more or less tacky video of a man who likes himself, it is possible, a little more than necessary.
It’s up to us, I think, to remove the clutter, clear the brush, try to see what’s underneath all the gestures and kitsch. Because it is possible that what is there is telling us where the shots are going to go and, if so, and I think it is, we should start taking off our glasses of looking over our shoulders and assume that gastronomy, now, too is there.
