We should thank media chefs for their efforts so that home kitchens are not a mere area for reheating manufactured food. The microwave was a great invention, but it softens the culinary imagination. In the universe of cooking, behind the media, there are great chefs and Marc Ribas is an example. And to demonstrate his expertise in the kitchen, Ribas has his restaurant La Taverna del Ciri in Terrassa, a medium-sized establishment that in the not too distant future will end up being renamed with the simple name of El Ciri.
La Taverna del Ciri is like the rest of the warrior Ribas. A kitchen open to customers in which the chef prepares the dishes from a local menu. Let us understand proximity as an embrace of traditional Catalan cuisine, that which survives as best it can the fashions imported from the global world without disdaining the modern cuisines that add richness to traditionality without masking it. La Taverna del Ciri is not a place where the chef dedicates his wisdom in his free hours and it shows. It is a place with a bearded figurehead and each plate or dish is impregnated with the word brutal, popular in Ribas’ television language.
It is not an extensive menu, but it covers all the palates of the clients who want to enjoy it, because cooking is about enjoying, smacking your lips and letting your imagination travel, from the gastronomic hand of the chef from Girona. Take, for example, their macaroni stuffed with sanfaina with fresh oregano and Ermesenda cheese. Or Mediterranean bluefin tuna with white romesco, remoulade sauce, grated dehydrated tuna heart, salt and Molí d’Arbúcies oil. Or dry shrimp rice. Or, to close the poker of aces, a Rossini-style cannelloni without bechamel, but with a sauce composed of double cream and a meat broth, mushrooms and aestivum truffle.
At La Taverna del Ciri it is possible to accompany the meal with a llonguet, one of the childhood breads of Catalan boomers. A small step for man, but a big step for the recovery of traditions lost in the wasteland of modernity. Behind a large loaf, there should always be a plate at its height to be able to scrape. I left the one in which the Brutal Leeks served brighter than one passed through the hands of a citizen of Villa Arriba as a Fairy. The sauce is a Chardonnay vinaigrette with mustard and Molí d’Arbúcies oil of the empeltre variety.
Other diners opted for a sweet and sour Ral d’Avinyó bacon with potato parmentier, celery and ginger or an Angus strip with chestnut arugula and its juice. It was bad.
In its task of recovering taste memory, in the future the Giantess that represents the ancient Lent will be installed in El Ciri. Symbol, mythology and good cooking to receive diners like me, who closed the party with a Cardinal de Terrassa, a cream dessert that would have driven Patsy, the sweet-toothed child from the movie Once Upon a Time in America, crazy.