Disfrutar's last dish of the year has eight colors and is an invention of a technique never before seen in the world

BarcelonaThe creative team at Disfrutar's restaurant has done it again. They've invented a new culinary technique, now featured on the restaurant's Festival tasting menu, which recently celebrated its eleventh anniversary. It consists of eight colorful spoonfuls, each a textured food created using starches. These are presented on a white plate, like an artist's palette, and eaten with a spoon. "The waiter explains to the diners that they can eat them one by one or mix them together with their cutlery, which is what they end up doing," say Mateu Casañas, Oriol Castro, and Eduard Xatruch. The result is a dish that's visually stunning, thanks to the starches that give the food its natural sheen, and also delicious, thanks to the precision of the cooking. The dish represents a novel technique, preparation, and concept: playing with the idea of painting on the plate.

The eight splashes of color on the plate (to continue the comparison with an artist's palette) come from eight different ingredients. The white patch is from the almond; the black, from the roasted calçot; the red, from the beetroot; the purple, from the red cabbage; the green, from the spinach with olive oil; the orange, from the carrot and saffron; the brown, from the black trumpet mushrooms and button mushrooms; and the yellow, from the corn. Some diners claimed they had never eaten vegetables that tasted so good. "If all vegetables tasted like this, we'd eat it every day," said some customers who had even used their cutlery to draw a dragon on their plates.

To arrive at this technique, and subsequently the dish, the chefs studied starches, specifically wheat starch—in our house, there's a very common brand, Maizena, which has been used in traditional recipes. "The final concept is a vegetable cream, which we serve in separate spoonfuls, so that the senses are involved and so that each person can decide how they want to eat it," the chefs explain, adding that the reaction they've noticed most is surprise, the playful desire to paint, to mix the colors, and finally, "when." Of course, their explanation is simple, because behind it lie many hours of study and work.

On the other hand, the three chefs point out that they constantly work against scams involving websites that duplicate their restaurant's domain so that people make reservations with prepayment. They report them, but they keep getting scammed; the last time was just a few weeks ago. "We don't ask for money with the reservation; we only ask for the credit card to validate it. And we also take reservations by phone, not just through the website," the three chefs comment, adding that they won't open another Disfrutar anywhere in the world, because "having it in Barcelona along with Compartir is already a great responsibility."

Offers to open another Disfrutar restaurant come from all over the world: from the United States to Arab countries, and even Great Britain. "We ruled it out because, on the one hand, it would be impossible for us to be there, and on the other hand, the way we approach creativity, the hours we dedicate to studying techniques, prevents us from doing so," Xatruch and Casañas explain. They clarify that these shared ideas define their approach. "It's our choice, and we believe we're doing the right thing, but that doesn't mean we don't understand what other chefs are doing," they say, adding further reasons: "We have many customers who frequently order from the same menu, so we create personalized menus for them, with dishes not listed on the regular menu, many of which come from our studies of new techniques." Creating these personalized menus requires constant research and creativity.

Improvement of food industry products

In the new studio they've acquired next to the restaurant, the chefs explain that they continue their food consulting work, which leads them to frequently collaborate with the food industry, which asks them how to improve products. "We have some collaborations we've been working on for fourteen years. We also have products we make ourselves, and it doesn't matter whether our brand is featured or not." In the latter case, they sign the creative work with the CXC brand.

Continuing with the theme of new dishes, aside from the color palette, the chefs reveal they are working with pork rib tendons, which they believe will lead to a new dish. For now, they are sourcing the product before developing the concept. "The use of new technologies also helps us, and in fact, we currently have a new machine that allows us to work with very precise temperature control, while also having a lot of power for grinding," they explain. The explanation might make it sound like a Thermomix, but when they show it—it's in their research studio, located next to the restaurant—it becomes clear that it's something else entirely, especially given its size. "We come across technology as a starting point, both because we find it and because people call us and suggest it." In fact, they acquired the famous Occo machine, the pressure cooker that combines pressure and temperature, because a friend from Korea gave it to them. Without Occo, they wouldn't have been able to come up with the concept of transforming almonds into a white bean texture. "We should also mention that out of every twenty attempts, we might only keep two. That's a figure that shows that sometimes we aim for one idea, but they find another, and we keep that one," they explain. "Creativity is an obligation we impose on ourselves, one to which we dedicate many resources," they add. Inspiration, then, doesn't come from nowhere, nor does it arrive suddenly; rather, it requires "an enormous amount of work."

Finally, the chefs at Disfrutar also rule out moving their Barcelona location. "We're happy where we are, renting, with a mortgage that covers the renovations, but which allows us to be self-sufficient and financially sustainable," they conclude.