The importance of identity in today's chefs: Mugaritz and popular culture

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between local traditions and avant-garde cuisine through Mugaritz restaurant and chef Andoni L. Aduriz. The methods used for its study are both descriptive (especially in the first stage of the research) and qualitative and surveys through three personal interviews with Andoni L. Aduriz to analyse how popular culture has influenced avant-garde cuisine. It highlights the importance of Nouvelle Cuisine in the 1970s as a milestone in the democratizsation of cuisine and the entry of popular culture into the kitchen. The New Basque and Catalan Cuisines also played an important role in the defence of the autochthonous and local products, and two of their leading representatives, Ferrán Adrià and Andoni L. Aduriz, brought this search for the popular to avant-garde cuisine. The article explores how Aduriz incorporates popular elements into his cuisine, such as local ingredients, trompe l'oeil, puns, irony, children's games and eating with the hands. It also focus on how his reflections on gastronomy, his audiovisual creations and his use of science have expanded his cooking techniques. By analysing Mugaritz's creative work, the article seeks to contribute to eliminating the artificial barrier that has arisen in recent times between two essential lines of avant-garde gastronomy: the consideration of cuisine as an art and its apparent distancing from popular traditions. Such a separation is illusory, more the product of a theoretical construct than of empirical observation of reality, as the following pages will attempt to demonstrate.