Drink and eat, eat and drink
“To create and improvise, one must know.” Convinced, and as one of the great masters of world cocktails that he is, Javier de las Muelas has joined the ingenuity of the best chefs to pair, in a union of the senses, cocktails and dishes in his new book, “Cocktails & food” (Planeta Gastro).
Ferrán Adriá, Juan Mari Arzak, Martín Berasategui, Alberto Chicote, Ramón Freixá, Jordi Cruz, Carme Ruscalleda, Joan Roca, Pedro Subijana… The list of renowned chefs drawn to this idea of a festive book, in which food and drink delight in unison, is admirable.
«Drinking a cocktail in bars and restaurants is the most glamorous, and places the cocktail bar as one of the pillars of gastronomy ».
Whoever speaks knows what he is saying. De las Muelas (Barcelona, 1955), in addition to being one of the best bartenders in the world, is a gastronomic consultant and owner of the Dry Martini, a bar that has been among those selected by the World’s 50 Best Bars for seven years.
After years of perfecting the art of create combined and unique spaces (“The real liturgy begins in bars”), many of them in luxury hotels around the world, De las Muelas wanted to go further. Propose and propose a challenge. To think of the best bite to accompany each drink.
Drink well when we eat. Or rather, eat well when we drink, well the author created the cocktails with each chef in mind, all of them friends and famous, and then they embodied their vision in a custom recipe.
To each combination, its plate
“Just like people, each cocktail is unique and has its own personality, so the job consisted of creating the best pairs, assigning each chef the cocktail that, in my opinion, best represents him,” explains De las Muelas in the book.
So for Adriá he thought of the Sherry Oyster Martini, a very dry aperitif, with great strength and marine notes, which the master chef paired with his Peking Suckling Pig.
A Berasategui He dedicated the intense, spicy and herbal Mo ‘Better Blues to it, which produced a seductive Chestnut Soup with Cardamom with pigeon mousse and celery sprouts.
And he gave his Gold Fever aperitif, gold and with a flower and vanilla weapon, to the creativity of Quique Dacosta, which captured it in a Rosa dessert, with apples, petals and flavors.
Almost 60 proposals of mixed drinks and their respective dishes to seduce the palate and the evocations that the individual or shared gastronomic experience always provokes.
As an aperitif, the book includes a series of articles about the world of cocktails, bars and the characters and anecdotes linked to them that De las Muelas compiles for those who seek the secret of the taste and knowledge of the bartender. “I explain all that,” he confesses, “because they are my ingredients, the notes of my score, the origin of my way of seeing life.” And to drink it in sips of excellence.