There are few greater joys for a foodie than to feel that he was right when he thought that a restaurant had a future. For vanity, but also for love of restaurants and food, to see from the beginning how a project is born and grows to become a benchmark with its own voice is a luxury, and that is what happened to us with Slow and Low, which we visited years ago, just starting, and to which we have now returned after the award of its recent Michelin star.
On the premises, a renovation that pushes you to eat in privacy or to look at the open kitchen in front of you. In the menu, a longer menu (also more expensive) that allows for more tricks of the chefs and better products. And in the menu the essence of the first time: haute cuisine with more feet in Asia and Latin America than in Spain (for something they are Mexican and Barcelona), -eclectic they call it, electric for us-, and with a lot of creativity and technique and the strong flavors of those distant cuisines that awaken the palate.
Mouth-watering dishes
The initial trilogy is already a classic in this type of places that serves to declare intentions: bao with bacon and Mexican macha sauce mayonnaise, scallop tartlet and tuna belly tatemado sambal. All said here, we salivate as we write.
The seafood box is one of the prides of the house, which justifies the price increase:a porexpan box in the style of the fish markets where the technique is deployed. Only the oyster comes with umami sauce, olive oil caviar and a clamato sorbet. The same line with the razor or prawns that complete the box.
The menu, a little too long, shines with dishes that insist on that line, like the tomato water as a Bloody Mary with mussels and Tajin (great dish) or tuna with pickled foam and we are less interested in more Mediterranean dishes, such as onion texture or Barbastro tomato, curious and technical, but that cost us more to fit and could have shortened the experience.
What is a Michelin star?
Anyway, the dishes you will already taste -love tortello with kimchi and meuniere and that prepostre of olive oil ice cream. The important thing here, we believe, is that Slow and Low explains what a Michelin-starred restaurant is: a cozy and intimate place, but professional and meticulous, and a proposal that only needs a place with more space and possibilities (they themselves say so) to continue growing.
And in the kitchen, technique, detail and a lot of creativity and delicacy (Michelin dixit). According to the Guide, in the 1930s a restaurant with one star is the one that deserves a stop, two those worth the detour and three those worth a special trip. Today, the guide defines the first two stars as, first, “those awarded to restaurants that, using ingredients of the highest quality, prepare dishes with distinct flavors and at a consistently high level” and, second, “places where the dishes bring out the personality and talent of the chef. The cuisine stands out for its refinement and inspiration.”
For us it walks towards the second because it complies with Michelin. But it deserves a detour, according to our parameters, because it gives the opportunity to hear a voice of its own. Just as we stop before a different book author, a restaurant with its own discourse is worthy of a stop and a chef (or chefs, in this case), with something of its own to say, that which any creator should aspire to have.