Right in the middle of autumn, the season of good eating, Barcelona hosted two events devoted to taste.
The first was "Gastronomic Forum Barcelona." This year it left its former home in Montjuïc and, for the first time, took place on a massive scale at the Gran Via venue. More than 450 exhibitors took part, up 12% on last year. Last year, 21,800 chefs and producers attended. I went on the first day, and it was clearly bigger than last year, a fresh reminder that food is the powerful engine driving this city's tourism.
This year's theme was "Revisiting Tradition." The three chefs of the three-Michelin-star "Disfrutar," named the best restaurant in the world, along with Quique Dacosta, Paco Pérez, and others standing at the very forefront of contemporary Spanish cuisine, all spoke about "tradition." Twenty years ago, what pushed Catalan cuisine to the center of the world was "innovation": elBulli's foams and spherification. That the chefs who stand in that lineage are now saying, in unison, that they are going back to tradition is truly fascinating.
The second was "MY Coffee Awards," a coffee festival held this weekend at "Nau Bostik," an old factory site in the La Sagrera district. Alongside a roasting championship, latte art, and a Brewers Cup, it names the Best Roaster, Best Espresso Bar, and Best New Shop. Up-and-coming roasters gathered from all over Europe, and quite a few of my friends and acquaintances were competing.
Over the past decade, the density of specialty coffee in this city has become one of the highest in Europe. A city with a port becomes a city of good coffee. Green beans from Latin America and Africa are unloaded at Barcelona's port earlier than anywhere else, and from here they are shipped across Europe. That is also one of the reasons our Lofi COFFEE has its roastery and research center in this city. It is close to the origins, it is inside the EU, and we can try new beans that would never make it to Japan, at any time.
The three-star chefs who have championed innovation spoke of "tradition" in a huge venue equipped with the latest facilities, probably because the whole fine-dining industry feels it has hit a dead end. Meanwhile, the roasters and baristas gathered at the old factory site never mention tradition at all. That is because they have no tradition to return to, and here innovation is still going on. The rise of specialty coffee over the past ten years was, you could say, an escape from Europe's traditional espresso and from the chains.
In other words, innovation lasts only as long as there is tradition left to break. The elBulli lineage spent twenty years breaking everything that could be broken, and for an innovation that had lost anything to break, the only novelty left was "going back."
If you ask which has a future, the "tradition" spoken of in a modern, giant forum venue, or the "innovation" that is still experimenting in an old factory site that looks like a guerrilla base, the answer is unmistakably the latter. The pitch-black espresso and chain-store coffee that the roasters at the factory site ran away from are still standing, untouched, in bars and in front of train stations all over Europe. There is still so much more to break.
On the day it has no one left to defeat, innovation has no choice but to return to tradition.
The fact that the people gathered at the factory site looked so happy is probably proof that the day is still far off.
