Main image: As a chef’s mise en place goes, the kitchen at Ekstedt at The Yard is elemental: everything Michelin-starred chef Niklas Ekstedt needs to tend a fire pit, a wood-fired oven and a wood stove. (© Emma Johansson)
As autumn turns to winter in the north, the more the kitchen cleaves to old staples of ancient worth. In restaurants too, it’s not the fanciful but the elemental that beckons. Here, Storied’s regular column dares to mix two touchpoints for the season – oil and fire.
Corfu sits amongst that string of Greek islands where ancient mythologies seem to breathe deep inside the landscape. It’s where Odysseus washed up shipwrecked, and one of the lushest green and golden isles in the biosphere. Tall cypresses stand like sentinels against soaring cliffs already dense with a deep abundance of ancient trees. Amongst which, in scented groves of silvery olives, gnarled barks spread out their branches loaded with the fruit of ages. It takes being in such a place, with the sun beating like bronze on your neck, to realize that when in your delicatessen at home you mutter “get some olive oil” you’re not quite doing the origin story justice.
All Mediterranean islands have suffered ownership wars. When mighty Venice brought 400 years of peace (1386-1797) to Corfu’s turbulent story, it was olive trees that sustained the calm. Venetian incentives to plant more groves in massive number made Corfu the centre of regional olive oil production, and kept the lamps of Venice burning.
A solitary gnarled olive tree rooted deep in the heat of arid soil, its hard fruits evidence of time and persistence. (Shutterstock)
Today 400 million silver-green olive trees grow (mainly koroneiki and lianolia) across the island’s 230 square miles (590 sq km), producing 15,000 tonnes of oil each year. The health benefits of olive oil were known long before wellness became a word. It tops every list of nutritional value. But its culinary value wasn’t really universalized beyond its own sun-drenched patch until the Mediterranean Diet hit the lifestyle pages in the late 1990s. Then suddenly, for the chefs and the keen home kitchens of the western hemisphere, when it came to cooking with oil it was olive all the way. But Greek, Italian or Spanish?
Spain (30%), Italy (24%) and Greece (18%) account for nearly three-quarters of the world’s olive oil production. Which to choose. Well, which dance draws you? The paso doble, the tarantella, the syrtaki? A sense of cultural storytelling can warm a kitchen, wherever your imagination leads. Either way, olive oil transports you back beneficently to the certainties of nature and our human heritage within it.
If the labor of hand-picking olives isn’t a labor of love, what is? And from each one of these millions of individual fruits the rich collective goodness of its oil emanates. (Shutterstock)
In Corfu an exclusively hand-picked harvest, usually in October, renders a golden-green extra-virgin elixir with individual flavor profiles spilling from the type of olive and the maker’s method. As if you didn’t know, extra-virgin is best reserved for dressing dishes. From November to April, nature knocks the remaining olives into black nets on the ground to become oil for general above-standard cooking.
Which means that something most associated with summer – bright fresh salads set out on sun-baked terraces drizzled with olive oil – is actually one of the treats of winter. As autumn descends, bottles labeled New Season arrive in store. The oil pours viscous, peppery, green, vibrant… It’s November, but somehow you’re back in Corfu, and the sun is beating like bronze on your neck.
Of course, it’s all about men. And what men do best. Meat and fire. And so it is that, down the long centuries from the blazing pits of Vulcan, the Roman god of fire, it has been decreed that when a sacrifice is sanctified it shall be a man who puts the beast into the flames – and also shall he turn the franks at your cousin’s Labor Day BBQ. Women cannot do this. Salads, yes. But they are not ordained into fiery ritual, and thus the iron rules of life remain.
When Argentinian chef Francis Mallmann appeared on the Netflix series Chef’s Table in 2015 and cooked a variety of animal carcasses bound on a rack over a bonfire on a stony beach, other men across the civilized world trembled. Their puny hands melted like putty. They knew that Mallmann (father of seven, runner of nine hot restaurants) was the alpha, the beta-blocker, the vestigial caveman they would never be but maybe should.
Francis Mallmann, the main man of flame, the Hemingway of meat. Pictured here at Château La Coste in Provence. Don’t ask: “Do you smoke cigars?” (Richard Haughton)
Meat might be the signaller of men, but it’s fire that smokes the room. Anyone can haul a topside from a freezer into an oven. The thrall that Mallmann generates is to stoke our residual memory of the elemental. In our soft, convenient world, we are so removed from the visceral – at least those safe in a privileged everyday – and yet we find its fingerprint still makes marks upon our sense of who we are. There is nothing so elemental, so earthly human as cooking on an open fire.
Mallmann was the forerunner hero of what’s turned into something of a movement now of firebrand restaurant chefs in cities, who treat the in-kitchen Big Green Egg like a nursery toy. Stoves are out. Ovens are out. Sous vide, are you kidding?
Tools of trade. Niklas Ekstedt started cooking with live fire at his Stockholm restaurant in 2011. At the 5-star Great Scotland Yard Hotel in London too, he eschews white tablecloths for a fiery down-to-earth experience. (Alamy)
These young guys – and women – are torching tomahawks over massive burning trays of charcoal fuming with oil-soaked herbs the size of shrubs, handfuls of crystal salt and black pepper sparkled over. While next door in the dining room’s showy open kitchen the rotating coal-black chains of spits and cranking rotisseries erupt in flames and invite us into the forgotten pleasures of the cave. It’s theatre and it’s what we’re paying for.
Beyond nutrition, the adventure of experiential restaurants like Mallmann’s is to offer us a sense not of who we are exactly. But where we have come from. And what we might have lost or not from our own origin story. As autumn turns to winter, if our questions in that respect tend to get a little more internalized, or go a little deeper back inside the metaphorical cave… well, maybe that’s what they’re for, our quiet contemplations by the fireside at home.
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