SHOWCASING THE WORLD’S FINEST PROPERTIES AND THE STORIES BEHIND THEM
From Constantinople to the Palace of Versailles, then from Versailles to Abu Dhabi. Where art travels, restaurants follow. Ali Ben Ahmed, The Caliph of Constantine, With His Entourage Outside Constantine (Théodore Chassériau, 1845). (Shutterstock/Sergey Bogomyako)
Sometimes we need a longer telescope. Sometimes our pictures of the past are off-beam and our grasp of history so slippery we don’t really know what happened when. When exactly, remind me, did the Moors invade Spain?
I looked it up. Turns out the Moors – a somewhat suspect term now for the various peoples of ancient North Africa and Arabia – boarded their boats one day in 711 CE and, for reasons known best to themselves, landed in Spain and proceeded to rule the Iberian peninsula for the next eight centuries. During which time they led the known world in matters astronomical, mathematical, scientific and built Granada, that citadel of ornate arches that keeps the united nations of marauding Instagrammers busy today. There’s a bit more to it. But why did I need to know this in the first place?
Because I was heading down the streets of south London to the home of my old amigo, chef and restauranteur José Pizarro, who recently did something unusual. With six wildly successful restaurants in the capital, a TV omnipresence that makes him chefing royalty plus, courtesy of King Felipe VI, an actual royal medal pinned to his chest, José is basically the ambassador of all things Spanish and edible here.
José Pizarro is the only chef in Spanish history to have been awarded the Cross of the Order of Isabella the Catholic. Equivalent to a knighthood in the UK, it was bestowed by King Felipe VI and presented by the Spanish Ambassador at the Spanish Embassy in London in March 2024. (Pizarro/The Caterer/exteriors.gob.es)
As I rang his doorbell, I hoped he might be downstairs making one of his famous tortillas that redefine unctuous. But mainly my task was to grill him about this unusual thing he’d done. Which was, after 25 years in London, to turn history upside down and spearhead a reverse Spanish invasion of the Middle East.
Why had he opened restaurant number seven in Abu Dhabi? Tell me he wasn’t resurrecting that appalling era of “fusion cooking” we’d all had to live through a decade ago and was suddenly carving doner kebabs from blocks of Spanish prawns.
“Very funny, my friend. But really I had wanted to open in the region for nine years. In Dubai, there’s so much going on, the energy is enormous. But when I saw Abu Dhabi for the first time I fell in love with the place. It’s calmer. Yet the Louvre has arrived, and the Guggenheim is opening too in 2025. Incredible exhibitions. They’re investing so much in the cultural dimensions of the place.”
This is the Louvre. But not as we knew it, not even when I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid took Paris by surprise in 1984. This is Abu Dhabi, the latest outpost in the globalization of “France’s greatest art gallery”. Frank Gehry’s $200m new Guggenheim nearby is slated to open in 2025. (Shutterstock)
So what are this adopted Londoner’s plans? Packing up his paella pans, taking his croquetas on a world tour?
“You know London is my spiritual home away from Spain, it’s where everything started for me. I’ll always have a base here. But Abu Dhabi gives me that thrill of a second beginning. What I don’t do is come in, put my name on a place, go boom and leave. We’re slowly building a loyal customer following.”
Why had he decided to turn history upside down and spearhead a reverse Spanish invason of the Middle East?
It suddenly dawns on your dim correspondent that Spanish and Middle Eastern food are a close culinary match. Of course they are. After 800 years of Islamic rule across Iberia, they must have left a few recipe books behind with the mathematical treatises.
When the crusading armies of Onward Christian Soldiers Marching As To War arrived to regain the peninsula in 1492, a change of menu might have been expected. But Spanish tapas = Middle Eastern mezze. Olives and nuts x 2. Fresh-caught fish to the power of 10. Vegetables + vegetables. Rice over potatoes in the main. The cuisines are cousins at least.
Hold on, what about José’s beloved Pata Negra ham from Ibérico pigs snuffling and nuzzling on forest acorns, pride of Spain and as central to Pizarro’s career as a line of glistening back fat? How does that go down in Abu Dhabi?
“It doesn’t. The hotel has no license for pork. So we spotlight other products. The seafood here is just wonderful. The hotel has a greenhouse on the roof. And the honey, my goodness, the honey…”
With Iberico pork not on offer in Abu Dhabi’s Conrad Etihad Hotel, José Pizarro’s way with sparkling seafood lets you go the whole hog. (David Allen)
What I’m getting here (and here in his pristine kitchen I clearly wasn’t getting any oozing tortilla that morning) is what happens when chefs expand beyond their home turf. What compromise does the colonizing of their cooking involve? Very little, he says. Because beyond a few pre-known non grata ingredients, the first thing these chefs pack in their suitcases is the obsessive quest for quality that took them to the top in the first place.
Pizarro is not alone in flying in to open up in the Middle East. For the past decade, a queue of Michelin-starred restaurateurs have descended on customs control Dubai, waiting to expand their international empires. No surprise there, these figures in towering toques and pressed whites don’t just possess sharp knives, they own hallowed hospitality environments that operate as businesses or not at all.
Especially when Michelin stars need to be gained or protected (investors likewise), tight accountancy accompanies every basil chiffonade. And the numbers can get stratospheric.
Londoner Jason Atherton has opened 38 restaurants in his 25-year career, spinning out from Soho to the Philippines, Shanghai and Dubai. French maestro Alain Ducasse owns 36 across the world, with a total of 21 Michelin stars. Nobu (Nobuyuki Matsuhisa) wields his Nikkei knife over 59 global outposts from Atlanta to Warsaw. That’s 133 in all. Well, I suppose once the yeast starts rising, it’s hard to stop looking at the dough.
Can’t sit still. Like all chefs, each of these celebrated industry figures (Ducasse, Nobu, Atherton) began at the bottom of the culinary food chain, some as dishwashers, before moving up through the ranks. Between them, they now own 133 restaurants across the world. (Alamy)
As I left José Pizarro that day with a warm hasta luego (and a chilled slice of you guessed it from his fridge), I thought how removed we diners are from the exhausting and highly precarious concern of running a hospitality business in commercially difficult times, all the while being endlessly subject to the whims of a choosy clientele. We scour the reviews, we book, we arrive, we await the miraculous.
Next time we have our napkins billowed discreetly into our laps, maybe we should do something unusual ourselves. Perhaps, as we wait for our amuse bouche to amuse us, we should pause and ponder the workloads of these professionals who make the miraculous happen so carefully for us. Every time we step through those revolving doors.
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