By Fiorella Donayre
Dante Liporace, the executive chef at the new Moreno restaurant, offers a menu that puts twists on traditional flavors to tap your taste memory with techniques that both surprise and satisfy.
“The idea is to look for flavors that you know, that you have in your mind, stuck to your memory, and to find this flavor that you know with a different texture, with a different temperature, but that in your mouth has the same flavor,” Liporace, 31, told The Argentine Post in an interview at the restaurant.
In his executive chef debut, Liporace, who worked at El Bulli, among other Spanish Michellin-starred restaurants including Akelarre and Tragabuches, doesn’t seek extravagant flavors. Instead he says his aim is to serve Argentine diners bife de chorizo or risotto in ways they can enjoy as never before through the use of “perfect flavors.”
Moreno joins a small field of restaurants including La Vineria de Gualterio Bolivar that have brought vanguard cuisine, also known as experimental cooking, or techno-emotional cuisine to Buenos Aires. The style emerged in 1990, led by El Bulli owner and chef Ferran Adria, as a search for new culinary concepts and techniques which began as an empiric exercise that employed foams made with siphons and savory ice creams made with liquid nitrogen. In his search of constant innovation, Adria later explored other fields, including “molecular gastronomy,” a scientific approach to cooking, and using the new technology to improve his cooking techniques. (Adria’s manifesto is here)
Deconstructed Spanish Tortilla
Moreno Restaurante is located on Moreno St. on the edge of Montserrat and San Telmo, a few blocks from the Plaza de Mayo. The restaurant has a main dining room next to the bar and a VIP area, with seating for 80 and a wine cellar with a capacity for 1000 bottles that includes classic and boutique wines, says sommelier Maria de la Paz Nasta.
Moreno offers three-course daily lunch specials (50 pesos) as well as tasting menus of seven (220 pesos per person) and 10 courses (330 pesos per person), with a la carte options also available.
The menu includes a “deconstructed Spanish tortilla” served in a glass. It starts with a layer of onions cooked slowly for four hours under a layer of scrambled eggs topped with a layer of mashed potato foam that’s sprinkled with French fries to provide a juxtaposition of potato textures, Liporace says.
Another dish that stands out is the suckling pig served with a wild berry risotto and “ossobuco sauce.” The meat is vacuum sealed in a heat-proof plastic bag and vapor cooked in a special oven for 17 hours at precisely 72 degrees Celsius. The temperature is then quickly lowered to 3 degrees Celsius. On order, the dish is reheated to 72 degrees Celsius in 10 minutes and served.
The lack of oxygen helps intensify the flavors so it’s not necessary to marinate the product for hours. The pork only needs a few drops of olive oil and some herbs to obtain an intense flavor. This method gives the cut of meat a crunchy exterior and a tender interior that bursts with flavor.
The same technique is used in other dishes like the lamb with “locro sauce” and “humita” foam or the salmon with scallops, pistachios and a potato-leak sauce.
The level of efficiency achieved with this cooking technique is one of the characteristics of the vanguard cuisine, Liporace notes. It’s a way to reach an “extreme flavor” that surprises and stimulates the senses of the costumers who often find themselves compelled to discuss the food and the menu with the chef, at times making their own suggestions.
“This is a different experience. You don’t come here to exactly fill yourself up, but to look for different flavors and textures”, Liporace said.
Bife de Chorizo Cocido al Vacio
The new technology is also used to make desserts, such as making ice cream in minutes with a special Italian machine — or even in seconds using liquid nitrogen. Among interesting dessert options are the moist chocolate biscuit that comes with a flan ice cream and dulce de leche sauce, or the chocolate hazelnut biscuit with coffee ice cream and vodka granite.
But not everything in this style of cooking is about new technology. Vanguard cuisine also broke down the walls between the worlds of sweet and savory. An example of this is Liporace’s foie gras with raspberry jelly, parmesan cheese foam and an olive sweet, or the Northern bluefin tuna tartar accompanied by eucalyptus sorbet and miso.
The Bar at Moreno Restaurante led by Juan Pablo Acosta also offers interesting cocktails like the “22 creations” made with vodka macerated with ginger, sake, pink grapefruit juice and ginger syrup. The “Troopez” that mixes up gin, mint ,key lime, sugar and orange juice, and the “Lichee Martini”, a blend of vodka, sake, lichee juice and lichee syrup. Microbrewed beers are also provided by Gambrinus brewery.
MORENO RESTAURANTE
Moreno 372
Information and reservations: 54 11 5291 2830 (or 8890 or 5593)
www.morenorestaurante.com
*Fiorella Donayre is a Peruvian lawyer who moved to Buenos Aires in 2004. She completed the professional chef’s program at Mausi Sebess in 2006 and has worked as a pasante at the Caesar Park Hotel’s Agraz restaurante in recoleta and at El Senorio de Sulco in Lima. She can be reached at: fiorella@argentinepost.com
