To Our Readers
Spaniards leading a national surge in global business and politics, culture and the arts. As the country prepares for a pivotal election, TIME examines its striking creative burst
TABLE TALKERS: from left, David Trueba, Ana Palacio, Carlos Vela, Trinidad Jiménez, Ferran Adrià.
Spain’s Table Talk
In Madrid, TIME has lunch with five leading Spaniards and asks them to discuss what’s going right — and wrong — with their country. The result: plenty of food for thought
Posted Sunday, Feb. 29, 2004; 15.48GMT
Next month Ferran Adrià — who is Spain’s, and perhaps the world’s, most celebrated chef — will serve up his solution to one of Europe’s most familiar laments: that America’s fast-food culture is smothering the Continent’s culinary traditions. Unlike so many in the anti-McDonald’s lobby, though, Adrià won’t be burning any golden arches or lecturing customers that “slowly” is the only way to prepare or enjoy a meal. The 41-year-old owner and head chef at El Bulli, the Michelin three-star restaurant north of Barcelona, says it’s not enough to dismiss the Big Mac as “crap,” and points out that “the people who complain about junk-food places are the ones who never eat in them.” The right approach — perhaps even the Spanish approach — is to offer an alternative that beats the fast-food chains at their own game. Adrià’s answer to fast food is “Fast Good” — real meals with real flavor that can be eaten in a hurry. In April, he will open his first Fast Good location in central Madrid, and if the idea catches on, he’ll launch more. “We’ll have natural juices, made ourselves, fantastic,” Adrià enthuses, all but squeezing the imaginary passion fruits with his bare hands. “We’ll have salads with the best lettuce, hamburgers of the finest meat.” Adrià is not driven by some high principle to reject a concept that works. “Sure, I know I have to make French fries,” he says. “But I’ll make them in olive oil.”
That attitude — pragmatic, undaunted, more given to enterprise than to theory — united the five leading Spaniards Time invited to lunch last month at the ornate fin de siècle La Terraza del Casino restaurant in the Casino de Madrid. The five — Adrià; Carlos Vela, banker; Ana Palacio, government minister; Trinidad Jiménez, socialist politician and David Trueba, filmmaker — talked passionately and provocatively about their country’s strengths and foibles, its future hopes and its fears. Over chef Paco Roncero’s Adrià-inspired offerings of fried rabbit ears, cotton candy with coconut, tamarind and mint, and caramelized quail egg and truffle ravioli, the participants in the TIME roundtable (or tertúlia) all agreed that Spain has something unique to offer the world — and is offering it with new gusto.
Some felt that the explosion of Spanish pride is closely tied to the reforms outgoing Prime Minister José María Aznar has introduced during his eight years in power; others thought it has occurred in spite of him, and might have been even greater in his absence. But that it’s happening is, as the Spanish say, evidente.
To some degree, of course, it’s a function of a peculiar historic moment: a country that is a mere generation from its emergence into democracy but that can still connect with a rich past. Carlos Vela, 51, chief executive officer of Caja Madrid Banco de Negocios, part of one of Spain’s largest savings banks, used to explain to colleagues in London that Spain is “an old country with young people.” That’s not literally true — Spain has one of Europe’s lowest birth rates and a steadily aging population — but it feels true. “At this moment, Spanish society looks into the future with the confidence that it has the wind in its sails,” says Palacio, 55, Minister of Foreign Affairs in Aznar’s government. In business, politics, film and yes, in cuisine, Spain is undergoing a renewal that gives it the energy of rediscovered youth.
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