Chef Dani Carnero Has a Michelin Star, and His Restaurant Will Serve Home Cooking for About 40 Euros: He'd Rather Understand the Old Cuisine Than Invent a New One

Dani Carnero is a Michelin-starred chef from Málaga. He runs the restaurant Kaleja, as well as La Cosmo, the continuation of the closed La Cosmopolita. He trained alongside Martín Berasategui and Ferran Adrià - names that are synonymous with the cuisine of the future. Yet today he talks most about the cuisine of the past.

His new project is called La Carnera, and it lives inside Kaleja itself. It is a set family menu of home cooking, priced at about 40 euros, to be served once or a few times a month. The goal, Carnero says, is to show that home-cooked food can be eaten in the city center too - not only at grandma's in the village.

Understanding the cuisine, not inventing it

Carnero says he is more interested in understanding the Andalusian cuisine that already exists than in creating new dishes. He mentions the aguadillos, the soupy stews of his region, salmorejo with meat and other old recipes kept by families. Fire, slow-cooked stews and seasonal produce are his language.

He applied the same logic to his own restaurant. He scrapped the short tasting menu at Kaleja and cut the long one from 19 to 12 dishes. Fewer plates, more meaning - a rare decision in a world where the number of courses is often sold as quality.

He is sharpest when he talks about his colleagues. He is worried by restaurants that serve industrially prepared, semi-finished ingredients, and by a kind of cooking where the story of the dish has become more important than the cooking itself. In other words: the menu is written like a novel, and on the plate there's something out of a bag.

He has mixed feelings about Málaga. He is glad the city is growing, but fears the loss of authenticity and too many tourists. For real traditional food he recommends Mesón Mariano. If a Michelin-starred chef has to publicly defend the stews of his region, who will defend tavče gravče, Macedonia's baked beans, in the tourist centers?