Jon Giraldo and Jaime Lieberman are a Colombian and a Mexican with a clear objective: to demonstrate that gastronomy is art. These two chefs based in Barcelona got a place among the finest culinary offerings of the city with Spoonik, an underground restaurant at their detached house located in Lesseps square. There they offered unique experiences for all the senses with live cooking demonstrations combined with other arts such as opera.
In 2015, they moved to a conventional premise in the district of Sarria-Sant Gervasi and turned Spoonik into a restaurant opened to all public. While maintaining their philosophy of offering experiences beyond the purely gastronomic, in Spoonik Jon and Jaime have developed a concept of avant–garde cuisine characterized by mixing the Mediterranean influence and their Latin American origins.
The proposal of Spoonik Restaurant is a unique surprising tasting menu, served in eight times and paired with four options, during which both chefs offer a unique, personalized and close customer treatment. Jon and Jaime present each dish to diners, explaining its history, ingredients and cooking, getting them understand and appreciate even more exquisiteness, talent and creativity behind each recipe.
On their first anniversary as a restaurant, we chatted with Jon Giraldo and Jaime Lieberman about the Spoonik concept, gastronomic experiences and the relationship between cooking and art.
HORSE: You started to be known in Barcelona thanks to your clandestine restaurant. What would you say is the best and the worst of offering this type of dining experiences at home?
JON AND JAIME: The best is the warmth you get the diner wrapped in. The worst is that you do not sleep because it is your home. Opening our privacy to people allowed us to break the concept, but we did not take well ending in the early morning. People understood that, as it was a house, the after-dinner talk could last forever, so we lost our personal life. We ended at 4:30/5 in the morning, the supplier came at 9 am and the employees at 12 am to start getting ready. If you do this five days a week, in 5 days you sleep 20 hours. That is the worst part, the rest is wonderful, it is very magical.
H: Are you still doing dinners from time to time?
J & J: We do private events for friends, or friends of friends, which is how we started. But of course, our friends are many now.
H: In Spoonik Restaurant, art and gastronomy go hand in hand, since an evening at your restaurant includes live artistic performances and projections. Does this idea born as a result of your artistic concerns or did you see it more as a way to offer a different proposal?
J & J: Spoonik born alone, we wanted to say: enough that gastronomy is treated as an element different from art. Gastronomy is an art, is how to benefit from the rest of the arts for gastronomy to be considered an art. We are not doing a restaurant where there is art, but a performance of integrated arts, which is the difference. This is what Spoonik is.
H: In your avant-garde cuisine, we can see your Latin American roots fused with Mediterranean influences. Which of the two you are more into?
J & J: We like ancestry, whether from the Mediterranean, Latin America or China. Because we think that Spoonik is actually an experience that goes beyond the culinary, that is why culinary will be an element (important, but one element more) of all our performance. Of course, it began with Latin America that is our origin and with Catalonia because it is where we are and also because we work with slow food.
H: Local and Km0 products are present in your cuisine. Do you think sustainability is the current big trend in food?
J & J: Fundamental. It has to stop to be seen as a trend, it is just what it should and must be: respecting the planet. On this basis, the new trend actually goes through fermentation, the primeval, smoked, maceration, desiccation, and the ancestral and tradition.
H: Also, you opened one yogurt shop in Barcelona, Wondays. Was that your way to reach all audiences?
J & J: We opened Wondays and it was nice while it lasted, but we fail in the location because it was a very small space. We like the natural food and Wondays product works very well because it is a natural yogurt, which help us for everything to go well in our digestion. Everything was done at home with a loving and special care, so for it not to be the typical cut fruit, we looked for be caring with the consumer. However, we have left it behind at this time, it is hibernating. We will take advantage of the premise in another world that also has to do with the hostelry and Wondays will reopen at some point in our lives because we have a lot of affection for it. For the next summer season there will be surprises.
H: When will the Michelin star arrive?
J & J: When the comet Halley returns (laughs). That’s one thing we cannot know, what is clear is that we work 20 people every day, our kitchens are open over 16 hours a day, trying to reach quality standards that we presume are some of the criteria which the Guide seeks. However, what we will not do is give up our principles, which go through an experience far beyond the culinary. If the Guide opens to value these experiences we hope it for this year, but we do not know if the guide will pay attention to it.
H: How do you think it will be Spoonik’ s evolution?
J & J: The Spoonik experience, if it is in our hands, is going to be more complex. Every time there will be more space for arts, but also we will give more importance to the culinary exactitude. Everything has to go hand in hand and everything must have a consequence.
Lately the media has repeated so much that “chefs are the new rock stars”. After seeing what Jon and Jaime offer in Spoonik Restaurant, we could say that chefs are the artists of the moment: they transform memories and references in spectacular dishes both visually and gastronomically, tell consistent stories through them and integrate a number of other arts for the experience to be complete and to be enjoyed with all senses. From Horse Magazine we cannot wait to see the evolution of this restaurant, which promises to surprise increasingly both in a culinary and artistic level.
Images provided by the restaurant