Coure is a restaurant with an extensive bar. As Friday approaches, lockdowns and restrictions aside, there are elbows at the restaurant bar to gain space. This request has a name, Albert Ventura, but above all it has principles. The chef, originally from Segarra and having passed through Girona, has contributed to making Pasaje Marimon a gastronomic pilgrimage route alongside Hisop and, until recently, alongside Xavier Pellicer's Céleri, the latter two with a more than deserved Michelin star.
It would have been three if he had not rejected three times the conditions that the gentlemen of Michelin wanted to impose on Albert Ventura. For a matter of principles and loyalty to the model that has made him successful, Albert Ventura did not accept and did not get a star. If it hadn't been for the eccentricity that the French brand once showed in the adaptations of the establishments, we would have had a Pasaje Marimon with three Michelin stars. Recently, in this same section, we talked about Xavier Pellicer's new restaurant. For a time, less than a street, a passage, in Barcelona, three of the best chefs that the Catalan capital has today were concentrated: Hisop's chef, Oriol Ivern, Xavier Pellicer, and Albert Ventura.
But, today, let's stick with Albert Ventura. Behind the Coure project is the unease of a unique and unrepeatable character. He was going to be a lawyer; in fact, when you talk to him, you realize that his way of expressing opinions and chaining concepts is more like that of a consecrated criminal lawyer than a kitchen chef. That young law student at the University of Girona, he ended up in the city of Onyar as he could have ended up in Segre, he had to pay for his studies by working in the kitchen of a restaurant. It was not just any restaurant; we are talking about the world elite, El Celler de Can Roca. He also worked in other great restaurants such as Ca l'Isidre or Les petxines with Paco Torreblanca. Among pans, fryers, stoves, and sauces, the bug bit him. And that bug led him to abandon the idea of one day occupying an office or an administrative position to spend hours and hours doing what he discovered as a vocation.
Albert Ventura's cuisine is like him. Without artifice but with principles. Direct to the palate. Substance without accidents.
We start with their low-temperature eggplant. Finding the point in the eggplant that melts in your mouth but maintains all the flavor and consistency is not easy. Or their Russian salad, soft, not heavy at all, with its own flavor and delicate smoky aroma, one of the few that maintain an acceptable level in a tapas capital like Barcelona. One day we will talk about the dark underworld hidden under the concept of tapas and pinchos in Barcelona, but today let's focus on success.
We also talked about their sweetbreads in this section a few months ago. They compete with the sweetbreads served at Alkimia by their great friend Jordi Vilà, a comrade in arms at the mythical Abrevadero, in the Barcelona pool position.
Among meats, their tartare stands out. It is not easy to make a good tartare. Tartare is always demanding because beyond the spices, you have to know how to find the type of cut and its thickness, factors that determine its juiciness. Coure's beef tartare is creamy, very creamy, I can assure you. As are their cannelloni with pularda and their fricandó.
Ventura masters the art of cooking like no one else, with an expression that is neither minimalist nor austere, but he makes art with his simplicity. A dentex or a sea bass cooked by him always has the exact cooking point that is so hard to find on many of our tables. A perfect texture and a unique flavor. Gone are those oily fish, oil and vinegar overflowing, imitating the Basques, which have become popular in our home and end up killing the taste of the sea.
Ventura masters the art of cooking like no one else, with an expression that is neither minimalist nor austere, but he makes art with his simplicityIf you are lucky enough to taste a Coure rice, take advantage. The number one without a doubt is the grouper rice. It is not à la carte because there are no groupers every day. But if one day you hit the lottery and there is grouper at Coure, don't be mistaken. I assure you it has a unique flavor that takes us away from all the plague of rices made with industrial seafood stock. Nowadays you keep changing restaurants and you keep detecting the same base in each rice dish.Perhaps one day a public crusade will have to be launched to demand that restaurants of a certain category, or at least those that boast of being so, make their own broth and stop buying the damned concentrated broth.
Like everything, Coure is not perfect and for a long time the wine list contrasted with the excellence of the cuisine. In this case, we can now say that this imbalance is a thing of the past thanks to Cristina Bonetti, a high-level sommelier who knows Catalan DOs like no one else and who has brought the restaurant's wine list up to date, not to say to the forefront. If good cuisine and a good wine list are complemented by efficient and attentive service, today in Barcelona you have it all.
The restaurant team includes Cristina Bonetti, a high-level sommelier who knows Catalan DOsIf today Catalan cuisine is recovering dishes such as cod fritters, the taste for well-made croquettes or l'esqueixada, it is thanks to people like Albert Ventura, a man faithful to principles from which he has never moved.
There are many types of cuisine and we know that the respectable public decides at all times what they like, but Albert Ventura demonstrates every day that there is no artifice or frills to make high-quality cuisine, based on the product and new techniques that make our gastronomy evolve.
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