There are sauces that disappear. Others simply hide. One of them—made of offal, salt, and patience—was born more than two thousand years ago in the Roman Mediterranean and today reclaims its place, not as a relic, but as a promise. Garum, dark and dense as a marine secret, has moved from amphorae to Barcelona's haute cuisine without losing its essence. Manuel Vázquez Montalbán already sensed it: it was not history, it was language.
Today, that ancient ferment—dark, saline, precise—is, literally, a click away. Some order it via Glovo. It's not an exaggeration. Borja Ordoño prepares it from his new Ultrapaninos Marín, and sends it in jars that hold the sea and its memory. In his two establishments, garum is not a footnote, it is the main language: lemon, ginger, even oxygarum. A drop that refines like a perfect chord; it doesn't raise its voice, but it transforms the melody.
The recovery did not start from scratch. Paco Pérez and Jordi Vilà were among the first to give it back its voice. The former integrated it without fanfare, as things understood from the root are integrated. In Enoteca, his restaurant at the Hotel Arts, it has appeared in dishes such as pigeon or sea cucumber with beurre blanc. Vilà, for his part, brings it to his domain with the naturalness of someone who cooks from craft and memory. Deep, refined, without nostalgia.
Adrià de Pablo, from Dos Pebrots, recalls something essential: garum was an intuition shared by different cultures. In Japan they call it shotturu; even ketchup, some say, retains something of that idea. On the upper floor of the restaurant, a small laboratory—active since 2010—defies definitions. There, garums of blue fish or ribeye are born… and also vegetable versions that, without renouncing the name, expand the flavor. The result appears in dishes such as pine nut omelet, rice with mushrooms, or Barcino oyster with enogarum.
That same intuition is also cultivated in other kitchens. At Cinc Sentits, Jordi Artal works anchovy and duck with barley koji and fumet for six weeks, in a patient process that transforms the product and refines its flavor. His garums—and other fermented products—rest on a shelf at the entrance of the restaurant, displayed not as experiments, but as if they were books. Also at Hui, in Cambrils, Sergi Palacín displays another liquid library: koji garum, kombucha vinegar, mushroom shoyu. Two different kitchens, two contemporary alchemies that challenge the fifth range.
The phenomenon, of course, is not limited to Barcelona. Some time ago, René Redzepi presented his own vegetable versions—of mushrooms, rice, egg—at Noma, and it was the mushroom one that he first put on sale online, a smoked and accessible edition of his ferment. But it is here, in the Catalan capital, where garum has found fertile ground, among chefs who ferment ideas and a public that no longer seeks fireworks, but depth.