Recipes with 'copyright'

More than a decade ago, chef Toni Romero first served his steak tartare with bone marrow. Today, the recipe is repeated ---without citation--- in fifty Barcelona restaurants, almost becoming a cliché of contemporary cuisine. A dish that has gone from being an idea to a physical meme: replicated, reinterpreted, reheated, renamed, or served with minimal variations. But, original, there is only one.

Now that the Raval restaurant celebrates thirteen years, it is worth remembering where one of the most imitated icons of local gastronomy came from: a creation from Romero's kitchen that, without inventing either bone marrow or steak tartare, knew how to unite them with such accurate instinct and such powerful execution that whoever tries it hardly forgets it.

But no recipe comes out of nowhere. The chef acknowledges that the idea began to take shape after a visit to Dos Palillos, where they served bone marrow cut horizontally with katsuobushi. He also cites elBulli as a reference, where he himself began to work with bone marrow. And, of course, he points to Fergus Henderson's mythical version at St. John in London, which since 1994 has advocated for the integral use of every part of the animal.

You cannot register a dish or prevent another from copying it

And no, it's not just Romero's bone marrow. There's also La Cova Fumada's bomba. The 7 Portes' pajama. Sergi Arola's bravas. Oriol Rovira's flan with frozen cream. Sacha Hormaechea's lazy tortilla, much imitated and almost never attributed, or Hilario Arbelaitz's cheesecake. All are signature dishes that today circulate disguised, decontextualized, often without a clue as to where they came from. However, the question is not so much whether they can be copied or not. The real question is another: Do we know how to recognize where things come from?

It is precisely this reflection that takes shape in the Suculent dining room, surrounded by cookbooks ---by Joan Roca, by Harold McGee, by classic titles and technical manuals---, where the discourse remains alive through creations with their own vision. "We have had the same line from the beginning, but we have been refining and adapting to the client," says Romero. On the walls, collections of knives and spoons from all over the world give the space an air of a cabinet of curiosities. Details that speak of the journey, but also of the return.

The menu supports this idea with traditional recipes and new additions that reinforce the soul of the project. The white asparagus with tonnato sauce, the shrimp taco, the stuffed morels, the Mexican-inspired ceviche or the rooster comb tripe. All share a deep vision, where memory and craft coexist in a cuisine of broths, patience and respect for the product.

Even the family meal ---the one shared by the restaurant team--- says a lot about the chef. Every Friday there's paella and, during the week, rice with ribs or a chicken mole can appear, preserving the homemade soul within an author's eatery. Because at Suculent, not only are iconic dishes cooked: the diner, the team and, perhaps without saying it, the gastronomic legacy of an entire city are also cared for.