THE SEEDS OF CHANGE Fed by growing environmental awareness as well as a voracious appetite for new flavours and cooking methods, the culinary world’s fascination with plant-based haute cuisine has reached its boiling point. By Patricia Bröhm Illustrations by LINA EKSTRAND Vegetables are the future,” says Moroccan- Spanish chef Zizi Hattab, and anyone who has tried her smoked kohlrabi – to which aguachile adds spicy heat, seaweed adds iodine and roasted peanuts add a delightfully contrasting crunch – will agree that she knows what she’s talking about. In 2020, the former software engineer, who cut her culinary teeth under Massimo Bottura and Andreas Caminada, opened her restaurant, Kle, in Zurich and landed a surprise success. Gourmet-level vegan cuisine had struck a nerve. High-concept sauces, unexpected spices and intricately prepared vegetables are her trademarks, a recipe that earned her a Michelin star in 2022. “We offer something that didn’t exist before, something that our guests obviously appreciate,” she says. And it’s not just the style of her food. It’s also about the values that she 46
stands for: “Sustainability, teamwork and working with local producers.” More chefs around the world, especially among the younger generation, are beginning to think like Hattab. Fine dining in our globalised gastro-landscape is not only becoming more exciting and diverse with each passing year, it is also increasingly imbued with a newfound mindfulness fuelled by recent social and political developments. During the pandemic and a consequent period of restaurant closures, restaurateurs had the opportunity – often for the first time in years – to stop and think about how they want to cook in the future and what their guests really want. Not infrequently, this led to a course correction, if not a dramatic change in concept. Given the high CO 2 emissions in cattle farming, mass husbandry and the overfishing of the oceans, the younger generation, in particular, is now cooking with a different awareness of ethical issues and the finiteness of resources. And they are increasingly orienting themselves towards the kind of cuisine that our grandparents and great-grandparents took for granted. It is a way of cooking that respects seasonality and relies, above all, on the fruits of the earth. American management consulting firm Kearney estimates that the consumption of animal products will decline by around one-third in the next 20 years. A reduced availability of these ingredients will pose a creative challenge for chefs, who will have to find new ways to add richness of flavour, variety of texture and appealing visuals to their dishes. Meat and seafood are already playing a smaller role on menus today than in previous decades, and when they do make an appearance, they are increasingly presented nose-totail, right down to the long-despised offal and bones, which can be used to make flavourful stocks. The same applies to plants, which are often used leaf-to-root, as their most concentrated flavour is found in the stem. “Our current food system is simply not sustainable in many ways,” says Daniel Humm. The celebrated New York chef had been playing his cards close to his chest so that when his restaurant Eleven Madison Park reopened after a pandemic-induced hiatus, he stunned the world by announcing that he would be serving a plant-based menu in the future. It was, to say the least, a bold move for a three-Michelin-star eatery which had already won every other conceivable award in the book. Humm approached his concept with the loftiest of aspirations: “My ambition is that our new creations must match the signature dishes of the past,” he explained at the time. “It’s a huge challenge to create something from plant-based ingredients that can rival our lavender-honey-glazed duck or butter-poached lobster.” The 46-year-old goes to great lengths to live up to his self-imposed goal, employing 60 cooks alone for the evening service. The work has paid off: Michelin awarded Humm’s newfangled cuisine another three stars this October, which can certainly be taken as a milestone when it comes to the critical reception of vegan cooking. N ot every chef is willing to take it quite as far as Humm, but numerous examples show that a collective rethink is beginning to grip the culinary world. Chefs around the globe are increasingly offering a plantbased menu alongside their omnivore menu, or turning to other novel concepts completely. At Hong Kong’s Amber restaurant, for instance, Richard Ekkebus has been doing entirely without dairy for some time now; in New York, the thoroughly classical Jean-Georges Vongerichten expanded his restaurant empire with the vegetarian abcV; and in Copenhagen, Rasmus Kofoed has been cooking without meat since the end of 2021. Not least because he has been awarded three Michelin stars for his restaurant, Geranium, and is currently ranked number one in the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, this gesture has had global ripples. Kofoed, at any rate, is happy with the shift: “Change is something good, we’re leaving our comfort zone, and that’s always a moment to get to know something new.” Alain Passard, a French gastronomy icon and master of the vegetable, has experience with the inspiring effect of radical decisions. The 66-year-old banned red meat from the kitchen of his Paris restaurant L’Arpège in 2001 and focused on vegetables at a time when such a move was still often met with incomprehension. At the time, it was not an ideological decision but rather an emotional 47
