The chef of a Barcelona restaurant renowned for its thoughtful updates to traditional Catalan food, an award-winning food critic and blogger, offers deeply thoughtful meditations on how dishes have transformed over time. Evolution and adaptation are the center of Borja Sierra’s cooking at Granja Elena, a restaurant which specializes in a mix of traditional Catalan fare and modest innovations which reflect the way that local food has also evolved. Given that the restaurant began as a family-run coffee bar and grocery, it seems a fitting emphasis. Recipes are uncommonly discursive, with meditations on ingredients and cooking methods and a good deal of poetic flair as the authors muse on the first person to stuff pasta or the connection between pig trotters and the earth. The innovations, when they occur, are rarely matters of technical virtuosity. Special equipment has almost no place in the kitchen of Granja Elena, and presentations are simple and straightforward. The book is, alas, so far only available in Spanish. Paperback. Color photographs throughout. In Spanish
