Javier Urondo worked in an advertising studio; in press; in the Cúspide bookstore but he always had a hobby: cooking. And in 2001, in the middle of the crisis, with that impulse that comes from having nothing to lose, she decided to open his restaurant. The process took a little longer than he expected, but finally he was able to open, in the neighborhood of Parque Chacabuco, Urondo, the restaurant that also bears the surname of his father, Paco, a writer, poet and journalist assassinated during the military dictatorship. Javier Urondo is one of those low profile chefs whom everyone respects, his restaurant is a meeting point for people who like to eat well, and a new generation of lovers of cooking and good talks, with a few doses of politics included.
Its cuisine is unclassifiable, on the menu dishes of diverse origins coexist with fermented and intense flavors of Korean cuisine, an honest cuisine of good product. Urondo proposes a cuisine of peculiar, explosive and tasty combinations. Some of the recipes of the dishes that are in the menu, today also inhabit the pages of his first book, “The Imperfect Kitchen” (South American Publisher). But more than a recipe book, this book is a look at the irreverent cuisine of Urondo, a manifesto on trench cuisine that avoids mandates and aims to feed and recover forgotten flavors.
News: Was your dad a good host?
Urondo: My old man liked to bring people together and food is a meeting pointpeople who wouldn’t get together at a table could even soften their differences, there are many families with thousands of quilombos and the only place where they can get together is at a meal, that’s the real trench, where we all commune.
News: What was the kitchen like in the ’60s and ’70s?
Urondo: In the 1960s there was a very strong movement in gastronomy with places like Happening, El Bárbaro, places where many intellectuals of the time met but with the dictatorship everything was punctured, they disappeared. There is a generation that was lost, in literature, in music, the dictatorship made a huge cultural hole. Unfortunately, the whole business changed, it is no longer the field and the production of the land, the business today is to live on rents and those who choose that could put up a brood and it would be the same.
News: How did you start with the kitchen?
Urondo: I learned to cook as a boy, that’s when I began to dare to experiment. Many years later I liked to cook for my friends, that you like to cook is essential to be a cook, you have to like to eat and it has to bother you a little when you see something that for you is not well done.
News: How was Urondo born?
Urondo: I lost my job in 2001, like so many people, and I decided to face what I liked, after all, everything was risky, so I started giving cooking classes to people who lived alone, had purchasing power and didn’t know how to cook an egg. I liked to cook, I wanted to have a store with a beverage outlet and I bought the premises with the idea of having something in the future. Later my nephew who is a sommelier joined, he came with all the information about Palermo and I did not want to know anything about it, I have another idea of a restaurant: it does not matter where it is, people go because there is something they like there.
News: His is one of the few still lifes that survive but also has a large kitchen
Urondo: Only the locals remained from the still lifes, the Galicians died and disappeared. The fight between the restaurants should not be who has the cheapest milanesa or empanada but which one is richer. With this search for it to be cheap, no one makes their milanesas anymore, they buy them from a butcher or a third party who makes them in large quantities. It’s been 40 years since anyone has made the dough for empanadas. Much quality was lost.
News: New trends have appeared in the kitchen in recent years, what do you think about that?
Urondo: At one point we moved the family kitchen and replaced it with a doctor who tells you that you shouldn’t eat raw tortillas because it’s bad. Once I argued with a diner who told me that it was dangerous to serve raw meat and I told her that if that were the case, everyone in the Middle East would have already died from eating raw keppe. The interference of laboratories in gastronomy is also impressive, they sell you the insecticide, the preservative, the additives and then the medicine to repair all the mess they caused you, the doctors are the dealers of the laboratory that downloads you online from television. Now they are with the flours but the problem is not the flours, it is all the added gluten in millions of foods that have generated thousands of celiacs.
News: Is it possible to move forward without jumping on any trend and modernity?
Urondo: I am a toad from another wellI think there are two very clear businesses in the kitchen, in one the cook is his own product, there you have to be known, Narda Lepes could not be unknown because she is what moves her, she can put anything, the business works with her, I don’t have that profile, I like a quieter life and that’s why I have a restaurant like Urondo.
