Mauro Colagreco is an Italian-Argentine chef whose restaurant Mirazur, in Menton, received three Michelin stars in 2019 and the title of best restaurant in the world in the 50 Best ranking. His Ceto table, at the Maybourne Riviera hotel (Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, Alpes-Maritimes), was starred in March.
“A dish can be born from a trip or a product, but also from an olfactory memory. For example, when I worked at Le Grand Véfour in 2005, I was obsessed with the smell of freshly ground coffee that I could smell floating in the air, because there was a coffee roaster near the restaurant. I have an even older memory that comes to me from Argentina, where I was born and where I lived until I was 23 years old. I spent all my summer holidays at my grandmother’s house in Tandil, in an agricultural region. We left with my parents a little before Christmas and, after the holidays, I stayed alone with her, enjoying her house and her large garden surrounded by grain silos. I loved spending time under his fig tree, breathing in the scent of the warming leaves.
“Tears in the Eyes”
Once I became chef of my own restaurant, at Mirazur, I wanted to make a dessert that reproduced the perspiration of the tree. A little randomly, at first, I worked on the fruit: it was greedy but the smell was not there. I understood that it was necessary to turn to the leaves… on which I made lots of inconclusive tests. Their aromatic particles are very volatile, they disappear if you put them in the fridge or if you heat them too much. Eventually, I developed a syrup by infusing the leaves at 54°C for two hours. And there, I found the smell I was looking for. As this smell is deeply linked to summer for me, I wanted to make it a very fresh dish. I transform the infusion into a granita, and serve it with pieces of fig, a panna cotta whose sweet and lactic side compensates for the cold and a jelly made from leaf syrup. For me, it’s a “pre-dessert”, a kind of non-alcoholic Trou Normand that cleanses the palate.
When mom was still alive and dad was still traveling, they came to see me in France and ate at the restaurant. The first time I served them this dish, my father was very moved. He then told me a story that I did not know, that of my grandmother’s fig tree. My father’s family had fled Calabria at the beginning of the last century, hoping that life would be sweeter on the other side of the Atlantic. They got on a boat and arrived in Argentina with nothing, or almost nothing. My father’s aunt had taken care to ship a branch from her Italian fig tree. She planted it when she arrived and when the tree grew she gave a branch to each of her siblings to plant. The tree of my childhood is like me, a mixture of European and South American cultures.
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