KIKO MOYA: ALMOND MILK CLOUD, FOAMY ALMOND BLOSSOM, TURRÓN CREAM
Cocentaina (Alicante)
Chef-co-proprietor, L’Escaleta
Dish: Almond milk cloud, foam, almond blossom and turrón cream / Chilled almond milk
When you walk up the dry slopes of Montcabrer, a rocky peak to the north of Cocentaina, the sense of nature’s power grows as you leave behind the tamed valley below. At L’Escaleta, a family-owned restaurant reached by a small country road running up the mountain’s lower slopes, Kiko Moya crafts a rolling menu balancing avant-garde experiment with childhood memories, rural ways of life and Alicante’s Mediterranean flavours. Surprising forays into world cooking and witty plays on contemporary culture make appearances, but these never remove from nature’s power and its beauty, explored in the kitchen as if with a zoom lens capturing details of landscape and food that had escaped the public eye. Signature details, like whipped and herb-seasoned Ibérico pork lard for spreading over home-baked bread remain on the seasonal menus, yet nothing is ever exactly the same when you return here: one waits to see the new details set against the continuities. The terruño where Kiko cooks shares key aspects with Altamiras’s terroir: one of these is physical, with dryland mountain slopes and inspiring peaks above, then, below, a valley, sometimes but not always lush. What, then is distinctive here in the alicantino sierras? On the one hand Kiko’s technique of shimmering precision, honed with Ferran Adrià at El Bullí, with the Roca family at Celler Can Roca and at Talaia, yet also exploring the magic of popular cookery. On the other there is his personality, carrying an instinctive feel for food as culture and community. He calls it cocina de entorno, cookery reflecting the local environment in its widest meaning, referring to immersion in the landscape and local culture, but also – modestly and rarely mentioned – to his extended family’s long-standing commitment to the risks of running a Michelin-starred restaurant far from the crowds on the coast. I discussed Altamiras’s ideas with Kiko for some time before he chose his dish, a chilled almond milk through which he pays homage to the almond groves found on Montcabrer’s lower slopes. His interpretation combines an airy ice, a foam, pickled almond blossom and a rich turrón cream to stunningly modern visual effect, but it also references the landscape as he’s known it since childhood, for example, the pous de neu, snow wells where village people harvested soft snow since the early modern period. There are autobiographical links here, too, firstly to his father’s hand-churned ices and, secondly, to the imagery of Miguel Hernández, the great twentieth-century poet, whose work was rooted in the mesmerising landscape of rural Alicante, his home province. Like the rest of Kiko’s cookery, the dish is understated, but makes the value of humble ingredients unmissable. It’s one of the few dishes in the book matched with a wine by the restaurant’s sommelier, wine-maker Alberto Redrado, Kiko’s cousin. He chose to escape regional connections and make a cross-frontier sensorial pairing with a German wine offering “a magic balance between body and refinement, sugar and acidity.”