Paco Morales: mission Andalusia

A globetrotter, a high standing figure in the greatest fine dining congresses, a tireless researcher and a meticulous professional, Paco Morales is still a little-known chef in Italy. Spain, however, has long ago acknowledged his huge talent and his recent participation in Le Strade della Mozzarella gave us the opportunity to approach him in a particularly “sweet” moment in his career.

Trained in his hometown Cordoba, Morales’ career grows rapidly beside very prominent Spanish chefs; from Joseán Martinez Alija to Ferrán Adriá up to the long collaboration with Andoni Luis Aduriz. A journey rich in successes and praises but with a few disappointments too, as with the voluntary closing, in March 2013, of his first entrepreneurial experience, the restaurant named after him in Bocairent (Valencia) which granted him a Michelin star, due to financial problems affecting the hotel in which the restaurant was located. A disappointment that perhaps sped up, though only a little, the great project on which he had already been working for quite some time.

His restless personality and the years of professional training spent in the most illustrious kitchens in Spain have only accentuated his interest for analysing in depth and give value to his cultural roots, acknowledging the fact that the huge culinary tradition that the Arab-Muslim domination (711-1492) left in Andalusia and most of all in Cordoba, the headquarters of the Umayyad caliphate and the moment of highest splendour and elegance in Al-Andaluz, had never been studied in light of fine dining.

So in 2014, after over 14 years spent far away from home, Paco Morales returned to his hometown and built the foundations of Noor, the flagship, the centre of all his culinary activity. In Arabic, Noor means light, “The light – says Morales – which during over seven centuries of coexistence shined with decisive influence on the culture and cuisine of Andalusia". An ambitious and eccentric project starting from his choice of location, in the popular neighbourhood of Cañero, where for over a year now local people have been trying to look behind the darkened windows where cooks and the most varied workers are hard at work.

The first step was opening a research lab where the chef united his team of faithful collaborators. A creative space next to which he has created a study where he develops the culinary offer of the three restaurants he runs: Al Trapo (hotel de las Letras, Madrid) – hotel Torralbenc (Menorca) and Alacena (Rio de Janeiro). Three styles of high and cultured cuisine, very different from each other, where the young chef manages to vent all the experience he has acquired in terms of knowledge, technique and products, with a huge creative freedom.

By the end of the year he will also open restaurant Noor, which will be unique both in terms of offer and setting. The kitchen will overlook the eight tables in the dining room and will try to win the challenge of shaping the mixture of cultures that developed in Andalusia over the centuries inside the dishes, applying this knowledge to modern cuisine. “Up until today – says Morales – there was no restaurant offering andalusí cuisine, a place that would fully draw from the huge heritage of culture that was left, there was no one doing research and development”. Noor represents an evolution towards what’s best in modernity. Cooking cannot become a fossil. Evolution is life, it is light. Only a short time till the opening to the public and Paco is happy.

Noor
Paseo Pablo Ruiz Picasso, 6
Cordoba
Spain
+34 957 101 319