Paco Morales, Andalusia on a time machine

«For the first time since we opened, we're also cooking tomatoes, potatoes, avocado, corn, pepper, cocoa. These are all ingredients that didn't exist in pre-Colombian Andalusia, the horizon of the menus of the first 5 years. I don't deny that these privations generated moments of creative crisis. But what we've done so far is extraordinary».

How could we argue with Paco Morales, the young man who cooks history? An enfant prodige of the Spanish vanguardia of the early Millennium, over time he wriggled out of liquid nitrogen and spherificationr to return to his childhood neighbourhood and open here his new restaurant. Only eight tables in Cañero, a barrio that until the Fifties had no paved roads and no electricity, in the eastern suburbs of Cordoba, halfway between Malaga and Madrid. He starts to blow on the old cookbooks of Islamic Spain, giving a contemporary appearance to the forgotten dishes of the al-Andalus, the time when the Moors subdued a large part of the peninsula that now includes Spain and Portugal. A very long time, from 711 to 1492, the year when Cristoforo Colombo discovered America, but also when Ferdinand II of Aragon arrived in Granada holding a crucifix, completing the Christian Reconquista.

Noor (“light” in Arabic) is not just a restaurant but a project of culinary archaeology that has no equal in the world. A place where historians, archaeologists, philologists, designers and cooks work uno al lado del otro to compose tasting menus that gradually get closer to our days.

On the 17th of March 2016, first day of opening, Morales debuted with the "Noor Year Zero” menu, an exploration of the Caliphate of Cordoba, a time that profited of the influence of the Omayyad dynasty, the same after which to this day is called the most glorious mosque in Damascus, Syria, which showed extraordinary cultural similes between Middle East and Cordoba. At the time, the Andalusian city was the centre of the empire, a richness proven today by its marvellous inter-religious architecture and by the spectacular flowered courtyards that portray cultural stratifications that have no parallel in Europe.

Paco and his historian Rosa Tovar analysed cookbooks like the one from Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq from Baghdad (10th century) finding many affinities with Andalusian manuscripts from the 13th century. Enough material to create a first menu that included the dietary habits of the time: lots of wheat and legumes, little fish (dried or preserved in salt), poor cuts of meat like heads, feet or entrails. Very little fruits and spices.

With the 2017 menu (Noor year 1) it's the turn of the Kingdoms of Taifa, many small mosaics followed the breaking of the Caliphate of Cordoba. Morales can introduce spices, orange flowers, roses, dates, walnuts, goat's milk. Emblem of the Berber, Arabian, Slavish people who landed in the peninsula in the 11th century. The third menu (Noor year 2), focused on the Almoravidi and Almohadi monarchy, 12th century, now making use of peaches and apples from Persia, apricots from Syria, pastilla and couscous, Andalusian bottarga and garum.

Noor 3 continued on the road of the kingdom of Nasrid, in the Middle Ages that led to the Modern Ear, while Noor 4 celebrated the first Retrospectiva, a moment to think (and improve) the dishes and techniques of the 4 previous menus. And so we arrive at the current menu, Noor year five (the sixth when counting menu zero). Theme: Nuevo Mundo Andalusí, an edible vocabulary that can now become endlessly rich thanks to the first explorations of the conquistadores in America.

«People don't fully get our work», Paco Morales says at the beginning of a fabulous ride of 20 tastings and 13 glasses at the end of November (every detail is in the photos below). Outside oranges explode on the trees of Cordoba and a powerful sun mitigates the unusually cold weather. «We cook beauty. Ideas and concepts of all the dominations that have appeared in our world, with current techniques».

This last aspect is perhaps the most interesting in Noor's approach: culinary archaeology isn't just about giving a new take to antique specialties. The past is always subjected to the present because only this way will the industry grow, gradually acquiring the dignity of a science, just like the other disciplines that have made the history of the West.

Paco Morales knows well how important it is to study but also to doubt the past, first of all because he was born in the business: his father used to run El Asador de Nati in Cordoba. Then, because in 2001, when he was only 20, he was already in Bilbao working as sous chef with Josean Alija, a young man who has always loved escaping paradigms. And in 2002 he was head of creativity and then head chef at Mugaritz in nearby Errenteria, the most avantgarde culinary lab of our time. And then he spent 3 crucial years at Bulli in Roses, Catalonia, the most influential establishment of the past 50 years, we'd say.

This was followed by some small undecided experiences before Noor. Of which we would like to point out another great merit: the brave capacity of joining two worlds that don't communicate as much as they should. The Mediterranean world is one, indeed, but it's as if there was a wall in the sea, separating north from south. With important consequences even on the fine dining of the last century, which was completely deaf to the technical and conceptual secrets of Arab gastronomy (above all, the harmonious fusion of sweet and salty). Noor thus indicates an important two-way road: past and inter-cultural communication as the necessary foundations of every possible innovation.

NUEVO MUNDO ANDALUSÍ, the 2021-22 menu