The Mendoza Sun | News digest and event guide for Mendoza, Argentina

Francis Mallmann turns the heat up high—really high. Argentina's star chef explains the secrets of his art to Peter Kaminsky.

Francis Mallmann's position as Latin America's pre-eminent chef depends on more than mere cooking. Most of it can be summed up in one word: style. Everything Mallmann does speaks of elegance as easy as a Fred Astaire soft shoe. Tall, fair-haired, with ice-blue eyes, and often sporting a Sinatra-ish fedora, he cuts a figure that is flamboyant yet somehow never showy. Mallmann is all about the perfect gesture, from the banquettes in his Uruguayan restaurant—knockoffs of a seventeenth-century church pew that caught his eye in Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night—to the handwritten poetry that covers the walls of his dining rooms. So yes, he is a cook, but his sense of taste extends far beyond food on a plate.

Take, for example, a Francis Mallmann fête champêtre in 2002 on the occasion of the announcement of a joint venture between Eric de Rothschild, proprietor of Château Lafite Rothschild, and Nicolas Catena, who is to Argentina's Mendoza wine region what Robert Mondavi is to the Napa Valley.

A group of 30 guests caravanned from town, past terraced vineyards and into the cool uplands. An avenue of poplars—leaves aflame with autumn gold—brought us to a stream. Two good-looking wine stewards in double-breasted blue tunics and white aprons offered Catena's best chardonnay, poured from a half-dozen bottles that lay cooling in the shady brook.

With glasses filled, we strolled back down the poplar promenade. Every hundred yards or so, another pair of smart-looking wine bearers awaited with a refill. As we passed a small farm cottage, a gaucho put on a lariat-twirling exhibition that Baron de Rothschild tried gamely, if inexpertly, to emulate.

We arrived at a clearing surrounded by chestnut trees. There, Mallmann had set up his signature cooking device, an infernillo (literally "little hell"). It consisted of two enormous black iron griddles, and sandwiched between them was a 20-pound salmon encrusted in 40 pounds of coarse salt. Underneath the bottom griddle and on top of the upper one, intense wood fires put out blast furnace levels of heat. Mallmann muscled the fish from the fire, rapped the crust with a mallet, and pulled away chunks of salt. A cloud of briny steam rose from the salmon. He made the operation look as easy as serving a piece of buttered toast, and, mirabile dictu, his white shirt remained unblemished by either fish or salt. In the manner of an archaeologist cleaning dirt from a recently unearthed relic, he brushed aside any stray grains of salt from the skin of the salmon. Meanwhile, he took some skin-on roasted potatoes and flattened them to produce what he calls "smashed potatoes." He covered one side of each squashed potato with tapenade and placed it on the grill to created an olive crust whose aroma infused the potato. He served the fish alongside the potatoes, lightly bathing the salmon in a dressing of olive oil, oregano, lemon juice, and garlic. As promised, the salmon was perfectly delicate.

Mallmann was raised 200 miles south of Mendoza, in the town of Bariloche, the Aspen/Jackson Hole of Argentina. His father, a physicist, had moved the family there when he set up Argentina's atomic energy program (a pursuit he later abandoned in favor of sociology). Like many members of the upper—or at least well-educated—class, young Mallmann attended an Argentine version of an English public school: veddy British, right down to the short pants and blazers.

At age 11 he had an epiphany. "These three lovely Australian girls showed up at my school. They invited me over for tea and put on a Monkees record. We started dancing on top of the table. Then they put on the Grateful Dead, Black Sabbath, Jimi Hendrix. That day my life changed. I got a guitar and started singing in bars. I grew my hair long, stayed out late, lost interest in school. When I was sixteen, my dad signed my emancipados [legal papers that release a child from parental oversight]. I bought a cheap ticket and flew to America."

He spent the next two years in California, going to Grateful Dead concerts, busking on the streets of San Francisco, working in a day-care center, auditing classes at a nearby college, and hanging out in a beautiful house overlooking the ocean in Santa Barbara. It was heavenly, to hear him tell it, but not a way to spend the rest of his life.

Mallmann returned home, where he had an offer from a woman friend in Bariloche who had been to Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. She invited the young man, who was a good home cook, to join her in a restaurant venture. This was in late 1975. Shortly before the restaurant was slated to open, the woman announced that she was going to India for a month.

She didn't come back, but her father, who was the principal backer, liked Francis and was understandably interested in recouping his investment. Nahuel-Malal (a local Native American name meaning Little Hill of the Jaguar) opened, serving a table d'hôte menu. To build a clientele, the dashing young chef would hang out at the ski slopes all day, chatting up people on the lift lines and taking reservations for that evening.

Nahuel-Malal attracted notice, and restaurateurs began seeking out Mallmann for his potential star power. In 1979, a Uruguayan family asked him to open a seaside restaurant in the village of José Ignacio, about 40 miles up the coast from fashionable Punta del Este. At the time, the little village by the lighthouse was an out-of-the-way beach town. Today, thanks largely to the following Mallmann developed there—first at La Posada del Mar and then at his own restaurant, Los Negros—it is still a simple village and yet a chic one, with modest beach houses renting for $50,000 a month in season.

The Uruguayan restaurants were moneymakers. Better still, they were open only three months a year. That left Mallmann another nine months to fulfill his dream of cooking in France. "There were 23 three-star restaurants in the Michelin guide," he said. "I wrote to all of them asking for a stagier [internship], and they all said no." However, the chef at a two-star restaurant, Ledoyen, told the eager Argentine that he would be welcome.

With wife number one in tow (as of this writing there have been three), Mallmann arrived in Amsterdam in 1980 and made his way—by bicycle—to Le Doyenne in Paris. "That first day, I had to hold myself up to keep from falling. I was so impressed and fell so in love with the food, techniques, dress, and organization of classic French dining. The white hats looked so beautiful!"

Over the next half-dozen years, Mallmann ping-ponged between Europe and South America. He worked for a string of the most illustrious chefs in France during one of the country's most gastronomically inventive eras. At L'Archestrate, he served in the frenetic kitchen of one of the prime movers behind nouvelle cuisine, Alain Senderens. "The tension at the hour of service was very strong," Mallmann would write later in his book, La Cocina del Instante. "He [Senderens] allowed no errors, and there was a constant level of screaming."

Mallmann also worked for one of nouvelle's other godfathers, Roger Vergé, at the Moulin des Mougins, in Provence. He wrote of Vergé, "I learned cooking from him, but more than that I learned that a calm atmosphere in the back of the house establishes an attitude that arrives at the table with better service. This is a truth for any kitchen."

It was while he was with Vergé that another life-changing event occurred: Mallmann's wife, Karina, became pregnant. "I knew I would need better and steadier money," he said. "Windows on the World was opening in New York and looking for a chef. I wrote to Joe Baum [who got the contract to design and manage Windows], and he asked me to come see him. We were set for the move to America."

Fortuitously, just as Mallmann was about to leave, a telegram marked urgent arrived from a banker in Buenos Aires. The chef for a big nightclub/restaurant project had just been canned: Would he step in and take the position? The money was good at Club Hippopotamo. It quickly became the glam hangout in B.A., and Mallmann both contributed to and basked in the glow of celebrity heat. The work, however, did not mesh with his aesthetic, and in 1981 he quit. More important for his culinary development, Mallmann had also tired of being a French chef in a South American country. He began to move away from nouvelle cuisine and, as he said, "its decorative sauces that were perfected by a very few and poorly copied by thousands of chefs, including myself. I got very bored of all this three-star thing. It was my church for so many years. All those towers and decorations and too many things on a plate pushed me to go brutal and beastly in my cooking."

He opened a small cooking school. It was an immediate success, in part because Mallmann now starred on Argentina's most popular televised cooking show. That was fun, but after four years he was again restive: He wanted his own restaurant. One day, an acquaintance approached Mallmann with an offer. How much money would it take, the potential backer asked, to open a restaurant? Francis said $50,000. Two days later, the man called and asked Francis to come sign the papers. "So I go to his house. On the desk was a brown envelope full of money and, unobtrusively, a pistol. He said, 'Well, you know I like you very much, but I don't want to be your partner because I don't know the restaurant business. I want to help you, though. Take the money and start your restaurant. Think about it. Whatever you say, you must do. This is a debt—if you don't pay, your son will.'"

Mallmann rolled the dice and took the money. His new restaurant—no sign, no name—shared a building with the fly-fishing shop of Jorge Donovan, the greatest angler of his generation. With its evolving "Nuevo Andean" gastronomy, Mallmann's no-name restaurant surpassed his expectations. He was soon off the hook with his backer. Within a few years, he was able to relocate and open his dream restaurant, Patagonia. He was now the brightest star on the South American cooking scene. As a chef, he had found his own voice with his mud ovens that reached a thousand degrees and his ranks of infernillos. "Fire had become the most important thing," he said. "I realized that at extremely high temperatures, if you have a piece of meat that is not too big, you can cook incredible things in a very short time. The timing is quite pinpoint."

A corollary to his fast, high-heat method was a nearly complete abandonment of the long, slow-cooked sauces of haute cuisine as canonized by Careme and Escoffier. In fact, in the ten years I have known Francis, I don't believe I have ever seen a stockpot in his kitchen—although he has told me that he uses stocks for soups. In place of sauces, he often dresses his food with olive oil and herb mixtures, with vinegar or lemon juice added for brightness. With beef, he serves a version of a classic Patagonian chimichurri with homegrown herbs in place of the dried herbs that gauchos carry out on the pampas. For pork, he douses the caramelized medallions with his version of the Sicilian salmoriglio—a mixture of lemon juice, olive oil, lemon peel, oregano, and honey. And, then, of course, there's the herbal lemon and garlic dressing that he used on the salmon at the De Rothschild picnic. (I have used the same recipe on East Coast striped bass and New Orleans redfish.)

One of his earliest and greatest high-heat hits was Fish in an Iron Box, for which he employs a deep-sided rectangular iron pan, one much favored by Brazilian cowpunchers. The box and lid are placed in a superhot oven, and when the box is well heated, Mallmann tosses in thick wedges of squash, potato, or whatever vegetable looks good that day. He then puts the heated lid on the box and returns it to the oven. After just a few minutes, the vegetables achieve a light char on the outside and a subtle softness within. He lays a fish fillet on top of the vegetables, seasons it, and adds a splash of olive oil and fresh-cut basil. The box is then carried to the table, with the lid on, and in the time it takes to get from the kitchen to the customer, the fish is cooked.

Although fast and simple cooking was at the heart of Mallmann's evolving style, it was about more than just high heat. It was also the waiters, waitresses, and often kitchen crew as young and beautiful as models. It was the handcrafted steak knives with wide shafts and handles made of huayacan (a hardwood that grows on the slopes of Mount Tupungato, in Mendoza) and, alongside such gaucho rusticity, the place mats and napkins from the artisanal looms of Le Jacquard Français in Paris—starched white damask with an interwoven Chinese pattern.

European refinement and new-world gutsiness proved to be a winning combination. Mallmann seemed set for the long term. But after ten years, his handshake lease became one month's notice to vacate or fork over a huge amount of cash. Rather than meet what he felt were outrageous financial demands, he closed up shop and moved to a mansion in the raffishly seedy waterfront neighborhood of La Boca. They say the tango was born there, invented by the rowdy stevedores, knife-wielding sailors, and dime-a-dance girls of the dockside community.

Patagonia Sur, as the restaurant is called, was slow to catch on, in part because of the economic pall cast by the financial crisis and hyperinflation in Argentina in the late 1990s. Or maybe it was the reluctance of the well-off to go slumming in La Boca. By this time, however, Mallmann's stature had outgrown the need for him to have a hot Buenos Aires restaurant. He merely needed a presence.

Among others, President Carlos Menem found the place convenient to bring his dining partners for a supper well out of the public's (and, more important, his wife's) eye. Both Menem and current president Néstor Kirschner turned to the illustrious chef when an important visitor came to Argentina, flying him in from wherever he happened to be so that he could prepare a dinner for heads of state. At last year's economic summit in Mar de Plata, Mallmann calculated that his big old steak and crispy potato basket would fit nicely into a culinary canon as cultivatedly lowbrow as that of George W. Bush. Mallmann's adherence to the Argentine custom of dining late (normally no earlier than 10:30 p.m.) reportedly discomfited the early-to-bed president, but Mallmann swears that it wasn't a political gesture.

Through most of the years of financial crisis, Bodega Escorihuela's Francis Mallmann 1884—his joint venture in Mendoza with Nicolas Catena—remained a de rigueur stop for serious wine tourists, while Los Negros continued to hold its own in Uruguay. Mallmann was able to cast around for new opportunities, testing the waters with consulting ventures in the United States and Europe. But the South American economic picture had improved so much by 2005 that Mallmann, who liked splitting his time between the United States, Europe, and Latin America, could no longer afford to spend so much time away from his restaurants and catering businesses.

Last year, he opened a boutique hotel about ten miles inland from Los Negros, in the sleepy town of Garzón. Its five bedrooms look out on a grassy courtyard. His Smiles of a Summer Night banquettes, painted pale green with a black trim, lend an almost surreal René Magritte touch to the setting. The voice of Cecilia Bartoli or Norah Jones on the sound system, or even T. S. Eliot (Mallmann is the biggest poetry fan I've ever met), often competes with the lowing of cows and the cry of roosters on the other side of the fence. If you drive from Garzón to the sea, you can bet that any new car you encounter contains visitors coming or going from a meal and maybe a night at Mallmann's.

Late one night last winter, I joined Mallmann in the courtyard of his Hotel Garzón. We had just come from a blowout birthday party at Los Negros. A theatrical designer could not have arranged the mise-en-scène for the festivities more dramatically. A full moon hung directly over the nearby lighthouse. In the open-air kitchen, Mallmann's second-in-command, Lucía Soria, ordered the cooks around with drillmaster brio. Within the huge ovens, behind immense cast-iron doors, salt-mounded salmon and similarly encrusted whole fillets of beef evoked a Viking funeral pyre. You could feel the heat from 30 feet away. The salt crust, two inches thick, cracked like distant rifle fire. Hell's own workshop, I thought.

Back at Garzón, it was pleasantly cool, as it often is even in midsummer. A fire snapped, crackled, and popped peacefully in a raised wrought iron basket that Mallmann had designed for such evenings. We opened a 1990 tannat, made from the full-bodied grape of the same name and much favored in Uruguay. The kitchen crew whipped up a light supper of caramelized sweetbreads with a squeeze of lemon, home-baked bread, and charred tomatoes. This last dish, if you can call something so simple a dish, was nothing more than cherry tomatoes cooked in a very hot pan. Just as the tomatoes start to burn, you pour on some olive oil, which immediately catches fire. When the supernova calms down, the result is the most concentrated essence of tomato—sweet and savory at the same time, a perfect foil to the meaty flavors of the sweetbreads. Afterward, we sipped Armagnac, smoked cigars (Romeo y Julieta Cedros are his favorite), and gazed up at the stars of the Southern Cross.

Francis smiled and then laughed as he blew a smoke ring and watched it rise. An idea had amused him.

"What?" I asked.

"I was just thinking. Maybe someday I will give this up and become the chevalier servant of a lovely lady. I would pick out flowers for the vase on her writing desk and a scarf for her to wear to lunch. I would make sure there were good books to read and beautiful music. I wouldn't have to worry about all these restaurants and presidents. I would just have to choose nice things. Yes, I would like that very much."

For those few moments, at least, I believe it was a serious fantasy.

Re-print of the article "Maestro On Fire" written by Peter Kaminsky for Conde Nast Traveler.
Photos by Conde Nast Traveler.

The original article is available at:

http://www.concierge.com/cntraveler/articles/10482