The Barcelona Vázquez Montalbán Convivium is welcoming the festive season with a pre-Christmas dinner created from ingredients sourced from the immediate surrounding area tonight. The menu will be created by Chef Xavier Sala who this year joined the Red km0 project, a group of well-known Spanish chefs from the Terra Madre network committed to sourcing their produce from local growers, breeders and producers.
Throughout Spain there are more than thirty km0 restaurants, of which a dozen are located in the region of Catalonia, which are committed to using ingredients that have traveled less than hundred kilometers from the place of production to the restaurant and to promoting the good, clean and fair producers on their menus.
Red km0 was created in 2009 by Valentí Mongay, cook and leader of the Slow Food Garraf Convivium, also in the province of Barcelona, in order to encourage restaurants to source more food directly from local producers. It also promotes Slow Food Presidia and Ark of Taste products and is growing a culture of change across Spain, with chefs building more intimate relationships with their suppliers.
The Barcelona Convivium is interested in showing that these principles can be applied to their countries largest urban centers too, and what better way than with a festive menu that traditionally would have been based on the region’s best offerings. By awakening an awareness of what is happening just beyond the urban fringe, the participants are reintroducing rural life, ecology and tradition to food in the city.
Tomorrow evening, Chef Sala will join convivium members for their event “Sopar de Nadal Avançat” (pre-Christmas dinner) and serve up a menu based on seasonal and sustainable local ingredients, including broccoli and cauliflower from the restaurant’s kitchen garden and sardines from the Barcelona market, all accompanied by local biodynamic wines.
For more information:
Barcelona Vázquez Montalbán Convivium
[email protected]
Zero Food Miles
http://cocineros.slowfood.es/