Alejandro Cancino is a vegan and elite Argentinian chef
YES, Alejandro, your CV is dazzling. Mugaritz in Spain, Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons in Britain, Bulgari Hotel in Tokyo, Noma in Copenhagen.
And here you are in Brisbane, still only 30, having sealed your commitment to Australia by becoming a co-owner at haute diner Urbane just one month ago.
Never mind all that. What we really want to ask is this, the big-banyan-fruit-in-the-room question: How the hell did an elite chef — and an Argentinian chef, at that — become a vegan?
To his credit, Alejandro Cancino is unfailingly polite in response to the predictable line of interrogation.
“Of course when I’m at the restaurant I have to taste meat, that’s part of my job,” he says. “But when I leave here, I follow a plant-based diet. And when I’m on holidays I eat fruit almost exclusively. I love fruit.”
Fruit, in fact, was one of the reasons the then 18-year-old, back home in Buenos Aires, decided he would one day live in Australia. He saw a TV show on countries with the best lifestyles, and that was that: Australia, and Queensland, had the climate, the people and the food.
Lucky us. Since moving here to take the top job at Urbane two years ago, Cancino has made quite a splash, winning Best New Talent, Australian Gourmet Traveller, 2013; and Chef of the Year, Queensland Good Food Guide, 2013. His food is refined, elegant and contemporary, taking inspiration from produce rather than tricky technique, and native ingredients are a leitmotif. He bakes bread with wattleseed and bunya nuts, and serves a dessert of “native Australian fruit infusion” including quandongs and Davidson plums, believing bush foods to be widely misunderstood.
“I compare them to olives. You have to treat olives in a certain way to make them palatable,” he says. “A lot of native foods are the same.”
And yes, his dietary convictions have influenced his menu. To some degree. There is now (organic, local) tofu on the restaurant’s standard degustation menu, while the two “herbivore” menus — five-course or eight-course — are a strong part of his repertoire.
“To be honest, I was never that crazy about meat,” he says. Then, the week before he left Tokyo to come to Australia he met a Japanese man who was a vegan, and the impressionable chef was surprised by how fit and strong he looked.
“So I started researching the subject, and the more I found out about veganism the more I was convinced it’s the way of the future. To me it makes sense on every level — health, environmental, animal welfare. I’m not fanatical about any one of those reasons, but taken together …”
Not even a little bit of cheese? He craved it initially, he says, but after a few weeks — and encouraged by his Argentinian vegan wife, Paola Moro — the desire for dairy abated. Now, he’s undertaking a Cornell University online course in plant-based nutrition and dreaming of one day opening a vegan restaurant.
“Not for a few years yet, I’ve just become an owner here,” he hastens to add. “But at some point, it will be a natural progression.”
Posh vegan? It all sounds very Gwyneth Paltrow. Still, if anyone can take vegetables to a higher place, it seems Cancino is the man most likely. At next month’s Noosa International Food & Wine Festival, where he is a guest chef, he’s planning to cook a “simple” (by chef standards) vegetarian dish of pickled onions with smoked beurre blanc and macadamia. But then, how could you reject another of his signatures, his version of ceviche mixed with buttermilk (“it gives different layers of acidity”) served with raw scallops and cucumber?
Memo omnivores: grab him while he’s still flirting with the dark side. There’s no such thing as a vegetarian scallop.
Source: The Australian - 26 April 2014
