Actually, that should be “bistronomía”, a term coined by El Periódico’s food critic Pau Arenós based on the word “bistroteque” that the French food critic Sebastián Demerold came up with to describe the nouveau bistro of Paris in the Nineties. In Spain, the concept became official at the gastro-gathering Madrid Fusion earlier this year when a whole day was dedicated to establishing it as the country’s hottest trend since foam.
According to lore, the word bistro is a Russian term that means quick and it didn’t become widely used in French until the late 19th century and in English in the early 20th century. It always refers to somewhere small where you can get something to eat and drink, generally of a rustic nature, on the cheap.
As Alan Davidson points out in his tome The Oxford Companion to Food: “The concept of simple inexpensive food served in a French atmosphere has wide appeal and as a result, the use of the term, whether as a description of eating places or of food, had, towards the end of the 20th century, begun to be annexed by more pretentious premises.”
The Spanish equivalent of a bistro is a fonda, from the Arabic word fondouq, which is quite literally a place to trade animals, rest and refuel. A less pretentious place you could not hope to find. And the “bistronomía” cult has also smartly avoided anything too overblown, effectively just putting a name to an upgrade: mid-range, nicely decorated restaurants that serve honest food with a creative flourish.
According to the journalist Michael Booth, to be a neo-bistro you need to be “chef-owned and unfettered by tradition.” As such you have to serve home-style cooking updated with an elegant and modern twist, and possibly a couple of exotic ingredients thrown in. You may well have trained at one of the country’s top restaurants—El Bulli, Martin Berastegui, La Broche or Espai Sucre—but will have decided to gather your new-found techniques and use them to stoke the flames of mother’s hearth.
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