Espresso: Inside Michelin-Starred Kol's WILDLY Creative Drinks Menu

0:00What did you, firstly, what were some of the surprising lessons that you took from learning drinks? And actually, were there any lessons you applied from learning about drinks to food? A thousand percent.

0:11Santiago Lastra:There are different things. There are different sides of drinks. Like, obviously, there are the drinks that you source, like the wine and the spirits. There are low ABV drinks, like slightly alcoholic drinks that we source, like kombuchas and kefir. and sparkling low ABV wines for people that don't drink as much alcohol. So that's one side of things. Then you have the actual wine that is a whole world of wine that we also source. So it's more about understanding the region and understanding the soil. That is very important, the soil. And for us, when we source wine, we focus a lot in low intervention.

1:00Santiago Lastra:in terms of not for the wine to be vinegary or funky or anything, but it's more for people to not add chemicals. Because I don't want to import ingredients from Mexico. So I don't want to use avocados or limes or lemons, things that have been sprayed. I've been in markets around the world, and you can see that they get the fruits unripe, like completely rock hard green. And then they spray a chemical in the floor. And then they change color. You know, and then you can see, like, how they turn bright red, you know, or turn yellow. And then that allows them to stay, like, to hold the whole trip until, like, they are here in Europe.

1:51Santiago Lastra:And then that goes down to also when they are growing these ingredients. You know, like when you go to Mexico and you see where they're growing the avocados in Michoacan, they spray, you know, like they spray chemicals with planes, you know, and there's a documentary about it. And the thing is that those chemicals go to schools and they just like they just spray everything. But then it makes the avocado before it grow to already have a different structure for it to hold better. The whole journey. Because if you go to Oaxaca, to a little town, and then you pick an avocado from the tree, it's already kind of black.

2:37Santiago Lastra:That's natural. You're not going to have perfection from nature because they are not here for us. Nature is not here for us. To please us in terms of, okay, this is going to be perfect for the humans. And that's the same with wine. We want to work with people that care about nature. And they work biodynamically and they don't add a lot of chemicals to the bottles or to the wine or to the plants. So that's the other side of things. And then the other side of drinks is the spirits. So we have spirits that are coming from Mexico and mezcal is a big part of it. And with mezcal, I also be learning that it also doesn't have any chemicals.

3:25Santiago Lastra:It's also chemical-free, and it's also additive-free. They don't add any sugar. They don't add anything. And it's coming from a natural plant. So then when you drink mezcal, you're actually drinking something natural with natural sugars. That is very important. So that makes it the healthiest drink in the world. You drink mezcal. Oh, ten of them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, we can have one when you finish your coffee. the thing is that we are i realize more and more drinking more and more mezcal that uh that it actually doesn't really make you feel bad or angry or or i was just in france and we with these we met this like group and they were saying that tequila is out of all the booze you can drink tequila well she was saying tequila is yeah doesn't give you like the down yes exactly i'm assuming mezcal is like another level of that exactly doesn't make you depressed no exactly it doesn't make you depressed and it also doesn't uh give you like a hangover like a hangover or anxiety or rage rage yeah it actually gives you you know and you're like drunk and you're like you know like that doesn't that doesn't happen if i have beers i get like sloppy and i'm like right whereas i just need to do a bit of mezcal exactly mezcal brings you up into uh into a way of uh joyful wow moment and also it opens up conversation it's really good for like these kind of things and uh tequila is a type of mezcal technically okay so tequila is a type of of of agave spirit and um and but the problem the thing about tequila is that tequila regulation it only like you can name tequila something as soon as it has i don't remember it's 49 or 51 percent agave so then the rest of whatever you put on tequila it can be sugar it can be uh sugar it can be straight alcohol it can be anything yeah so then tequila depends on which tequila is gonna be good or bad for you where mezcal is a little bit more controlled and and And if you see that it's 100 % agave, it's actually much better for you.

5:42Santiago Lastra:But then in terms of like what you were asking, sorry. Oh, no, no. It was all over. Yeah, it was all over. No, no. So then we started making cocktails here. Yeah. And this place where we are sitting here used to be a bar, a cocktail bar. And I learned so much about how the bartenders will, and the mixologists, will mix flavors. that is a very, very, very different way of the way that we mix flavors in the kitchen. Because when you're mixing flavors in cocktails, even if you're doing a non-alcoholic cocktail as well, you're mixing liquids and densities and aromas together and you work a lot with bitterness.

6:31Santiago Lastra:So you work with bitterness and aroma and and in in the and the way that it's been balanced it's uh it's a very very uh interesting thing that i learned a lot uh and i add to the to my food now like we do a lot of it's not that we are we create our own perfumes or anything but if you think about the mango sauce and if you get a mango and you blend it uh it smells like mango but then in the moment that you in the moment that you heat it up, it just loses the aroma. Do the mango sauce and then it's like, okay, well, it doesn't really smell like anything anymore. So it's interesting because if you will have these, like let's say mango aroma or floral notes from the mango and you could add it at the end to a butternut squash puree, you will get the sensation of mango.

7:22Santiago Lastra:You know, so it's a very interesting thing to add aromas. even if it's like if you if you drink a bitter of the ones that they add to the to whatever negroni or whatever it is it's undrinkable if you drink lime juice just like that it's undrinkable but it's powerful yes so then and and very aromatic so doing really aromatic powerful condiments is what i learned from the mixologist and that is what we do for every single dish you You apply it to your food now. Yeah. Amazing.