The Road to Flavour

Driving trips across Spain gave Nieves Barragán Mohacho a respect for food from all regions of her homeland. She tells Mark Sansom how she’s spreading the love for her national cuisine at her Mayfair restaurant, Sabor

Nieves Barragán Mohacho was born in Bilbao in 1975, and by the age of seven could prepare a roast chicken on her own. Playing chef in the family kitchen served her well: after shifts in Bilbao restaurants, she moved to the UK at 23 with limited English to take a job at Sloane Square’s Simply Nico. Positions at Gaudi and Fino followed, and she quickly progressed to head chef at the latter. In 2007, Barragán helped launch Barrafina. In 2018, with a Michelin star under her belt, she opened Sabor in Mayfair.

Bilbao to Valencia is a long way in the Spanish summer sun. Some 600km by road, or nine hours’ drive along low-quality 1970s asphalt, it would surely seem even longer in a hatchback with zero air-conditioning.

But throw into that car a pile of chairs, a table, cooking appliances, pots and pans, a handful of cool boxes packed with ingredients, and a family of four, and you have the makings of something that wouldn’t look out of place on Wacky Races. Welcome to the summers of Nieves Barragán Mohacho’s childhood, when her family took the trek south for holidays.

‘My mother wouldn’t leave anything behind,’ says Barragán, sitting on the terrace of her Mayfair restaurant, Sabor. ‘She wanted to know that she had access to all of the things that she knew we liked. I remember my father talking loudly, saying: “We’re going to kill each other. I can’t even see where we’re going.” But it was great fun.’

This annual north-to-south pilgrimage was to be a key influence on Barragán’s cooking philosophy. Many Spanish restaurants in London and across the world stay loyal to a particular region, city or town, but Barragán’s menus have a magpie quality to them that sees almost the entire country represented. Quite often, her dishes will bust into France for ingredients or technique, toying with the traditions Spanish chefs have stuck to for decades.

‘Our holiday would always start in the small town of Santurtzi where I grew up,’ Barragán recalls. ‘Each July we host a sardine festival and everyone goes outside to cook and eat on the street. You grill the fish and put it on a piece of bread, then twist it so the oils fall onto the bread and you eat them one at a time. It’s a very simple but delicious way of eating. Simple food, for me, is the best. I grew up with great food around me but I didn’t realise I wanted to be a chef.’ The passion for food was a slow-burner. Barragán started training to be a nursery teacher, while also doing charity work. ‘I knew that I liked to help people, but it just didn’t give me that buzz. I like to draw, I like to create, but couldn’t put my finger on what I wanted.’

At 23, Barragán agreed to join a friend for a weekend in London. It was her first time abroad, her first time on a plane and she spoke only Basque. ‘I said to myself that I would come to England for one year and try to learn the language. My friend’s boyfriend managed to get me a job with him at Nico Ladenis’s restaurant Simply Nico.

‘Immediately, it clicked. I was like: “OK, so this is what real cooking is about.” It was the respect for ingredients, respect for other people and the accuracy of the dishes. It all fell into place. Learning about the French style of food really opened my eyes and I felt a spark I hadn’t felt before.”

What was the atmosphere like in Ladenis’s kitchen for a young female chef? ‘It was tough, super-tough, and they would try to push me, but the head chef would look after me and make sure I was happy. Before long, people realised that I was pulling my weight, and I wanted to show chef that I could do it better than everyone else.’ Barragán was quickly promoted through the ranks and finished her time there as sous chef. ‘It was mainly the discipline that working at Nico’s taught me,’ she says. ‘The structure and the team ethic really appealed.’

Plain and Simple

The part of the Basque Country that Barragán comes from has produced some legendary restaurants. Within a few hundred kilometres of Bilbao, along the coast of northern Spain, are Mugaritz, Arzak, Elkano, Martín Berasategui, Akelarre, Neura and Azurmendi – all multi-starred temples of gastronomy that are at the height of modernist cuisine.

But this style of avant-garde cooking didn’t ignite Barragán’s passion. ‘Sometimes people say to me: “Nieves, when are you going to open a Basque restaurant?” I tell them that I am Basque, but I don’t only want to cook Basque cuisine. I love the Andalusia, I love the Canaries, I love Mallorca, I love Galicia. I just want to cook Spanish food.’ She has always found herself coming back to the produce. ‘I learnt to love simple ingredients from my mother,’ Barragán reveals. ‘Working with the style
I have developed, where there are only say three or four ingredients on the plate, is very risky, because the ingredients have to work perfectly.’

Barragán found lovers of her style in restaurateurs Sam and Eddie Hart, who recognised her food from their own trips to Spain’s far reaches. They recruited her to open Fino, the excellent Spanish restaurant that operated between 2003 and 2015. ‘We started to get really interesting things imported. Chipirones [small squid], boquerones [pickled anchovies], good prawns and suckling pig.’

After success at Fino, she went on to launch three incarnations of Barrafina on behalf of the Harts, including the Soho branch that wona Michelin star under her stewardship – a first for Spanish cuisine in the UK. ‘All three Barrafinas have different menus. I’m very proud of that – I didn’t want to open a chain,’ Barragán says. She gave each its own identity, featuring ingredient combinations from all over Spain. ‘There was so much to introduce, so much to develop. It was never going to be me
to just copy and paste.’

The opportunity then arose for Barragán to branch out on her own. She received backing from JKS Restaurants group, owned by the Sethi siblings, who run Trishna and Gymkhana. With their help she opened Sabor in 2018, which won a Michelin star that year. Sabor offers two different experiences. Upstairs, her team operates an asador (open grill), cooking rustic Spanish food – suckling pig, paella and retired Galician dairy cow beef. Downstairs, the plum seats are those at the counter where quick-fire, quality tapas is prepared and plated.

A Star Turn

‘I want to make sure that every guest coming away from Sabor is the happiest they can be, saying that they want to come back tomorrow,’ Barragán explains. ‘Having a Michelin star is like “wow”, and I’m pleased to show you don’t need to have a white tablecloth to get one. For me, at one-star level, it’s about amazing service, good- quality food and fun. I’m not working for that star, but it’s great that it’s there.’

Barragán admits it was tough naming her restaurant Sabor, which means ‘flavour’ in Spanish. ‘I just couldn’t work out what to name it. I wanted to call it after the Spanish words for garlic [ajo] and parsley [perejil], the two ingredients I use the most, but I heard what it sounded like in English, and I thought: “No, I can’t call it that. I needto keep it simple.”’ However the name came about, Sabor speaks to Barragán’s philosophy perfectly and articulates exactly what she sends to the table.