Wine & Spirits - Summer 2023 - 43

wealthy second-homers. She recalls telling Mallmann that
she was going to take a sabbatical year, and he said, " Why
don't you open a restaurant? " He lent her the equipment
to get started, and she opened Lucifer with 20 seats on the
patio in her back yard.
It took three years before she began to miss her cosmopolitan
life. Soria approached her parents about helping
her open a restaurant in Montevideo-she was determined
to break with the set menus, the branded condiments on
the tables and the plastic chairs, which were, at the time,
standard in the city. And she also decided to break with the
local expectations when it comes to food.
Mallmann had introduced her to the writing of Alice
Waters, of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, and she responded to
Waters' philosophy of focusing on the provenance of her
ingredients and their inherent beauty. Today, that beauty
is apparent on the plates at Jacinto, without much meat
in sight.
Beef is, by far, Uruguay's largest export, and Soria is a
devoted nationalista in her adopted country. " In Uruguay,
we raise cattle in a nice way, " she tells me. " So people don't
see the impact of the environment. The cattle have a lot of
space; you see the cows, they are happy. "
As a visitor, you can't help but see the cows-often in
a family's yard, or grazing in a ravine off the highway-as
you might see deer grazing along the Taconic Parkway in
New York...except, the cows are tethered. Uruguay has the
most cattle per capita of any country in the world: At 3.45
cows per person, they are far ahead of the next in line, New
Zealand, with 2.1; Argentina and Brazil are tied for third
place with 1.2, according to Rob Cook at beef2live.com.
A lot of tourists come to the restaurant and say, " I'm in
Uruguay, I want a ribeye. " Rather than redirecting the newcomers,
Soria focuses on converting her Uruguayan guests.
" I try to change their minds about vegetables and let them
think that they can be fun. For ages, we have known how
to cook meat. For us, it's very simple: We barbecue. Vegetables,
maybe they need a little more love.
" The soil is very rich and that is something very powerful, "
providing exceptional produce, Soria says, recalling
the fruit dessert she presented when I visited the restaurant
in March. " The peaches are incredible. We have to try to
show everything. "
In Uruguay, that includes wine, and wine in Uruguay
means tannat. Pascual Harriague, a Basque, planted Uruguay's
first tannat vines in 1870 near Salto, a city in the
northwest where he had made his fortune in salt. The
vine arrived in Canelones, near Montevideo and the sea,
in the 1880s. There were European families bringing other
varieties with them, but they found that the grape called
" harriague " consistently performed best. Since the 1970s,
the vine has been recognized as tannat. It is the country's
most widely planted variety, today representing 27 percent
of all the wine grapes planted in Uruguay. And, as if its
name were a synonym for tannins, you might expect that
it would be most at home with beef.
Soria might change your mind, as she managed to
change mine. " I'm a person who enjoys teaching, " she
says, " this goes with this...you learn with each bite. In a
way, I'm the most Uruguayan person, I'm very proud of
what this small country has achieved. I like wine, I think
it's a beautiful product. So, we changed all the wine menu:
Before, we had wine from Argentina; now everything is
from Uruguay. "
That means albariño, a favorite of the descendants of
immigrants from Galicia and a variety that performs particularly
well in the hills close to the Atlantic. Soria pours
it with her salad of asparagus and pears over avocado
cream. And it means tannat aged in cement or amphora,
new styles of wine from young winemakers experimenting
with infusion rather than extraction in their tannat.
She serves these light, savory reds with cauliflower steaks
over a spicy romesco sauce. She chose two fuller, oak-aged
tannats to accompany her comfort food-polenta with a
wild mushroom ragout. They may be rich and round, but
they hold to the elegance of wines from Uruguay's Atlantic
vineyards.
Having been taken aback by her brilliant tannat and
vegetable pairings at Jacinto, I asked Soria to create a
menu for a range of Uruguayan wines. While Soria's recipes
require some advance planning, they are relatively easy
to pull off, especially if you make some of the sauces and
dressings a day before. Her combinations of fresh ingredients
bridged by these sauces and dressings take on an
intriguing logic with the addition of wine.
Summ ER 2023
WINE & SPIR IT S
43
THE DINING ROOm
AT JACINTO IS BRIGHT
AND INFORmAL, WELCOmING
GuESTS TO
ENGAGE WITH CHEF
SORIA'S EQuALLY
BRIGHT PLATES.
http://www.beef2live.com
Wine & Spirits - Summer 2023

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