Chef Yves Gautier at Greenvalley Restaurant has created an original style of cuisine, extracting and combining the essence of his ingredients.
Picture fermented lemon juice used as a seasoning for two kinds of grilled carrots! The result is a contrast of the lemon’s acidity with the carrots’ softness. This is but one of the options offered by the menu of the Quinta da Serra Hotel’s very own Greenvalley restaurant.
From 2015 onwards this restaurant holds a certificate attesting that between 30 to 60 per cent of the products it uses are of organic origin. It is up to Chef Yves Gautier to get creative.
Options are varied and bound to surprise you, be it in flavour, presentation or creativity: a chickpea Crumble or a codfish soup are just about right to open up your appetite for a Beet Royal served with egg and caramelized chila or an organic Perfect Egg, cooked at a low temperature and served with a la Brás vegetables.
And should you still fancy some more there’s the Milk Custard dessert, probably one of the most conventional dishes you can find in this restaurant.
But all of these are mere examples of the philosophy the chef wants to imprint on the spring and summer menu. ‘We have more vegetable proteins and less animal proteins’, says Chef Yves Gautier.
Dishes exploit new techniques the chef has come to introduce and which have to do with the employment of extracts from products, mostly vegetables, but also fish, for instance. These are techniques which use differences of temperature or fermentation and allow for more flexibility in the crafting of the dish’s final flavour. Food becomes lighter and even more nutritious without losing its flavour. And there is further space for creativity.
Yves Gautier’s visions is for a ‘cuisine with terroir’, following in the same line as wines, which vary in their attributes according to the kind of land grapes are grown in. In this case, terroir is achieved by prioritising regional products, many of which grown in the 345 acres of land that belong to Quinta da Serra, located in an place with a long agricultural tradition at an altitude of 2625 feet.
Quinta da Serra was the first hotel built in Madeira to be certified for its agricultural production and employment of organic produce in the restaurant. The certificate was awarded in 2015 and made this the first hotel in Portugal to receive such a certificate.
