This dinner was a pop-up by the young talented chef Santiago Lastra Rodriguez at Carousel in London. I was very much looking forward to this dinner so my expectations were very high. What I got was far beyond my expectations. Santiago is taking cooking with all the seriousness united with a lovely playfulness.

All dishes were great, but “Flavours of guacamole” was exceptional, so I wanted to know more about this dish which has seduced my palate and Santiago responded:

“Probably the most popular Mexican side dish around the world is the guacamole, which literally means blended avocado.  I have been living out of my country for 7 years now and always struggled to find a proper avocado. I was making a trial at Relae in the summer of  2014 and they had a dish with white asparagus and pistachio. I was for an hour grating with the microplane this small nuts, and eating the scraps – it is that kind of job that makes you disconnect completely, and for a moment I was home eating avocado. That was a revelation for me – pistachio has a very refined avocado flavor. It is green, fatty, kind of sweet, herbal and creamy, so I decided to make a dish using only pistachio trying to achieve the sensation of eating a guacamole. I started adding elements, like grilled cucumber, beer, chervil and beach coriander seeds, as well as some grilled tomatoes, spring onions, some lemon supreams and chochoyotes made with nixtamalized rye (that taste like fried tortilla) basicly every element that reminds me of my home.