When you talk to him it is as if you were walking together along a mountain path, you almost feel the scents of the forest, of the herbs, Artemisia, Gentian, Arnica, Asperula, Achillea, and you seem to hear the cry of the Eagle, the bellowing of the deer or the ranting of the roe deer. Because he and the mountain are one, there is no separation and how he tells you, in an engaging and emotional way, nobody tells you. Why Agostino Buillas, 58 years old, Chef and patron of the refined Café Quinson in Morgex in Val d'Aosta once an obligatory stop on the via delle Gallie, Michelin star and international audiences, when they remember their childhood in the mountains, their eyes still shine.
Those walks with the great-grandmother, born at the end of the 800th century, with whom during the spring and summer days he collected wild herbs in the meadows to prepare soups, omelettes, are stamped in gold letters in his memory, it is not only the memory of affections, of a world that was, but also of the magic of the mountains where time dissolves in the discovery of many worlds, where a boy's imagination crosses between reality and popular beliefs. An enchanted mountain, but not à la Thomas Mann, more adherent instead to the thought of Reinhold Messner "When I look at the mountains I have the feelings of the mountains inside me: I feel them, like Beethoven who heard sounds in his head when he was deaf and composed the Ninth symphony. The rocks, the walls and the climbs are a work of art”.
The young Agostino became aware of the mountain and its fruits very early on, his parents were farmers and his father and mother were also cheese makers at the village dairy. So the scents of wild herbs, the flavors of the vegetable gardens and the aromas of the cheeses have forged him from an early age to quality. The family was therefore the school of life for him. If you ask him how he discovered a taste for cooking, he replies: "Mine was not a discovery of cooking, I was born in it: my parents worked in the fields and I cooked my meals for lunch and as a snack with supervision of my great-grandmother” who handed down such ancient flavors to him”.
Working in the kitchen came to him spontaneously. He found himself working in the family now in the kitchen now in the dining room, in the hotel run by his sister and his brother-in-law. To tell the truth, the idea of attending a hotel management institute had crossed his mind at one point. “But having already worked for a year in the kitchen – recalls Buillas – my brother-in-law, a chef and much older than me at the time, advised me to choose something else, as I already had the culinary foundations. It must also be said that in those years theoretical skills were not taken into great consideration, which today instead have great value, and one looked more at practical skills”.
And between the teachings of his great-grandmother and those of his brother-in-law Chef, Agostino had accumulated a lot of skill. He still remembers the first dish that was cooked for him, his delight. Not a spaghetti or two fried eggs, let alone beginner stuff! No, he threw himself on something much more complex, a sautéed kidney. "Stupendous! – He still judges it today with the expert eyes of a starred chef – it looked like what my mother prepared for me as a gift ”.
So no school but a lot of practice with the brother-in-law, "chef who came from the" mess-up" where you had to "steal" everything to learn. He taught me the basics, the real ones that are no longer done today, such as recognizing cuts of meat, both visibly and organoleptically, and the value of the great quality of raw materials, on which one must never compromise ”
Another important "school of life" was the one with Rolando Morandin for pastry and bread making. A sacred monster of pastry, that in Saint Vincent he had a laboratory from which many pastry chefs passed and then made their fortune.
To get an idea of its importance in the world of leavened products, it suffices to say that it gave its name to the technique of maintaining mother yeast in water, known by insiders as "Morandin method". Buillas owes him the acquired ability "in recognizing the various types of flour and butter and sourdough ... as was done in the past, without resorting to the subterfuges so fashionable today".
In reality, a real turning point in his life came from his passion for wine. She decides to attend a Sommelier course and he likes it so much that he throws himself headlong until he qualifies as the first sommelier in Italy in 1995. "The experience as a sommelier - he admits today - has allowed me, by doing international competitions, to appreciate and evaluate different styles of cooking".
In short, if Agostino Buillas is what he is today, he must, self-taught, alone and solely to his great love for nature and the mountains a love so strong as to push him to continually rack his brain over how to cook a product to the point of enhancing its mountain purity to the point of emphasizing its most genuine entity. Because Buillas feels like the high priest of that world and his activity is all aimed at making people understand the quality of the products used and his cooking line with respectful cooking of the raw material.
And when it is described, this love for the land and for its protagonists is evidently perceptible as when you look at a painting by Segantini: "I take great pleasure in cooking, in making new dishes, in interpreting the products of my land, of those farmers and breeders who do me the honor of providing me with the fruit of their work. In the kitchen of my restaurant I worked alone for many years, without having a comparison except with colleagues from other activities; I had the weight of the whole kitchen on my shoulders, but I also reaped the relative satisfactions”.
Here comes the Montagnard who admits to being stubborn and stubborn but who immediately after glosses this first admission with "but in my opinion these are good qualities for a chef, they help you keep your line of thought and carry on with your project ”.
It is no coincidence that his points of reference are "Marc Veyrat or a Norbert Niederkofler, people who live in the mountains like me and who are attentive to the territory and love to use spontaneous, wild herbs, flowers, and above all local products".
This long work of study, improvement, refinement in the field has finally materialised in the Café Quinson, which to define as a restaurant is an understatement: it's more of a literary salon à la Proust, a philosophy of thought, a place where one goes in search of lost time but with the proactiveness of trying new experiences.
Luigi Veronelli landed there in one of his gastronomic wanderings and awarded it a very prestigious "Sun" in these terms: "Has it ever happened to you, entering a restaurant, to feel taken back in time? At Morgex's Café Quinson this feeling is strong and very pleasant. Everything smacks of antiquity: the period of construction of the building dates back to the 1600s and the traces are still clearly visible in the stone vaults of the beautiful cellar or in the wooden cladding of the walls and ceilings…Agostino Buillas, a long-experienced chef, reworks local dishes made with a skilful hand and with constant creative research, collected in a menu that varies every day, depending on the market and the season ... the bread deserves special mention, homemade every day and enriched with many flavors: herbs, nuts, coriander and bread sticks with mountain butter" .
But Veronelli didn't just taste Buillas' dishes and write about them. He also wanted an encore of his ravioli, the Chef recalls today with legitimate satisfaction.
The dish "Ravioli made from organic durum wheat semolina pasta with eggs stuffed with veal sweetbreads and trout caviar" is on the menu and it is worth hearing the meaning from Buillas's story: "First of all, I choose a durum wheat semolina Senator Cappelli, organic, worked with two parts of yolk and one of whole egg to obtain a properly porous paste, which can be spread with a thin and resistant blade; therefore the sweetbreads which are the source of inspiration for this dish as I love them very much, are part of my gustatory experience; I use them raw, cut thin, to stuff pasta and to cook with them.
The trout roe is the reinforcement element for the sweetbread as I love to combine elements of different origins, in this case meat and fish: once cooked, one maintains its crunchiness and the other becomes a real explosion of flavor within the same bite.
Then the butter, which takes me back to my childhood, but the good butter, still made with outcrop cream (not with whey as it is practically always today); I clarify it, following the instructions left to me first by my great-grandmother and then by my mother, and I use it to complete the recipe, enriching it with the scent of wild thyme, the low-growing one, which is hidden among the other herbs of the meadow, from the small little pink flower and a very intense perfume”.
Need more to explain what lies behind Buillas' cuisine? His ravioli are the hallmark of his whole philosophy in the kitchen, in which egg pasta is prepared every day, bread, bread sticks and sweets are cooked, the dishes on the menu vary according to the season and to suggest the best of the Aosta Valley tradition. All that has a sort of mystical-initiatory dimension and like every ceremony it is reserved for a few. No more than 20 people enter the Cafè Quinson, admitted to a ritual that requires slow times because everything is prepared at the last minute, even the game is not marinated beforehand but cooked at the moment, soaked in wine, for no more than 10 – 15 minutes, because the rule is to safeguard the flavors do not alter them with long cooking.
“If you come here – warns Buillas – you mustn't be in a hurry, because everything is made on the spot without the aid of blast chillers and so on. Each dish is a story”. A story that takes you back in time but which has the charm of current events.
Café Quinson
Piazza Principe Tomaso 10
11017 Morgex AO
Phone: +39 0165 809499
Email: info@cafequinson.it
