This article is part of a new series, From the Wanderlust Kitchen, celebrating real, good food. Receive a digital cookbook of this season’s recipes from chef Seamus Mullen and Wanderlust Hollywood by signing up here.
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“Spain has always been a very important place in my life,” says Wanderlust Hollywood executive chef Seamus Mullen. He first visited the country when he was 16 years old, and has lived and cooked in Spain on and off ever since, spending a total of seven years there.
The cuisine of Spain inspired his first restaurant in New York—Boqueria, which he left in 2010—and his three current ones—Tertulia, El Colmado, and El Colmado Butchery.
“I wanted to do whatever I could to bring back the food that I remembered from Spain, but in a way that was not just recreating what I had had there,” Seamus says. “The reality is we are not in Spain, and our products are slightly different here, so what I like to think of what we do as cooking in the language of Spanish cuisine.”
Now at Wanderlust Hollywood, hints of Spanish influence pepper the menu. Take the kale Caesar salad with anchovy vinaigrette. Anchovies—the little fish that, when high quality and fresh, are exponentially more flavorful and delicious than the tin-can variety you’ll find at pizza joints—are a culinary highlight of Spain. “When you learn just a little bit about how to cook with anchovies, they become this incredible flavor experience that accentuates everything else,” Seamus says.
To see for yourself, check out Seamus’s recipe for the Spicy Kale Caesar with Anchovy-Citrus Vinaigrette.
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