The air was icy. Thankfully we were moving, walking along Danziger Strasse to meet a friend for dinner. We were brainstorming what to cook when that same friend came for dinner at ours, but we’d reached a gridlock. Nothing was quite expressing that sense of elation that comes with realising the full potential of an ingredient. In this case, the potato.
A few weeks before, on a pitch-dark morning in southern Germany, we’d stumbled under a tarpaulin for shelter. It was 7am, the market had just opened, and we could hear the heavy rain drops falling above us. The light was dim, and the potatoes camouflaged with dirt, but our eyes adjusted to make out a line-up of at least seven hessian sacks containing different varieties. The farmers were weighing them out on an antique balance scale using weights.
Those potatoes: Annabelle, Linda, Glorietta, were a jolt of clarity: so sweet and rich in flavour. And they delivered 100 percent on the promise of festkochend or firm, golden, and waxy. And when we found mehligkochend (floury) they blended effortlessly into a creamy mash. We hoped to convey to our friend, through our cooking, that excitement. And as if on cue, the place we were headed illustrated exactly how to do that.
The dish was described as ‘Spiced potato, pointed cabbage, coriander cream and seaweed’ and when placed on the table appeared to be an elegant circular serving of mash topped with delicate leaves. But somewhere between those two layers chef Javier Barbosa Olaya and his team weave electric flavours, that kept that potato dish on my mind for the rest of the week, and take us right back to the potato’s origin story.
‘This dish comes from Peru,’ shared Javier when I returned to find out more. ‘It’s called Causa limeña and basically, it’s like a lasagne of cold potato with ceviche. The original is hearty and can be made with chicken or seafood. We keep it vegetarian because we love vegetables, and we adapted it to Germany because you have a lot of varieties of potatoes here.’
Having long been a staple in Peru, the potato landed in Europe somewhere in the 16th century, and those plated layers tell a layered story of the movement of people and food. Javier comes from Colombia and together with his partner Micaela Longo, who comes from Argentina, opened their bistro ITA in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin. When describing their philosophy, they write: ‘Just as individuals flourish without labels, so does our cuisine’.
The ITA Causa
The foundation layer, as Javier describes it, is an emulsion of potatoes, olive oil, salt, and typically lime but with his, the acidity comes from late summer yellow chillies from Tlaxcalli, a tortilleria in north Germany, lacto-fermented with yellow peppers (for colour) and koji. ‘That’s going to give the taste a little bit more umami and make it more interesting,’ says Javier, ‘It’s really, really complex.’
Then comes a layer that wasn’t obvious at first glance. ‘Ceviche you know,’ says Javier, ‘is lemon, onion, meat or vegetables, and coriander […] we make a creamy cocktail ceviche.’ It features pointed cabbage, also called hispi or sweetheart cabbage, and it’s easy to fall in love with its rippled cross-section alone.
And then the array of leaves. ‘Normally we have pickled seaweed from the north of Germany but in the past few weeks there have been a lot of storms,’ says Javier, ‘so instead there is northern German Salicornia’. The Salicornia offers intense salinity. ‘It also tastes a little bit like fish you know, and that’s so nice because the causa is normally made with shrimps or calamari [in the ceviche].’
In detailing the finish Javier adds that it’s sprinkled with Furikake, which originated in Japan and which he makes with local ingredients, roasted in the wood-fired oven. He retrieves a container of dried herbs from the kitchen to show me one of them: Huacatay or Tagetes minuta. It’s a herb that grows in Peru and now, Javier says, in Germany too. He collects it through the summer to make ice cream – smelling it I can imagine that, it’s reminiscent of passion fruit.
‘Another important topic,’ says Javier, ‘Is the Japanese and Chinese people in Peru, who brought soya sauce, sesame oil, shiso, koji, and started to make a new version of the Peruvian cuisine, so for that reason we have this style of causa […] with the soya sauce and koji from a company in Germany called Mimi Ferments and shiso leaves that we get from a local farmer.’
In describing Causa, Javier showed pictures with mash covering the top, which doesn’t appear on ITA’s take. ‘We want to make something that’s easy for people to share and easy for us to plate – because we are only three people in the kitchen, everything has to go a little bit faster,’ says Javier ‘Sustainability for us is time […] we work 10 hours [as opposed to 16 hours] and we adapt the menu to be able to do it in 10 hours.’
While ITA’s vision is a space for the free flow of ideas and cultural influences, a tight filter, just like human sustainability, is the physical and technical parameters of the wood-fired oven that is central to the spirit of the place. ‘When chef friends of ours came over they were like: man, you cook everything in that small oven?’ says Javier, smiling.
He confirms it’s where the bread is baked too. ‘Yes, it’s part of the concept, but it’s also super challenging,’ says Javier. ‘In the beginning we wanted to buy a professional oven to put in the back […] and we said no, we’re going to keep working with this […] and now we are really happy because this idea is always pushing our creativity.’
Having grown up in Cape Town I’m drawn to gathering around a fire, and when I tell Javier, he tells me Micaela is from Buenos Aires, which is where they met. ‘I lived in Buenos Aires for ten years and fire is very important for families on Sunday […] It’s a ritual: lighting the fire, modifying food with fire, it’s something precious.’ So I asked Micaela about her relationship with fire cooking.
‘For me it symbolises unity, friendship, and family […] it brings back memories of Sundays spent grilling and enjoying what we call Asado. Essentially a barbecue where meat takes centre stage, it happens almost ceremonially every Sunday. It’s much more than just the food; the Asado experience begins with sourcing ingredients […] the slow cooking process requires intuition and touch to cook all different meat cuts to perfection […] and finally, sitting for hours to carry this experience as energy to navigate the week ahead.’
This brings us back to the name. ‘ITA is short for Itacate,’ says Micaela, ‘a Nahuatl word meaning the food that you take for travel and the leftovers of a meal that the host gives you for nourishment later.’ And that’s what Micaela and Javier aim to transmit at ITA: ‘to create something that will stay in people’s memories to create comfort and joy once the experience is over.’
The dish for the photographs was prepared and plated by chef Gabriel Cheisson, who is part of the ITA team and is also pictured above.