How local can a global restaurant really be?

EBRU ERKE

In hospitality, standardisation creates a sense of trust; in gastronomy, it can sometimes disconnect a restaurant from the place it inhabits. While speaking with Mark Vaessen, Global Culinary Chef of OKU Hotels, in Bodrum, we found ourselves returning to one question: What truly makes a restaurant local — the ingredients it uses, or how deeply it understands the place to which those ingredients belong?

Consistency is one of the fundamental principles of hospitality. When you stay with the same brand in Istanbul, Paris or Tokyo, you expect certain standards, from the room to the service. In gastronomy, however, that same logic can work in reverse. What is an advantage in a hotel room can easily become a disadvantage in the kitchen. If the dish you eat in Ibiza is replicated in Bodrum and the one in Bodrum appears again in Kos, eventually the destination becomes little more than the view outside the restaurant window.

This was precisely what Vaessen and I discussed in Bodrum. OKU’s hotels in Ibiza, Kos, Andalusia and Bodrum share certain codes: The sea, olive oil, vegetables, fire and a culture of sharing. But for Vaessen, that is where the similarities between their kitchens should end. Consistency, in his view, should lie not in serving the same dishes but in a shared philosophy: Good ingredients, clean flavours, simplicity and generosity. Everything else should respond to the place. One sentence captures his entire approach: “Bodrum should taste like Bodrum.”

“Local” has become one of the restaurant world’s favourite words. Menus are filled with terms such as local, seasonal and farm-to-table. Buying vegetables from a nearby grower and serving locally caught fish are, of course, valuable choices. But as Vaessen points out, buying a local tomato does not automatically make a restaurant local.

First, you have to understand where you are. That means visiting markets, eating in local restaurants, talking to fishermen, farmers and producers; listening to chefs who grew up there and learning what people eat at home — and why. Buying an ingredient and understanding the culture to which it belongs are two very different things. Locality is not simply a matter of distance; it is also about how well you can read the knowledge accumulated around an ingredient.

That is exactly what Vaessen did after arriving in Bodrum, eating his way through local restaurants and discovering the region’s food. What struck him most was not a new ingredient or technique, but how much flavour could be achieved with so little intervention. Vegetables, wild herbs, olive oil, fish… When the ingredient is good enough, there is often very little you need to do to it.

He was also struck by a way of eating that we ourselves may barely notice: Small plates arriving one after another, dishes placed in the middle of the table to be shared, food and conversation flowing into one another. This social rhythm of eating also resonates with the culture of sharing that OKU seeks to create. But Bodrum reminded him of something more fundamental: Travelling as a chef does not always mean adding a new technique to your repertoire. Sometimes it teaches you to do less.

Perhaps this is one of the significant shifts taking place in contemporary gastronomy. There was a time when we measured a chef’s skill by how much technique could be brought to a plate; transformation, surprise and the creation of new textures were highly prized. Today, another form of mastery is coming to the fore: Rather than demonstrating everything you are capable of doing, knowing when to stop.

Vaessen takes a similar view when it comes to intervening in traditional dishes. He believes that a chef’s desire to leave a signature on every plate can sometimes have more to do with ego than with making the food better. Before reinterpreting a dish, he argues, you first need to understand why it exists, how people remember it and what makes it special.

Techniques can then change and an element can be reinterpreted. But if everything is altered simply to make the chef’s signature visible, the memory of the dish can disappear with it. Vaessen’s position is disarmingly simple: Sometimes the smartest thing a chef can do is taste something and say, “This is already good. Don’t touch it.”

This idea becomes even more interesting at Teyo, OKU Bodrum’s restaurant centred around Japanese influences and techniques. The kitchen in Bodrum is led by Executive Chef Muhammed Karaaslan. Ultimately, it is in the hands of Karaaslan and his team that the relationship between a global culinary philosophy and local ingredients is tested every day.

At first glance, Japan and Bodrum may seem like two distant culinary cultures. Vaessen, however, sees their common ground not in recipes but in their attitude towards ingredients. He draws a parallel between the Japanese respect for seasonality and produce and the Aegean instinct for simplicity when faced with excellent fish, olive oil and wild herbs. In both, the point is not to obscure the ingredient but to preserve its character.

Fire is another language they share. Cooking over fire may look simple, but it demands an understanding of when to intervene and when to leave the ingredient alone. This is where Vaessen sees Teyo’s potential in Bodrum: Not in allowing Japanese technique to overpower Bodrum’s ingredients, but in letting the two speak to one another. The distinction matters. In restaurants that bring different cuisines together, local produce can easily become little more than a stage on which to showcase a foreign technique. The real challenge is to create an encounter in which neither side loses its identity. Vaessen also believes the menu should continue to evolve as the team eats in local restaurants, meets producers, listens to those around them and gains a deeper understanding of the ingredients.

Seen from this perspective, OKU’s kitchens in Bodrum, Kos, Ibiza and Andalusia offer an interesting case study. All four share the sea, olive oil, vegetables, fire, seasonality and a culture of sharing, yet each expresses them differently. Vaessen’s aim is not to turn them into versions of the same restaurant, but to allow knowledge to circulate between them.

An ingredient or technique discovered in Bodrum might inspire the team in Ibiza, but it should not simply be reproduced there; it needs to be reinterpreted through Ibiza’s own ingredients and culinary culture. The wild herbs, local olive oil and clean, saline character of the Aegean that Vaessen would like to take from Bodrum are therefore not recipes to be exported, but starting points for new culinary ideas.

Perhaps this is the most interesting possibility globalisation offers gastronomy: Not replicating the same plates in different parts of the world, but allowing places to learn from one another. The global restaurant of the future may not be defined by how perfectly it can reproduce itself around the world. The real skill may lie in understanding how much it needs to change each time it arrives somewhere new.

And the starting point is remarkably simple: Sit down at the table, taste the food of that place and truly listen.