Don't Gloss Over Detail

Imagine yourself walking into Bodega El Capricho, a small chophouse situated in northern Spain that’s considered one of the world’s finest. Bodega El Capricho lies inside a hand-carved stone cellar that once stored wines. Its cavernous, cool and dark interior is beset with intimate and soft yellow lighting which prompts one to imagine a medieval chapel or abbey–some type of sacred, ancient place. It’s not just the intensity of the warm interior lights that is reminiscent of temple candles, but even the dining tables, chairs or benches have a spartan feel to them, not unlike rough-hewn church pews.

I haven’t been to Jimenez de Jamuz myself where this establishment is situated, so I’m unsure if the temple-like setting is coincidental or intentional.

Regardless, the ambience seems well poised to revere beef, this eatery’s entire raison d’etre. El Capricho's captain, Jose Gordon, obsessively raises pure-breed Iberian cattle. Gordon tends to his herds with fanatical devotion and an attention to detail that considers every aspect of these animals’ lives. Every detail, from their very beginning at the pasture to their very end on the dinner plate, has its own parameters. This includes their feed, their habitat, their care, the manner in which they’re sacrificed, and how their meat is processed and stored prior to being cooked. This labor of love not only guarantees the best possible culinary outcome, whether the meat ends up as El Capricho’s aged cecina, tartare or its signature ox chops, but the expended effort is another way El Capricho dignifies its noble animals.

Nearly anyone who writes about this place uses words like “pilgrimage” or “temple” suggesting a gastronomic experience closer to the divine. It is even said that when ordering fare, the waitstaff doesn’t ask diners how they’d like their beef cooked because diners aren’t presumed to be as well-informed as the staff is about beef! As far as the staff is concerned, to look past any detail would be ignominious of the cattle’s sacrifice. The end-result is an institution that the foodies discuss with reverence.

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Now, instead of sitting down in one of the intimate alcoves at El Capricho, savoring carpaccio fashioned from Iberian beef raised on a special diet of Spanish grass and grain, picture yourself sitting down at some casual-dining chain-restaurant, located in a suburb adjacent to a any major American city. The dining room is flooded by overhead fluorescent lighting–a far cry from temple-like candlelight. Every entrance, door and hallway inside this building is “built to code” and the walls certainly aren’t hand-carved from stone. The sole purpose of this restaurant is to generate cash-flow. Legal documents and occupational licenses are prominently displayed near the main-entrance, where you notice the to remain unlocked during business hours label.  The menu is exactly identical to the same location that you previously dined at last year on the other side of the country, two time-zones away; entrees have clichéd names that try to grasp at the vestiges of the old-world. In fact, this establishment isn’t even called a restaurant, they call it a “store.” You’re not a patron, you’re a “guest.” You’re even sure you remember the same piece of corporate art hanging in the other location too. 

But this “store” has steak on its menu, just like Bodega El Capricho. It’s all the same, right? 

Of course not!

Equating the labor-intensive ox chop from Bodega El Capricho to an ordinary steak from a casual dining chain would be ludicrous, even though biologically and molecularly the makeup of beef is the same. Beyond the mere amino acids and chemical compounds that formulate the steak, it would also be inane to argue that the dining experience in Jimenez de Jamuz, Spain vs Anytown, USA would be identical. 

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Any meal, any object, any experience, any thing, can be deconstructed into smaller parts. Therefore, the value of that “thing” or that “experience” can be quantified as the sum of its parts. This in turn means that these parts matter just as much as their final product.

It’s the details in every aspect of  the first meal compared to the other that logically differentiates the Spanish chophouse apart from the casual diner. Details are the sole agents with the power to change the gravity and the impact of the food. 

Casting aside food, the details found throughout life hold a tremendous importance because when examined as parts of a whole, details are the accumulation of wisdom, knowledge and effort. Details translate into both beacons of technical innovation and amplifiers of pleasure or enjoyment that make life rich and meaningful. The old phrase “the devil is in the details” morphed from the original version (attributed to architect and designer Ludwig Mies van der Rohe), “God is in the details.” With either version, the meaning doesn’t change, only the perspective but the point is clear: the end result stems from details.

Mastery can be proven by details.

Believers and philosophers since the dawn of time have pointed to the natural world and its workings as evidence of the divine (see above example). For us mortals, the deeper our grasp of details is, the more we understand and possess mastery over that topic.

It can be argued that the difference between an amateur and a master is quite literally their grasp of detail. In my chosen sport, competitive-action pistol shooting, for example, amateurs are largely concerned with merely hitting their targets while high-level performers take a more comprehensive approach to matches. This group not only approaches the contest with an inner mental game to control themselves, but they’re cognizant of details such as the type of footwear they wear, the specific tint of their shooting safety-glasses, or even the springs inside their pistols (to tune them to the proper rhythm). Ultimately, they posses the capacity to process more details in a shorter amount of time in order to affect a competitive outcome.

Similarly, this is why El Capricho’s Jose Gordon or any other luminaries of their craft obsesses about detail. Gordon isn’t the only one in food to stand out, and chances are that those on the highest rungs of the totem pole in their respective field are detail-obsessed. Names like Steve Jobs or Enzo Ferrari come to mind too. Could the old masters like da Vinci, Caravaggio, Velasquez or Durecht have painted the works they did during the Renaissance/Baroque periods without a thorough appreciation and understanding of detail? Hell, why do we even still talk about their work when today’s 16:9 format 4K-HD cameras can capture anything?

Besides being tokens of mastery, wisdom or effort, details are also important because life is short and unpredictable. Considering tomorrow is promised to no one, why skimp over the “parts” that sum-up to maximize the “thing”? Returning to our chophouse example, the point of dining at El Capricho isn’t to satisfy the body’s bare nutritional needs, it’s to leave with experience and memories. And there’s only so many chances for opportunities like that during a lifetime. If the staff cut-corners, it would invalidate the entire dinner. 

Don’t gloss details, because that’s where the richness and the differentiators of life are found.