Diego Cabrera has done it again. "Salmon Guru temporarily closed", jumps on Google. In reality, this is not a requiem for the most famous cocktail bar in Madrid -number 15 in the last The Worlds's 50 Best Bars-, but the prelude to a new Salmon Guru. Before the Roca brothers announced the same with the Celler, the Argentine bartender – the only real celebrity in the patriotic sector – had already warned: "We closed Salmon Guru to change everything except the name." Those words spoken in the gastronomic podcast La Picaeta resounded in the world, a bam! As thunderous as the noise of maces throwing down the bar on the morning of April 11.
As soon as he enters, Diego looks overwhelmed. The mess is hopeless.
-Do you ever wonder 'what am I doing'?
Every day, when I wake up, I say to myself 'why am I doing this'.
He is interrupted because, in the midst of so much hammering, he fears for the integrity of a computer screen. In just a while, with a sleeping shirt and a more relaxed smile, Cabrera will release adrenaline participating in the collapse.
-Let's go back to why.
-Why not? Salmon is a space that has to represent you, it must be different with a more daring proposal. And after seven years we have to rethink things. In cocktails we are living a brutal moment, after the pandemic we have feelings of total openness, we travel all over the world, people want to get together and share. You see other things, today's knowledge is not what we had before, and you decide it's time to take Salmon Guru to another level.
Diego was already branded as crazy for wanting to open a cocktail bar on Echegaray Street and now it seems that you have to be to not want to open a place in the neighborhood of Las Letras. There will be those who think the same because of this decision, a sign that they do not know him. "This comes from questioning everything since we opened Salmon Guru Dubai, which was born with a different proposal and design. When we did something new we saw that we had to renew this," he explains of his pathological nonconformity. Salmon Guru Dubai turns one year old on April 27.
"Salmon Guru is our most international brand, the spearhead of the company. We are in such a moment of maturity that we could afford it. There's always an excuse not to, but it's never off." August is when they work best, so they took advantage of Easter. The reopening is scheduled for the second week of May.
-What will the new Salmon be like?
-We are actually opening a new bar, we would have liked to make more changes but we cannot modify the structure. We considered opening another bar and leaving this one as it is, but Guru Salmon is what has allowed us to position ourselves and grow, this is the space that people want to see and for which they wait forty minutes at the door.
They have not yet been able to touch the façade. They will maintain the three spaces defined by environments, the eclectic universe of Diego that defined the old Salmon, but the decoration will be taken to the extreme and the height of the bar will be changed: "We realized that people want to see and be involved. We wanted to be more radical, but within our madness we are being quite conservative. That said, it's going to be extremely different." The liquid part will also change, with a new menu in full development from the contribution of the team members, scattered these days in Brazil, Italy, Thailand or Vietnam to soak up ingredients and influences. "They became ambassadors of the brand, the family grew," says a Cabrera turned expedition leader who, this time, stays on land.
Bartender Diego Cabrera.
The bartender entrepreneur has shown to have a cosmopolitan vision of cocktails, attached to the neighborhood and the city but projected to the world. "Salmon was always an open-door space, like Madrid, and the way to evolve is by traveling." Its cocktail bar, with hardly any windows, could belong to any city. "It's dark, time is running out... Yes, but it is in Madrid. It could be London or any of the trendiest cities in the world. But our city is trendy. I would like when people travel instead of saying this could be in London or New York to say this could be in Madrid because Madrid is the coolest city."
The new Salmon Guru already predicts tails: "There is going to be a call effect, there is an expectation of the industry and the customer. Salmon always set trends." When asked if he feels fear, anxiety or vertigo, Diego talks about nerves about meeting deadlines. It is not his first work. Twist de Naranja, the umbrella company of Salmon Guru, Viva Madrid and Guru Lab, has both an opening in Barcelona -collaboration with the Florería Atlántico bar of his friend Tato Giovannoni- and the presentation of Dragon Experience Factory, a 450-meter production center in San Sebastián de los Reyes.
With the Salmon bar already reduced to chips, the conversation ends again on the reasons: "Our company is healthy and this space works. You may think that doing this is a bit crazy but the world needs madness, otherwise everyone would do the same and no one would dare to do anything. And when you propose different things, people follow you."
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