Mura Mura, high-end Italian cuisine in Malaga

Enrique Bellver

Malaga

Monday, 3 June 2024, 15:40

Carmine Guarino has been living in Spain for nearly ten years. In 2015, after graduating in law, he decided to devote himself professionally to his great passion, cooking, and opened his restaurant Mura Mura in the centre of Malaga. Together with his team, he reinterprets the traditional cuisine of his native Italy on a daily basis. Carmine is a native of Irpinia, a small village in Campania.

His roots, his way of facing life, the channelling of his passions and his family and home life have led him to create a totally homemade cuisine, based on produce, but with a lot of hindsight and a very personal touch. His menu is a compendium of the different ways of cooking that exist in each region of his country and the end result is very original and elegant dishes. This chef knows perfectly what the different Italian cuisines have in common and he expresses it in his dishes.

Mura Mura is not a trattoria, nor is it a pizzeria in the way we understand those concepts here in Spain. On the contrary, this small and cosy restaurant, with a capacity for barely twenty diners, is different from everything that is offered in the centre of Malaga, even in the province, going under the name of 'Italian cuisine'. Like all good Italian chefs, Guarino will surprise us the most when it comes to pasta. As well as using different cooking times so that the pasta itself becomes the vessel for the flavours, he also creates daring combinations of products that have never before been mixed with traditional fresh pasta, such as linguini with pickled oysters and mint.

It is in these dishes that Mura Mura's cuisine takes on its identity and becomes what for many of us is 'haute cuisine'. However, you have to be a bit of a bohemian and gastronomic adventurer to enjoy Italian cuisine of these characteristics in a place where tourists have been the main attraction for quite some time. Fortunately, more and more people from Malaga are coming to this restaurant in search of sensations and experiences in an Italian cuisine with a lot of personality and different from all the others.

Transparencia

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A dish that is a tribute to Malaga's gazpachuelo. Carmine surprises with an almost translucent coating of very thinly sliced, cured squid accompanied by a very mild fish broth.

Pasta con ostras

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Very good interpretation and even better staging to express the combination of fresh pasta with almost every kind of product, including pickled oysters with mint, onion, smoked butter and bottarga (salted and dried fish eggs). Great!

Calamar en purgatorio

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One of Carmine's classic and perhaps most traditional dishes. A medium-sized squid on a homemade stewed tomato base with a fried egg to fuse both the flavour of the mollusc and the acidity of the fried tomato.

Boquerones cocinados

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A complicated yet very tasty interpretation of anchovies cooked with miso sauce and salt. The base on which the anchovies sit is warm endive with sun-dried tomatoes and a thin slice of bacon.