El Cellar de Can Roca
Described by many as avant-garde, and by others as a unique blend of traditional Catalan and modern cooking techniques, El Cellar de Can Roca in Girona has always been something of an enigma. Its commitment to excellence and its popularity is rarely questioned, and by way of affirmation it was this year named best restaurant in the world by Restaurant Magazine.
El Cellar de Can Roca is regarded as a freestyle restaurant with a deliberate leaning towards the avant-garde,
but one which is still loyal to the techniques and traditions of generations of the family’s ancestors.
Run by the Roca brothers, Joan (head chef), Jordi (pastry chef) and Josep (sommelier) — often referred to as the holy trinity of molecular gastronomy – the 55-seater restaurant began life in August 1986 in a small bar next door to their parent’s restaurant, Can Girona. It previously won the coveted (but sometimes controversial) award in 2013, losing out last year to the famed Copenhagen eatery Noma,
This year’s awards saw Noma pushed into third place, while chef Massimo Bottura’s restaurant Osteria Francescana in Modena grabbed second place.
Fourth spot went to Virgilio Martinez’s Central in Lima, fifth to Daniel Humm’s Eleven Madison Park in New York; sixth to Andoni Luis Aduriz’s Mugaritz in San Sebastian, Spain; while seventh spot was awarded to the eponymously named Dinner by Heston Blumenthal in London.
The White Rabbit in Moscow was the highest new entry on the list, ranked at 23.
El Celler de Can Raca is regarded as a freestyle restaurant with a deliberate leaning towards the avant-garde, but one which is still loyal to the techniques and traditions of generations of the family’s ancestors, all dedicated to the simple purpose of feeding people.
Indeed it is arguably the evolutionary end product of a family that has been engaged in the business of doing just that for hundreds of years. According to head chef Joan, their paternal grandmother, Grannie Angeleta, “spent all her life stirring pans and feeding people”, while their father, Josep Roca i Pont, aside from being the bus driver in his childhood village, spent his spare time roasting chickens on a spit and grilling meat to raise the money he needed to open Can Roca.
But it was his wife, and the boys’ mother, Montse Fontané, who exerted most influence over the budding young chefs and instilled in them their continuing love of traditional Catalan cooking.
This, combined with a passion for the avant-garde and molecular gastronomy has created an alrnost inevitable dialogue between the countryside and science.
All three brothers attended the Girona Catering School, are winners of the National Gastronomy Award, and hold honorary doctorates from the University of Girona. An academic approach to their craft, which stems from their shared advocacy of pedagogy as the basis for the development of chefs in the future.
“We always want to find a balance,” Joan Roca recently said in a conversation with English food critic Oliver Smith. “Traditional techniques are still very important. But we are also committed to science and to being creative.”
A commitment which in 2013 saw them premier El Somni, a theatrical multi-sensory production exploring the interaction between food, music and art. Then, in 2014, the entire team embarked on an ambitious and unprecedented restaurant tour across the southern US and parts of Latin America, temporarily closing the restaurant in the meantime.
Less publicly, El Celler is at the forefront of a ‘gastro-botanical’ research project called Terra Animada that is cataloguing rare wild species with the aim of reintroducing them into our food systems.
The restaurant is one of the most sought after dining destinations in the world and reportedly employs three people simply to politely explain to callers that they’re fully booked for the next 12 months.
Which, at any given time, they are.
Dining at El Celler certainly isn’t cheap, with the complex taster menu costing around 300 euros per person including matching wines from the 60,000 bottle wine cellar, but that perhaps has a lot to do with the fact that the 60-strong staff easily outnumber quests at every sitting. Not to mention the brothers’ insistence that at least two of them are on site for every service.
The brothers have so far resisted pressure to open another restaurant. “I am amazed at the passion people have to eat here”, says Joan Roca, “But we will never expand, or open another restaurant. How can we change our formula? Good hospitality is the most important thing for us and if we had another business we Would no longer be there to see the quests.”
A winning formula indeed.
