3 secrets from the second best chef of the world
The Diario de Gastronomía interviewed Joan Roca in the last Madrid Fusion. He is the older of the three brothers in front of El Celler de Can Roca (Girona), an establishment which last year won the second position in the prestigious ranking of The World’s 50 Best Restaurant Awards.
After reading the interview, I share here three interesting ideas:
1. Education in a hotel school
The Roca brothers are the third generation of hospitality professionals, so they were born and raised in a kitchen, in a restaurant. They began helping out their parents and learned there. But also in school, at that time there were only two hotel schools in Spain, one in Girona and the other in Madrid. They were fortunate, says Joan Roca:
We were fortunate to have a hotel school here and that’s probably also one of the reasons why we are dedicated to this: because we could study and have a formal education. But anyway, in the kitchen you realize that you are always learning and that the road is long and still not over.
2. Keep grounded
El Celler de Can Roca has 50 employees and all of them have breakfast, lunch and dinner in the restaurant of the parents. Joan Roca admits that it solves a logistical issue, but also keeps them true to their origins.
Home-made food … is like keeping the umbilical cord with the mother, something that keeps you well grounded from the gastronomic point of view, but also in the sense that-actually-it’s very easy for chefs to lose our head and believe everything the media tells us, awards and recognitions. When you go every day to your parents’ house, you ground yourself and say “okay, here’s where we come from, this is what we are.”
3. Exceptional products
Class chefs require class products …
Today one of the most important concerns of the chefs is to find premium products, apart from the creativity and other things that obviously also influence, but finding products is becoming an obsession.
What do we do? we try to establish contacts with small producers, people who produce what we want or are willing to produce what we want and we are willing to pay what it’s worth. That is the key to having an outstanding product, which is what we all seek: the only way is to establish such contacts and synergies that yield close to the product.
