The first four clues of this decalogue have been drawing a generation of chefs and restaurants that share more things than it may seem at first glance. Projects often small, personal, and very linked to the daily lives of their creators, where cooking once again involves sofritos, picadas, stocks, and slow cooking, but also closer formats, more contained tickets, and dishes designed more to be eaten than to be photographed.
Until now, the journey had gone from the chef to the dish and from the dish to the dining room. This third installment looks a little further back. Because before a recipe reaches a bar or a table, there is a series of people, memories, and knowledge that have made it possible. Sometimes it's a grandmother who cooked without a written recipe. Other times, a book published decades or centuries ago, a colleague, or a preparation recovered after years of having disappeared from menus. And before the product enters the kitchen, there is also someone who has cultivated, raised, fished, or transformed it.
The fifth and sixth clues precisely enter this territory. In a generation of chefs who look forward without needing to always start from scratch, grandparents and old recipe books reappear as sources of ideas, techniques, and flavors, while local suppliers stop being simple names at the end of a menu to intervene directly in what is cooked. The result is a way of understanding the restaurant less focused on the solitary figure of the chef and more attentive to all the people behind a dish.
A way of understanding the restaurant less focused on the solitary figure of the chef and more attentive to all the people behind a dish.
5. The interrupted transmission
For a long time, home cooking was transmitted almost like a chain. What was prepared at home passed from one generation to the next through repetition, observation, and hours shared in front of the stove. This continuity, however, has been weakening. Working hours, lack of time, and a daily life in which frozen and prepared dishes have gained space have reduced the hours dedicated to cooking, but also the opportunities to learn by watching others do it.
Pep Nogué, chef and gastronomic popularizer, places this change several decades ago and warns that the rupture affects not only the youngest generations, but also chefs who are thirty or thirty-five years old today and who already grew up in homes where less and differently was cooked. "Surely, the vast majority of today's chefs did not have bread with tomato with meatballs or with roasted chicken for a snack. They already ate differently and perhaps had only seen cooking at home on weekends."
Artur Martínez, at the helm of TRÜ, goes even further and considers it a historical rupture. "Less and less is cooked at home and, in my children's generation, I see that very little and very badly is cooked. Even the choice when buying is very bad," he points out. For Martínez, it is not just a change of habits, but a deeper loss. "For the first time in history, the transmission of gustatory memory has been broken, linked to seasonal food and a traditional, territorial, regional and also family recipe book." The break therefore affects not only the recipes, but also the criteria that surrounded them: knowing when a product was eaten, how it was used, what indicated that it was good or when it had reached its optimal point of ripeness.
It is in this void where, for many chefs, transmission makes a leap. When the parents' generation has no longer been able to maintain that daily cooking with the same intensity, it is often the grandparents who remain fixed as the great culinary reference of childhood: those who made the roast, the stew, the croquettes or that dish that needed hours. Not because they were necessarily the only ones who cooked, but because in many cases they represent the last direct contact with a way of doing things that later gradually diluted.
Joan Font i Torrent, president of the Catalan Academy of Gastronomy and Nutrition, finds precisely in this memory one of the engines of the return and resorts to a literary reference: Proust's madeleine. That gustatory memory of childhood capable of suddenly bringing back a taste, a smell or a scene and which, in the case of chefs, can push them to recover dishes and ways of cooking that had been left behind. What survives is not necessarily a recipe learned by heart, but the memory of what was eaten, how it tasted and, above all, who cooked it.
What survives is not necessarily a recipe learned by heart, but the memory of what was eaten.
At Glug, this idea becomes especially visible. A good part of the cuisine of Beatrice Casella and Iván García is born from both their memories of watching their grandmothers spend hours in front of the stove. Casella learned one of the restaurant's most well-known dishes from one of them, the macaroni croquette. "It's a recipe she cooked on Mondays with the pasta left over from Sunday," she recalls.
García starts from a similar place. "My grandmother made a fish stew with a sauté of spices and bacon, and she added sobrassada. With the restaurant's stew, I start from the same base: I add sobrassada, spices..." In his case, the transmission also comes through the previous generation: the recipe for fricandó and a romesco to which he adds roasted pepper to give it more sweetness come from his mother. Inheriting, here, does not mean reproducing a closed formula, but preserving a logic of flavors and reordering it from the present.
But what happens when neither parents nor grandparents can transmit this cuisine, or when only fragments remain from the past? It is then that the search leaves home. Old recipe books, cooking schools, and written archives offer other ways to access knowledge that could not always be acquired through direct transmission.
In the case of Casella, from Glug, memory and book literally meet. "We just bought a regional cookbook from Piedmont because I want to recover my grandmother's recipes. She had written them all by hand, but they have been lost." The volume cannot replace the lost notebooks, but it can bring her closer again to the culinary tradition from which her grandmother came and offer clues to reconstruct what she no longer preserves whole. The recipe book begins, precisely, where the family archive ends.
Books thus acquire a new function. They are no longer merely documents that prove that a preparation existed, but rather repositories of techniques, flavors, and ways of cooking from which to resume a thread that had been interrupted. Recipe books like the Llibre de Sent Soví or the Llibre del coc allow us to return to preparations that for centuries were part of a unique culinary language. "Now we are lucky that they have been reissued and it is much easier to find them," points out Pep Nogué.
Pep Palau, content director of the Gastronomic Forum Barcelona, insists on the depth of this fund: "There is such a rich heritage that whoever has this curiosity has somewhere to go to seek inspiration."
Marc Pérez explains that, at La Sosenga, books coexist with technology and with the observation of the present. The restaurant's name itself comes precisely from the Llibre de Sent Soví, showing to what extent this legacy has been part of the project from its origin. "We offer fresh and dynamic cuisine, a living menu. We can develop this task partly thanks to technology, but above all thanks to books and paper gastronomy collections. We like to understand what is happening now to meet customer needs, but always being very aware of the legacy we have."
Marcel Pons, chef and owner of Incorrecte, also returns to books to locate less common recipes, beyond well-known references such as escalivada or fricandó. In this search, dishes like caragolins or Lleidatan-style cod with apple appear. His starting point, however, remains intimate: "In the end, what I cook are memories". This includes fricandó and his Canarian grandmother's papas arrugadas, but also Dinosaurus cookies or ColaCao, which inspires one of his most recent desserts. Gustatory memory does not establish hierarchies between a historical recipe book and a childhood snack: it preserves what, for some reason, remained.
"In the end, what I cook are memories" (Marcel Pons)
6. The menu starts in the field
Before a chef decides on a technique, the product already accumulates many decisions. Someone has chosen a variety, cared for an animal, waited for a season, gone out to sea, or accepted that a harvest would not respond as expected. The dish begins in all these tasks, even though for a long time the restaurant's narrative has reduced them to a geographical origin or a list of names at the end of the menu.
In many of the restaurants of this generation, there is also a circumstance that facilitates this change in the relationship with the supplier: the chef is also the owner or co-owner of the project. Deciding on the cuisine therefore means also being able to decide who to buy from, how long a relationship is maintained, or if a dish disappears because that product has not yet reached the right moment. The choice of supplier thus ceases to be a purely logistical or economic decision and becomes part of the very identity of the restaurant.
Oliver Peña, now at the helm of Mineral, has maintained a direct relationship with producers in all the restaurants where he has worked since 2006. "I like to go to Can Fises in the mornings and talk to Lluís or Àngels about vegetables, buy eggs in Calaf... I like to see who is behind the products and, if I can avoid buying from a large company, I try to." From this direct contact, bonds have been born that have lasted almost twenty years, such as the one he maintains with Rosa, who provides him with the beef tendons for one of the dishes that has become a classic at Mineral, or with Fede, from whom he obtains fresh orange blossom to make his own fermented molasses. In cases like these, the permanence of a dish also depends on the relationship built over years with the people who make the product possible.
At La Sosenga, Marc Pérez takes this same idea towards a broader way of understanding the restaurant. "If we don't collaborate with small producers, be they farmers, ranchers, fishermen, or cheese makers, the future will be catastrophic," he warns. For this reason, he advocates a cuisine that is not built solely from the chef's perspective: "We try to work this way, not just to cook to cure our ego or to show off, but also to give a voice to these producers, who have a very delicate and sometimes very committed job."
"Not just cooking to cure our ego or to show off, but also to give a voice to these producers" (Marc Pérez)
Artur Martínez, at the helm of TRÜ, takes this dependence to its ultimate consequences: "We cook what the product tells us." If the farmer warns via WhatsApp that the tomatoes are not yet ripe, the dish does not come out and the kitchen adapts to the rhythm of what happens outside. This relationship is also reciprocal: Martínez recalls how he proposed to a producer to use the leaves of the spicy pepper plant, usually discarded, to sauté them as if they were spinach. The producer provides direct knowledge of the land and the chef finds new ways to bring it to the plate.
At Maleducat, Víctor Ródenas works from a similar logic. Behind the pork is Cal Rovira; behind the beef, Cal Tomàs; behind the piparras or seasonal tomatoes, small producers from Maresme. Naming who produces is not just a matter of narrative. It means establishing a close enough relationship for the restaurant to know the possibilities, but also the limits, of each of them.
The producer provides direct knowledge of the land and the chef finds new ways to bring it to the plate.
This same dependence appears at Incorrecte. "For me, both the team and the suppliers are vital. Without them, Incorrecte would not exist," says its chef and owner, Marcel Pons. His argument is not based solely on the quality of the product, but on the work necessary for that product to exist. Caring for animals and crops requires a continuity that does not stop on weekends or during holidays. Recognizing this effort also modifies what is expected of the supplier: the relationship ceases to consist solely of demanding regularity and comes to imply a responsibility towards whoever makes it possible.