A scene that is still looking for its name cannot be explained all at once. One must return to it, look at it from another angle, and check if the coincidences remain when the focus shifts. In the first installment of this series, we began to outline a decalogue of new Catalan cuisine based on two clues: the resistance of chefs to be confined within a label and the return of brown cuisine, built with sofritos, picadas, stocks, and slow cooking.
This decalogue does not aim to become a list of commandments, but rather to draw the map of a cuisine that is still defining itself. Each restaurant brings the same intuitions to a different place and, within each clue, contradictions appear. Some chefs accept talking about new Catalan cuisine and others reject the name; some recover dark stews in visually luminous dishes. These tensions do not invalidate the coincidences: they help to understand their limits and diversity.
The two clues in this second installment come out of the pot and observe how restaurants shorten the distance with the diner: through price, the layout and aesthetics of the spaces, and the way recipes arrive at the table. In some cases, this proximity takes the form of a bar or a more contained bill; in others, of dishes that prefer to preserve flavor and temperature rather than pursuing the perfect photograph, although some voices also defend the image as a way to document and communicate their work.
3. The commitment to an affordable average ticket
Democratizing cuisine does not only mean lowering its price. It also means reducing the barriers that can make someone feel that a restaurant was not designed for them: not knowing how to dress, how many dishes to order, what rules to follow, or if they will understand the language in which the menu will be explained to them. The ticket is the most obvious barrier, but it is not the only one. There are economic, social, and even symbolic ones.
The most visible of these barriers is the economic one. At a time when the cost of living restricts spending on leisure, a part of the new restoration seeks formulas that allow people to continue going out to eat without turning every visit into an exceptional celebration. It is not necessarily about opening cheap restaurants, but about reviewing which structures, rituals, and costs are essential to offer ambitious cuisine.
Víctor Ródenas, chef and co-founder of Maleducat and Casa Fiero, links his projects with the desire to find a closer and less rigid way of understanding the restaurant. "Many of us are looking for a different restaurant format, a more unconstrained and closer way of doing things. We want to put our personality not only into the food, but also into the service and the entire restaurant, to shed protocols and grandiosity and make it more one-on-one."
Ródenas links this transformation with a broader social change. "Restaurants have become very democratized. Everyone goes out to eat, regardless of their purchasing power. The person serving you is on the same social scale as you; therefore, certain treatments and manners no longer make sense," he argues. If the relationship between those who serve and those who receive the service has changed, so too must the rituals that staged that distance.
Ródenas: "The person serving you is on the same social scale as you; therefore, certain treatments and manners no longer make sense"
This reduction of distances is perceived in more informal dining rooms, menus designed for sharing, and services that abandon some of the codes of classic restoration. It also translates into the desire to contain prices. Ródenas clarifies, however, the scope of the word affordable. "I believe it is very enriching for the city that these projects have a ticket that I wouldn't call popular, but certainly affordable. It's not cheap, but we're talking about between 50 and 70 euros."
At La Sosenga, this pricing policy translates into a 40-euro tasting menu. Marc Pérez links it to the need to put residents back at the center. "We have always focused on the people here, who I believe are the great forgotten in sales and marketing policies, because we have focused a lot on tourism," he points out. For the chef, recovering Catalan recipes and taste memory also implies thinking about who the restaurant is aimed at. "If they want to include us in the new Catalan cuisine because they consider that we are recovering a cuisine at democratic prices, drawing on taste memory, we will be delighted to be there."
The same concern was part of the conception of TRÜ. Artur Martínez wanted to transfer Catalan cuisine to a contemporary format, but also to find an average ticket consistent with the current moment. "TRÜ is born from the desire to create a restaurant adapted to the format we like and to find a ticket that makes it accessible," he explains. Martínez believes that restoration cannot be separated from household economics. "More and more people are having difficulties managing their family finances, and one of the first areas affected is leisure, and therefore restoration."
Joan Font i Torrent: "I see a return to the small bar. It's a format more oriented towards experience and with an adjusted price."
Restaurants organized around a bar, with diners seated in front of the kitchen, particularly condense this search for accessibility well. This format eliminates part of the scenography that separated the dining room from the kitchen and makes the work visible. Those who eat can observe the fire, the concentration, the errors, and the waits. Those who cook perceive the diner's reaction without always having to go through the mediation of the dining room. It is not necessarily a better relationship, but it is more direct. The restaurant resembles less a stage with an immobile audience and more a shared space.
Joan Font i Torrent, president of the Catalan Academy of Gastronomy and Nutrition, sees in bar restaurants a formula especially linked to the new gastronomic projects opening in the city. "I see a return to the small bar. It's a format more oriented towards experience and with an adjusted price." In this regard, he points out proposals such as 539 Plats Forts, by Martín Comamala, in Puigcerdà, Glug or the recently opened Sarau, in Barcelona. To this list we could also add Mineral, 22:22 Cultura Dulce or Direkte.
There is also a generational issue. Many of those responsible for these projects have trained in gastronomic restaurants, but when they opened their own place, they did not want to exactly reproduce the places where they had learned. They have preserved the rigor, organization, and technical knowledge, but they have changed the scale: fewer meters, smaller teams, more direct contact with customers, and a menu capable of reacting quickly to the market. The renunciation of part of the formal apparatus also allows, at least on paper, to contain the initial investment and fixed costs.
The clue, therefore, is not that haute cuisine has suddenly become popular or that it needs to be made cheaper at any cost. It is that part of its knowledge has moved out of the formats that traditionally legitimized it. Techniques learned in great restaurants, carefully selected products, and dishes conceived by chefs with their own voice now appear in spaces where the client can order less, share more, and better understand what is happening. Democratization is relative, but it seeks a specific balance: that the restaurant is viable for those who manage it, that it is accessible to a wider public, and that quality does not always need to be expressed through distance.
4. The dish before the screen
In an era where every dish can end up on a screen, one might think that younger chefs would give image a central place. However, among some of them, a different sensibility is beginning to emerge, where plating no longer always takes first place. This sensibility became especially visible at the Generation of 25 dinner, which brought together five finalists for the Chef of the Year 2025 award from the Gastronomic Forum Barcelona: Cup Vell, La Cort del Mos, Franca, El Raier, and Arrel/Casa Parera. Among the dishes served, Cup Vell's pork head sausage with garnish was ugly, perhaps intentionally ugly, and almost impossible to make look good in front of the camera. Precisely for this reason, it caught attention.
Social media imposed the idea that, before tasting a dish, it had to be able to circulate as an image
That appearance did not seem to be the result of carelessness, but of the decision to entrust the strength of the dish to the product, to the taste, and to the way it had been prepared. Aesthetics had not disappeared; it consisted, precisely, in not disguising. To understand what that dish questioned, one must observe the visual canon from which it departed. For years, a part of gastronomic cuisine turned presentation into a demonstration of control. Each element occupied a place, sauces were dosed, volumes were constructed, and the composition had to withstand photography. Social media reinforced this demand and imposed the idea that, before tasting a dish, it had to be able to circulate as an image.
From this tension between the dish and its representation arises the fourth track of the decalogue. In the first installment, we talked about the return of brown cuisine, but now the issue is not the color, but the decision not to add elements that only serve to embellish a photograph. Talking about an "aesthetics of ugliness" does not mean that chefs want to serve neglected dishes. Ugliness here is a deliberately uncomfortable word to describe a different hierarchy. The dish may be less symmetrical, less ordered, or less photogenic because temperature, texture, juice, or speed of service take precedence. The intention does not disappear, but rather concentrates elsewhere.
Àlex López, at the helm of Arraval, transfers this reflection to the moment the dish leaves the kitchen. "I'm not interested in spending three minutes on symmetrical plating while the temperature drops. We do austere, very simple plating, but with a lot of intention. We put each element in its place and try to imagine how the customer will eat it. What we don't do is spend extra time on it to make it beautiful and photographable."
Pep Nogué picks up on this same intuition, but prefers to speak of simplicity rather than ugliness. "For me, what some call crude is simply simple. A stew doesn't need microgreens or little flowers that add nothing. When the cooking is good, it's good; there's no need to disguise it," he argues. Nogué distinguishes this austerity from an imposed rusticity, built precisely from predictable decorations.
At Glug, the same idea takes the form of a stew. Beatrice Casella and Iván García summarize it this way: "A stew is a stew. We give more importance to it being tasty and well-finished than to the presentation. We try to do it as well as we can, but that's not what guides us." There are dishes that resist order because their charm is precisely that the ingredients have cooked together, released their juices, and lost their sharp contours.
But even the renunciation of ornament produces an image. Pep Palau, content director of the Gastronomic Forum Barcelona, cites as an example the austere dishes of several recently opened restaurants and summarizes it with a paradox. "In this non-aesthetic there is also an aesthetic bet." The seemingly casual arrangement of food, the tableware, the muted colors, the absence of decoration or even the request that diners not take photographs, as happens in some places, also build a recognizable language. When perfection becomes a convention, moving away from it is also a way to differentiate oneself.
Not all chefs, however, share this search for an aesthetic less conditioned by the screen. Artur Martínez, from TRÜ, defends the image as a legitimate extension of the work. "I really like taking photos of the dishes because, in the end, the dishes are your work. It is the most powerful image with which I can communicate what I am and what I do. It is not a commercial issue, but a communication one." Víctor Ródenas introduces another limit to the idea of ugliness. "First, things have to be good. But we also eat with our eyes and they have to be pretty." In the end, whether beautiful or ugly, every dish ends up building an aesthetic.