Three deliveries and six clues later, this decalogue enters the home stretch. So far we have talked about the name we give to this cuisine, but also about the people, memories, and products that make it possible. As the journey progresses, coincidences no longer appear only on the plates. They are also repeated in the way restaurants are organized, work is distributed, and decisions are made about what space the craft should occupy in life.
Very different projects end up returning again and again to similar questions. How many hours can a team handle without the craft taking over everything? What does it mean to open only five days? Can artificial intelligence help lighten some tasks? The seventh and eighth clues enter this territory: schedules, team continuity, and chefs who have decided to build their own projects, smaller and more personal, assuming the freedom and risk involved in making the restaurant an important part of life without letting it completely take over.
7. The revolution goes through the team
For many years, working in a restaurant meant accepting that life happened elsewhere. Days that started long before service and ended long after, non-existent weekends, and entire seasons with little room for anything else. Hardship was part of the craft and, often, also of its prestige. Among many of the projects of this new Catalan cuisine, this old association between vocation and sacrifice is slowly beginning to be left behind.
One of the most important transformations of this generation is not directly related to what is served on the plate. It is in the schedules, in the days off, and in the way a kitchen is organized so that those who are part of it can continue to love the craft without having to give their whole life to it. At Franca, Fran Baixas, Gianmarco Greci, and Joshua McCarty have taken it to the calendar: the restaurant is open Monday to Friday and closed on weekends. "We want catering to allow for eight-hour shifts. And that also means sacrificing certain things... or modernizing others," points out Greci.
Catering is not particularly attractive to young people.
The decision also responds to a change that Greci perceives outside the kitchens. "We have to be aware that restoration is not especially attractive to young people and find a way to respond to this reality." Getting someone to want to enter a kitchen is important; getting them to still want to continue there after a few years is perhaps even more so.
At Maleducat, Víctor Ródenas began to answer this question some years ago. "Since 2021, we already implemented a four-day work week and three days off," he explains. "We close on Sundays and holidays and that's a bit how we try to balance it: to be more considerate of the team and ensure they have three days off a week." Rest thus becomes part of the restaurant's structure, instead of depending on the spaces left by the service.
Rest thus becomes part of the restaurant's structure.
At Glug, Beatrice Casella and Iván García have even organized the first hours of the day around this same idea. Their kitchen needs stocks and broths that spend hours on the fire, so they are the ones who arrive first to start them. "We don't want the team to come in like us at eight or nine in the morning. We advance the longer preparations so they can join in the afternoon." Sometimes, changing the conditions of a kitchen starts with something as small as deciding who turns on the stove first.
Àlex López faces another old fragility of the profession: seasonality. Working between Arraval, in Barcelona, and Al Kostat del Mar, in Begur, has led him to seek a way to link two restaurants that operate at different times of the year. "We are working with two projects. The one in Begur closes in November and the team there was forced to find work during the closing months," he explains. From this comes the desire to avoid having to start from scratch at the end of each season and to find formulas so that an already trained team can continue working during the rest of the year.
The answer is "hinge" teams: people who move from one project to another and allow for continuity of teams between seasons. "I have always tried to form solid teams and, from there, create these hinges between them, trying to be very sensitive to the circumstances and the living space of each one," explains López.
This summer, while part of the team returns to Girona, new figures appear in Barcelona, such as chef Maria Estruga, whom López already envisions as one of these linking pieces in Arraval's future.
There cannot be a good restaurant without a good atmosphere.
But building a good team does not only depend on schedules, breaks, or continuity. Artur Martínez points to something more difficult to measure: the atmosphere created behind closed doors. "Just as there is no good cuisine without a good ingredient, there cannot be a good restaurant without a good atmosphere." His reflection takes the matter a little further: it matters how much and when one works, but also how a kitchen and a dining room are shared every day.
Pep Palau, content director of the Gastronomic Forum Barcelona, precisely identifies here one of the distinctive features of this new Catalan cuisine. "Putting people at the center and making them the most important part of the project is key." For Palau, this sensitivity is recognized in the way teams are formed, schedules are planned, and personal life is incorporated into the decisions with which a restaurant is born. The business must work, of course, but it must also leave space for the people who make it possible.
Putting people at the center and making them the most important part of the project is key.
8. The restaurant as a life project
There is an expression that appears again and again in these conversations: "life project." It serves to talk about restaurants that are meant to last, about cities where one has decided to stay, and about a unique way of practicing the profession. But it is almost always accompanied by a limit. Making the restaurant a central part of life does not mean putting life on hold. In fact, some of these chefs seem to have arrived at their own place with a very clear idea of everything they do not want to have to sacrifice along the way.
Víctor Ródenas formulates it almost as a contradiction. Maleducat is "our life project with which we earn a living," he explains, but immediately adds: "It's not everything either." He wants to be able to rest, see friends, have a private life, and someday think about starting a family. After years in which fifteen hours inside a restaurant could be interpreted as a demonstration of commitment, Ródenas defends another measure of ambition: wanting a place to last without having to dedicate every hour of the day to it.
Oliver Peña arrives at a similar place from a different experience. When he and Cristina Losada imagined Mineral, after years linked to much larger structures, one of the priorities was for the restaurant to be "very controllable," with a small team and a size they could manage. The reason ended up going much further than organization. "We wanted to have a bit of life... a business where we had another part of life that wasn't just being at the restaurant," he explains.
At La Sosenga, Marc Pérez emphasizes another dimension of the life project: duration. He speaks of building "solid foundations with our businesses" and moving away from the idea of the restaurant as a brief adventure before moving on to the next. He thinks of La Sosenga in the long term, as a home capable of transforming over the years and continuing to make sense when the novelty of the opening has passed. Staying, slowly growing a project, and imagining it still open many years later is also a way of thinking about professional life.
At Franca, Gianmarco Greci says it explicitly. The restaurant he shares with Fran Baixas and Joshua McCarty also represents a decision about Barcelona and about the time they want to spend there. "A restaurant implies an investment, it implies a commitment," he explains. Greci compares this choice to the trajectory of a chef who arrives in a city, spends a few years in a kitchen, and then goes to Paris or anywhere else. Opening Franca changes the horizon: "I want to be here twenty years." The city stops being a place of passage and the restaurant becomes a way to put down roots there.
The city stops being a place of passage and the restaurant becomes a way to put down roots there.
This long-term commitment, however, is also built from much more daily decisions. Thinking about twenty years means thinking about licenses, inventories, purchases, suppliers, breakdowns, schedules, and an administration that demands a considerable part of the day. The freedom of building one's own home coexists with all these invisible tasks that appear when the shutter is lowered or before the first client arrives. And talking about a life project ends up also being about time: about how many hours everything surrounding the kitchen demands and how many can be recovered.
This is where artificial intelligence enters these conversations in a very specific way. Greci, who has a background in computer science, already uses language models to create small tools applied to wines and the daily management of the restaurant. "I use LLMs to make simple apps and inventories," he explains. Technology does not come in to decide what will be on the plate, but to reduce the time spent on some of the tasks that accumulate around it.
Technology does not come in to decide what will be on the plate, but to reduce the time spent on some of the tasks that accumulate around it.
Ródenas is experimenting in a similar direction. With Claude, they are developing an application to manage daily checklists and so that kitchen and front-of-house managers can know what is happening in the restaurant even if they are at home that day. "We are very concerned with removing friction and, above all, absurd hours," he explains.
Technology thus appears as a very specific tool to lighten a part of the management and recover time in a profession that for years has tended to occupy almost everything. Perhaps here also lies the true meaning of talking about a "life project": imagining a restaurant ten or twenty years from now without, to get there, everything else having had to take a back seat.