Movements almost never start the day someone names them. By the time the label arrives, things have already been moving for a while. Some chefs have changed the way they look at produce, have recovered techniques that had been relegated to the background, have returned to books, or have started serving dishes that don't much resemble those that were successful a few years earlier. Then, someone detects the coincidences and tries to find a word that brings them together.
It happened with the Nouvelle Cuisine. In 1973, journalists Henri Gault and Christian Millau formulated their ten commandments after observing a generation of French chefs who simplified menus, lightened sauces, reduced cooking times, and gave more importance to fresh produce. The critics did not invent what was already happening in the kitchens, but they gave it contour, narrative, and visibility.
"The adjective "new" does not claim that there was nothing before. It indicates that a cuisine has changed its relationship with its past"
The New Nordic Cuisine followed a different path. In November 2004, twelve Nordic chefs signed a ten-point manifesto in Copenhagen around seasonality, landscape, sustainability, health, ethics, and the contemporary use of traditional products. In this case, the protagonists themselves decided to build a shared agenda. They didn't all cook the same way either. What they shared was a direction.
The adjective "new" does not claim that there was nothing before. It indicates that a cuisine has changed its relationship with its past. It can indicate a rupture, but often describes a return made from another place. Tradition remains present, only it returns after the avant-garde, the internationalization of pantries, the climate crisis, and a profound transformation of the way we buy, cook, and eat.
The time to name it
The expression "new Catalan cuisine" had already circulated at other times and had been used to talk about previous generations. It did not emerge from nowhere at a congress. However, the Gastronomic Forum Barcelona, held from November 3 to 5, 2025, made it the central question of an entire edition. Ferran Adrià opened the program with a presentation dedicated to exploring the history and influences of Catalan cuisine. Two days later, during the closing session on November 5, Joan Roca proposed a possible definition: "The new Catalan cuisine is the living continuity of a tradition, reinterpreted with a contemporary perspective, ethical awareness, and creative spirit."
The phrase is broad enough to encompass fine dining restaurants, inns, taverns, neighborhood bars, and eateries. It is also specific enough to rule out that any dish cooked today in Catalonia automatically forms part of the same movement. Between a rigid boundary and a concept where everything fits, there remains a more interesting territory: observing what is being repeated and asking why.
Week by week, this series will unfold two clues until completing a decalogue of ten. To outline it, we have spoken with chefs, restaurateurs, journalists, historians, and other professionals in the sector. The goal is not to establish a definitive definition of new Catalan cuisine, but to identify ideas, gestures, and concerns that reappear in very different projects in terms of format, price, aesthetics, or trajectory. Today we begin with the first two.
1. Rejecting labels
The first clue arises from a paradox. From the outside, one can speak of "new Catalan cuisine," but the chefs themselves disagree on the usefulness of this name and what it should include. Some believe it allows for the recognition of a shared direction; others fear it will turn a sum of personal quests into a school, a generation, or a closed style.
Oliver Peña is one of the voices that accepts it most clearly. He believes that a new Catalan cuisine exists, as long as it is understood from "different perspectives." Chefs do not work in the same way or offer similar proposals, but they share, according to him, the will to "be representative of a cuisine." For Peña, the richness of the moment lies precisely in the fact that "everyone is different." He relates it to the deeply personal nature of projects without external investors dictating the course. This independence allows them to succeed or fail, but always doing things their own way. Diversity, therefore, does not deny the existence of a new Catalan cuisine, but rather is what gives it meaning.
Other chefs, however, see more risks in the label. Artur Martínez was clear about it when he opened TRÜ. He decided not to put "Catalan cuisine" on the door to prevent the restaurant from being limited even before the customer sat down at the table. He also rejects that the phenomenon can be explained strictly as a generational issue: "There are chefs of different ages. It is a matter of vindication and also a bit of dignity of territory and heritage, and that is transversal."
At La Sosenga, Marc Pérez expresses a similar caution. He explains that they prefer to shy away from labels in a market already full of them, even though the project deliberately looks towards Catalan recipes and has even made the mortar part of its identity. The contrast is revealing: reclaiming a tradition does not necessarily oblige one to accept the box where someone else decides to place you.
Àlex López, from Arraval, is even more direct: "I don't want to be the new anything." He speaks of generational change and the responsibility of continuing what others have built, but rejects that this continuity becomes a uniform. "If the new Catalan cuisine is a place that has been enriched with Andalusians, Greeks, and people from all over, then I feel more identified," he points out. In a restaurant located in the Raval, this idea acquires a particularly concrete meaning: Catalan cuisine can also be explained from the neighborhood's mestizaje.
Joan Font i Torrent, president of the Catalan Academy of Gastronomy and Nutrition, takes the questioning even further. "It's not a group, it's not a project, it's not a movement. It's people trying to find their place after a period of absolute splendor. They are fish looking for oxygen; they are looking well and they will find it." Font places this search especially among chefs between 30 and 40 years old and does not see a radical break in it either. "The grace is that everything remains the same, but they captivate with the details," he explains.
The first clue of the decalogue does not, therefore, lead to a unanimous answer. There is a certain rebellion in this resistance, but above all a defense of independence. They claim a shared heritage without renouncing the right to interpret it in their own way, to make mistakes and to decide how they want to explain themselves. Perhaps the first coincidence is precisely this: none of them wants a label to tell them how to cook.
2. The return of brown cuisine
Beyond the discrepancies about the label, much more concrete coincidences appear in the kitchens. If this cuisine had a color, a good part of its recipe book would be brown. The brown of the sofrito that has lost water and gained sweetness, of the onion brought almost to a jam, of the juices of a roast, of the stocks, of the stews and of the casseroles where the ingredients stop living separately. It is not an especially grateful color in photography. It is, above all, the color of time when it becomes visible.
Talking about "brown cuisine," however, does not mean reducing all Catalan cuisine to a dark palette. There are also raw dishes, grilled dishes, garden produce, fish, light rice dishes and dishes that preserve the vibrant colors of the product. In the Augusta Guide, promoted by chef Pep Nogué, Núria Bàguena reminds us that even the sofrito changes as it crosses the territory. To the north it tends to be darker, with more onion and less tomato; towards the Delta, tomato gains presence and rice dishes change flavor and tone. Brown is not a rule, but a family of flavors and techniques that is becoming visible again.
The same Pep Nogué places this recovery within a change of perspective. For years, he explains, Catalan cuisine was often associated with a "rural, greasy, village, traditional" cuisine, viewed from the city with a certain condescension and, in some cases, even vulgarized. Now he detects chefs who are returning "to the chup-chup cuisine," to stews, to sofrito and picada, but without reproducing them exactly as before. "We have been cleaning and making Catalan cuisine healthier," he summarizes.
This way of recovering the essence without necessarily repeating the form is well seen in Glug. Beatrice Casella and Iván García link this return with a domestic memory and a certain way of understanding time. "We grew up with chup-chup, and that's what we try to bring to the restaurant." Their cuisine may not be, visually, the brownest among these projects, but the stocks tell another story. Preparations such as escalivada broth, toné sauce or a trumpet of death mushroom sauce appear. The dishes can be colorful and contemporary, but underneath persist cooking, concentrations and flavors that need time. The brown, here, is often in the background.
"It's not about reproducing an old dish, but about returning to known taste structures after decades of avant-garde, travels and international influences"
Something similar happens in the Franca restaurant, where this look at the recipe book is manifested above all in the picadas, sauces and stocks. There they recover and reinterpret elaborations such as balandra, a puttanesca-meunière or a smoked pork sauce. They also cross memories and references in a soup that moves between the Maresme soup from Racó d'en Binu, Bocuse's soupe Élysée and the classic chicken with prawns. It is not about reproducing an old dish, but about returning to known taste structures after decades of avant-garde, travels and international influences.
In La Sosenga, on the other hand, this tonality is much more evident. Not because color is an objective in itself, but because it appears naturally when a traditional recipe book is recovered and brought to the present without giving up sofritos, roasts, stews, and picadas. It starts with the dish that gives the house its name, the lamb sosenga, made from a spiced medieval sofrito and finished with a picada of stewed liver. The menu often continues with this palette with dishes such as morels with mushroom parfait, hazelnuts and chicken liver, ceps with chicken cracklings or escalivada peach. Brown is not sought: it appears as a consequence of cooking with time again.
The same logic is recognized in TRÜ, although Artur Martínez takes it to his own language. There is the cured acorn presa with pine nut and cep praline, the omelet with capipota juice or the waffle-trinxat, made with bufet potato and pig's trotters. In the latter, the waffle maker is not just a contemporary gesture: it allows to enlarge the toasted surface and achieve more "socarrat" than with conventional griddle cooking. The tool changes, but not necessarily the gustatory logic: concentration, toasting, depth and a recognizable memory brought to a current technique.
And if there is a technique that summarizes this way of building depth particularly well, it is the picada. It is not a sauce that lives apart from the dish, but an elaboration that enters the pot to bind its juices, give it density and make the ingredients stop functioning as a simple sum. It can contain nuts, toasted bread, garlic, parsley, saffron, liver, chocolate, biscuit or carquinyoli. Each house, region and recipe can alter its composition, but the gesture remains: chop, mix and incorporate.
"The picada is one of the differential signs of our cuisine," states Pep Palau, content director of Gastronomic Forum Barcelona, one of the voices that has most closely followed the recent evolution of Catalan cuisine. Palau warns, however, that it is only one of the many features that define it and introduces an essential nuance: the Catalan recipe book is not only brown, but also full of vibrant colors. Brown cuisine, therefore, does not intend to explain all of Catalan cuisine. It serves to point out how certain cooking methods, techniques, and a way of building flavor that had lost centrality are now returning to the forefront.