The residents of Ciutat Vella, especially those in the lower part of La Rambla, are in luck. This summer, the La Pau restaurant has opened on Josep Anselm Clavé street in Barcelona, next to the Pasage de la Paz [with G, due to historical French influence], with a quality culinary proposal based on typical Catalan dishes that significantly elevates the increasingly poor gastronomic level of the area. Eating excellently, however, is not the only reason to visit this restaurant, as its main mission is another: to provide a job opportunity for young people excluded from the educational and social system.
La Pau is, using a very fashionable term, a restaurant with a purpose, that is, a business whose sole aim is not to achieve economic performance, but also social. Diners, consequently, obtain a double benefit: they enjoy gastronomically and, in addition, contribute to completing the social and pedagogical work that the El Llindar Foundation, based in the Parc de Can Mercader in Cornellà, has been promoting for 18 years. It is not a school restaurant, but a first real job opportunity for young people of different nationalities who had been centrifuged by the system and who, thanks to El Llindar, have been able to train as cooks and are now in a position to work.
Thus, the fourteen cooks and waiters who work at La Pau are not students, but employees, with an employment contract signed by El Llindar Fem Feina, the insertion company dependent on the foundation. "I am very excited to be able to present this project and offer quality employment to these young people," says Begonya Gasch, founder and general director of El Llindar. According to this teacher and social educator, "to transform the world, we must bet on quality training and avoid precarious jobs," so La Pau will contribute decisively to making the entity's great objective a reality: "that every adolescent who has not fit into the traditional educational system can dream and think that they have a place in this world."
The idea is that everything learned at La Pau thanks to this employment contract will serve as a lever for these young people to jump into the conventional labor market, so this restaurant wants to be "a place of transit," with stays of around a year, although it will depend on each case.
At a time of maximum financial tension for third sector entities, it may be surprising that a foundation like El Llindar has the financial resources to undertake a project of this type. It hasn't won the lottery or received a grant from heaven: the key lies in the fact that this time, this time, public-private collaboration has really worked. The patron of La Pau restaurant has been the Enjoy Barcelona Group, a family business that owns sixty tourist apartments in the Catalan capital and also operates the business and corporate meeting center The 19th Hole and the new urban viewpoint Unlimited Barcelona, both on the upper floors of the central Urquinaona Tower. Enjoy has covered all the remodeling and opening expenses of the restaurant, involving its own team of architects and interior designers who have also wanted to contribute to dignifying the environment and to the urban recovery of a historic passage in Ciutat Vella, near Paseo de Colón and Las Ramblas.
The result is a cozy space with capacity for 55 diners decorated with paintings by the Mallorcan artist Pilar Correa and where a large bar decorated with different phrases written by El Llindar students to express their feelings stands out. Another prominent decorative element are the cacti, which aim to represent the type of boys and girls who will always work in the establishment, "treated by society as ugly ducklings, but very tender inside," explains Gasch. "We are very happy with this super-alliance we have forged with Enjoy; without them we would never have been able to have a restaurant of these characteristics," emphasizes El Llindar's alma mater.
It so happens that in the adjoining property, the Enjoy Barcelona Group is currently transforming the old Hostal El Nilo into a 24-room hotel with a four-star superior category that will also be called Hotel La Pau. "It will be a boutique hotel, the first of the Enjoy group, and we expect to open it in June or July 2023," says Carmen de la Maza, an Enjoy executive who is also part of the board of the El Llindar Foundation, where she serves as secretary. According to De la Maza, the La Pau restaurant will also be the hotel's restaurant, so a good part of its clientele is already guaranteed.
Begonya Gasch explains that the foundation will pay a symbolic rent to Enjoy, which will decisively contribute to the economic sustainability of the establishment. "We assume a business risk, it's true, but I believe it is very important that from the third sector we also assume risks, generate business and seek social profitability, but also economic, in our projects," she points out. With an annual budget of 3.6 million euros to finance its different programs, one of the main objectives of the El Llindar Foundation is to reduce its dependence on subsidies and money from public administrations, which today provide 85% of its income. The challenge is to significantly increase private contributions and achieve parity. In addition to Enjoy Barcelona, El Llindar's main private partners are the Botet Foundation, La Caixa Foundation, the M Automoción dealership company, the hairdressing firms Cebado and Raffel Pagès, and the L'Oréal group.
The La Pau restaurant project has also had the disinterested collaboration of José Santiago, the executive chef of Grupo Tragaluz, who regularly collaborates with El Llindar, whom in 2016 he helped launch the El Repartidor school restaurant, located in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat. Santiago, along with La Pau's head chef, Xavi del Amor, have designed a menu of traditional Catalan cuisine that includes dishes such as esqueixada, cod fritters, stuffed zucchini flower, mussels with vermouth, cannelloni with truffled béchamel, fricandó, chicken with langoustines, cod a la llauna, prawn and sausage rice, grilled squid with tomato and candied onion, suckling lamb, Balfegó tuna belly with vegetables, and low-temperature jowl marked on the grill with parmentier. For dessert, you can't miss the Catalan cream with nougat ice cream, a mel i mató cannelloni, a traditional flan with cream and an original version of postres de músic.
"At the Cuines de Santa Caterina restaurant, part of the Tragaluz Group, tourists always ask us to eat local dishes. With La Pau, we wanted to respond to this demand, offering quality autochthonous cuisine, made with local products and with Catalan wines and cavas. Enough with so much guacamole and so much tataki!... With La Pau, we are going to add a touch of quality and raise the bar for gastronomy in the Gothic Quarter," says Santiago. In addition to being able to eat à la carte, with an average price of 30 euros, at midday the new El Llindar restaurant offers a daily special for 10.50 euros, which also includes a drink and dessert. The operational manager of the dining room is the young Senegalese Cheikhou Balde, who dreams of being able to set up an entity similar to El Llindar in his home country one day.
When she launched the foundation in 2004, Begonya Gasch had eight students. Today, 480 young people complete its different training itineraries each year, and almost 5,000 students have passed through the entity over these almost twenty years. "The child doesn't fail, the system fails," Gasch states. "We were pioneers in creating a second-chance school in Spain, although I prefer to use the concept of new opportunities," says the promoter of a center that has become a benchmark in the educational sector and demonstrates its permanent capacity for innovation with projects like La Pau. According to El Llindar, 15% of its students enter the labor market after passing through the school, 65% return to the conventional educational system, and 75% obtain a certified qualification.
The foundation is part of the Generalitat's youth guarantee program and also collaborates intensely with the city councils and schools of Cornellà and L'Hospitalet de Llobregat. The new opportunities school offers adolescents excluded from the educational system adapted programs to be able to finish ESO and four possible vocational training itineraries: personal image, cooking, automotive, and digital manufacturing. Thus, it has a hairdressing school in alliance with Cebado in Cornellà, a restaurant school (El Repartidor) with Tragaluz in L'Hospitalet, and a mechanics school in Cornellà with M Automoción. Now, it is looking for a private partner to boost its youngest division, digital manufacturing, with which it wants its students to train in the new trades of the future.