40 years of El Celler de Can Roca in Girona: "We have lived together through the most momentous years of avant-garde cuisine"

GironaThe restaurant El Celler de Can Roca turns 40 this year, and Josep Roca is thinking about the song. To pave the way Borja Penalva's poem (based on a poem by Maria Mercè Marçal) serves as a metaphor for everything they've experienced. The story begins in 1986, when the brothers opened what was their dream. They weren't far from their family's support; they were right next door, adjacent to their parents' restaurant, the Can Roca of old, as the people of Girona call it. They've told the anecdotes from those early days countless times. There were few diners, or none at all, during the first services. They spent hours playing foosball, the legendary foosball table, and some days they even convinced friends to come for lunch.

The second date the Roca brothers haven't forgotten is 2007, when they moved to Can Sunyer, a few meters beyond the Talaià road, where they still are today. Anyone who comes to eat there today will enter a restaurant that lives in harmony with a forest, with nature. In the center of the room, through a skylight that floods the space with light, are the characteristic beech trees of the city. And at the table, once seated, three broths arrive, served in white bowls, which, as they fill, begin to outline the faces of the three brothers: Joan, Josep, and Jordi. "For us, The broth is a way of welcoming the diners."Explains Josep Roca, who at the Girona Gastronomic Forum made memorable statements such as: 'Tradition is legitimate avant-garde.'

From Catalonia to the world

When the sommelier reflects on the forty years he has spent at El Celler, he says: "We have lived through the most pivotal years of avant-garde cuisine together"; "we have been involved in groundbreaking, transgressive cuisine, in years when the focus was on Catalonia, and from Catalonia to the world." In other words, "we have played a leading role in groundbreaking cuisine, and we have done so intensely, actively, and stubbornly." This role has been to adapt the cuisine of the last hundred years to present it to future generations. And to do so, they have worked with various disciplines, especially science. Throughout these years, the Roca brothers have interpreted Catalan cuisine with the desire to improve it: "with the idea of ​​asking ourselves what we can do better than the previous generation." For all these reasons, Josep Roca maintains that "Catalan cuisine of the future will be better because people today are well-educated, they have a more open palate than we did."

Of all the dishes they've cooked since 1986, one has emerged in 2026 that they haven't ruled out cooking again this year: hake supreme with rosemary and red wine. In fact, Josep Roca says they "haven't ruled it out" because in February they don't want to finalize details of how they'll celebrate the restaurant's 40th anniversary, beyond a party with the team. "We don't want to dwell on the past, but rather think about the role that culinary artisans will play in 2066." So, what the Roca brothers are doing these months is projecting "a vision of what home cooking will be like, if homes will even have kitchens." The brothers are also considering other concepts about how people will be fed in 2066, and that's where the concept of fifth range and the homogenization of the food industry. "With all this, we believe that artisan chefs, as we define ourselves, must assert ourselves to encourage new generations to eat food that truly represents a worship of the body."

Finally, Josep Roca also offers an analysis of the personal journey he has taken with liquors, specifically with two hundred and fifty that he has createdAnd seven more that will be released in the next six months, including a ratafia, a pepper wine (with peppers, and based on a recipe from Girona Cathedral, which they have revived with Garnacha Gris and five peppers), a liqueur of yuzuand another of red fruits. The idea, from its beginnings in 2015, when it started, is to distill landscape, and that is still what it does. In recent years, with more space available, at the castle of Sant Julià de Ramis.