"After watching the series 'Gènesi', I feel like making an escudella and having a wine with Ferran Adrià to talk about it all"

TonaThe confrontation between chefs Santi Santamaria and Ferran Adrià has been one of the narrative threads of the series Gènesi, which TV3 finished broadcasting on Monday, October 5th. “I have received many calls and questions from people who wanted to stir up trouble about what happened, but I consider it all closed, and I have told everyone that it is fiction,” states Pau Santamaria, son of Santi Santamaria. He considers it finished, as does chef Ferran Adrià, who at the public premiere of the series thanked Pau Santamaria and his family for being there. For this reason, “after watching Gènesi, I feel like having an escudella and some wine with Ferran to talk about it all.”

Between the two chefs, Ferran Adrià and Santi Santamaria, there was a great friendship. They had been introduced by the beloved Fermí Puig, born in Granollers, who wrote for a local magazine, just like Santi Santamaria. When Puig went off to do his military service, he met Adrià, and there they established a friendship that they continued at the restaurant El Bulli, in Cala Montjoi, Roses. As the series accurately reflected, it was Fermí Puig who should have taken the position of head chef, but he did not accept it because he wanted to go work with chef Montse Guillén. He then recommended to Juli Soler that he trust Ferran Adrià, his friend from the army, in whom Fermí Puig had seen an unprecedented quality: he learned quickly and knew how to replicate the recipes he saw being made very well.

Two geniuses and three Michelin stars

Through hard work, Ferran Adrià and his team, with top-tier head chefs like Oriol Castro, Eduard Xatruch and Mateu Casañas, and also always with his brother by his side, Albert Adrià, achieved the third Michelin star. And then El Bulli was equated to Can Fabes, which had also held them for years. The director of El Bulli, Juli Soler, always with his wisdom and verbal engineering, asserted that each of the restaurants had a mountain that gave them personality: “Can Fabes was the Mont-seny and El Bulli was the Mont-joia”, and today this phrase that Soler had repeated so much in interviews is very much alive, as the writer Salvador Garcia-Arbós also recalls. But all of that has already passed. Pau Santamaria insists that it is over, just as Ferran Adrià also said at an event in Tona with the entire family and friends of Santi Santamaria: “I am sure that if my father were alive he would have sat down with Ferran, they would have eaten and they would have talked about it all”.

What would they have talked about? About the fact that both wanted to be the first, each with their own lines of work. “They were two geniuses, and being the first did not mean appearing in the press and being the most handsome, but rather that the client left the restaurant happy,” says Santamaria, who explains that this summer he went with his family to the El Bulli museum, located at the same site as the restaurant. “We loved it, we were with Ferran, and then he invited us to the presentation of the seriesGènesiin Barcelona”.

Pau Santamaria insists that the Santi-Ferran duel was about genius. “It pains me that the country has not recognized my father with the Creu de Sant Jordi, when he was the first chef to have a restaurant with three Michelin stars in Catalonia and the State. He was also the first to have a restaurant outside the borders; everywhere he went, he carried the senyera and the emblem of Catalan cuisine.” Santi Santamaria died at 53 from a heart attack while he was going to the Santi restaurant he had open in Singapore. “Before leaving Catalonia, he saw my newborn son for two hours. He went to the airport and we never saw him again,” says Santamaria, who with the Santamaria Gastronòmic brand sells 0 km products to the restaurant industry.

A few years ago, through private initiative, a restaurant was opened in Jerez de la Frontera called Universo Santi. “They reproduced my father's recipes there; it was very good, but it closed due to the pandemic.” Now, in Tona, in an industrial warehouse near the town, Pau Santamaria has relocated the kitchen of Can Fabes with the goal of carrying out educational activities related to cooking there. “My goal is for my father's cooking to be known, and we are open to proposals that want us to do so, both to do them in this space and in others,” says Pau Santamaria, who emphasizes that his father was always a great promoter of Catalan cuisine.