Clàudia Gozzi: "I hope people continue to think that outside the city of Barcelona you can't make a living as a cook"

BarcelonaI interview Clàudia Gozzi (Barcelona, 1990) and Jaime Bes (El Burgo de Ebro, 1992) hours before they cook dishes alongside other colleagues of their generation and profession. We meet at the Reversible restaurant (inside Hotel Indigo) in Barcelona, and the dinner that has brought them to move from La Pobla de Segur to Barcelona is called Generació del 25, which brings together the chefs nominated last year as best at the Gastronomic Forum Barcelona. They were some of them. As we talk, we greet the others, called together for the same reason: Fran Baixas, from Franca; Ricard from El Cup Vell; Jeffrey Ruiz and Helena Termes, from La Cort del Mos, and Robert Lechuga and Esther Gómez, from the future restaurant Arrel, in Mataró.Clàudia and Jaime opened the restaurant El Raier in La Pobla de Segur in July 2022, where they have become a benchmark for the region and beyond for good modern Catalan cuisine.

You are both chefs. Where did you meet?

— At the Pur restaurant, owned by Nandu Jubany. I worked there, and Jaime at Koy Shunka. Since the owner chefs, Hideki and Nandu, are very good friends, they often organized meals together, and we would go. We maintain a very good relationship with both of them. Mari, Hideki's wife, gives me advice on how to handle the administrative tasks of the restaurant, because she is in charge of them at Hideki's restaurant. She knows a lot. And I am also the one who has taken on this task at the restaurant.

How did you two decide to open a restaurant by yourselves?

— It was an idea we had, we were pondering it, but before that we were working. We went to Formentera to a restaurant that Hideki opened there; then to Madrid, and just when we were in Madrid they closed us down due to the pandemic. We were supposed to spend fifteen days there and leave, and we stayed until the summer. We thought up a large part of the dishes on our restaurant's menu during all those months locked in an apartment in Madrid.

When did you leave?

— In the summer, when the first restrictions ended. We ruled out Madrid for opening the restaurant because we found that we did not have enough capital to open any restaurant there. Then we thought about doing it in Zaragoza, near Jaime's hometown, where we had a house. And then we thought about Pallars, because it was the place where I had spent my summers as a child. My aunt, a traumatologist from Vall d'Hebron, left everything to go live there, and I had very good memories of it. It's very green. And while looking for places, the butcher, Carns Bastus, told us he had a place in La Pobla.

The restaurant where you are now?

— Yes. It had been a bar, called El Raier, it was closed but it remained as it was when it was functioning. We liked it. We took out all the drink bottles from the bar and put our spices there. We kept the ratafia and Calisay bottles, we made a minimal intervention because the bar was a very modern place, with a lot of wood. We opened in July 2022, just for the raier festival. In the restaurant, eight people can eat at the bar; sixteen seated in the dining room.

You kept the bar's name for your restaurant. What dishes did you start with?

— With very popular dishes. Meatballs with cuttlefish, Catalan-style chicken, Russian salad, stuffed pig's trotters, scallop tartare, which was the only novelty at the beginning and which we maintain.

Scallop tartare.

— It's just that the two of us, as chefs, have training in fish; in fact, we've worked in restaurants where fish was the star. And we found that the neighbors in the region were specifically asking us for fish dishes, because, of course, they are from the mountains, and they are more used to eating meat. It's curious because we've found that the neighbors from Pallars ask us for fish dishes; those who come from Barcelona, meat. It was because local customers were asking us for more elaborate fish dishes that we started changing the menu.

What dishes do you have now?

— We started with Palamós prawn croquettes and now we have the organic chicken magnum from La Torre d’Erbull, which we bread and fry, and serve on a stick. Hence the name magnum, because it visually resembles an ice cream. The fact is that we work with local products, local producers, local vegetables. The only thing we cannot have locally is the fish, which is brought to us from Motril (Granada), because that is where we know our supplier. We receive the fish the day after it has been caught.

I know you like the forest very much, and you also make your own preparations.

— We make a syrup from green pine cones. We take green pine cones from the forests of the region, cut them in half, put them in a glass jar with sugar, and leave it in the sun and open air for a year. Then the sugar turns into a syrup. Tonight we will serve a dish of leeks with yogurt cream and the green pine cone syrup. We also make almond blossom syrup. Also elderberry vinegar; our mustard, which we make with beer from La Pobla. At the restaurant we even use local pottery, because next to our establishment we have a ceramic artist. Jaime is learning to make it. We have realized that Pallars is a very rich region in everything, and look, at the beginning we were worried about whether we would find quality suppliers like the ones we had in the city. We have found, in Pallars, very high quality.

Jaime told me that in his family they have been butchers for generations.

— Yes, we have complete training in this aspect, both for fish and meat. We don't like to pigeonhole ourselves into any dish or any product.

When you told family and friends that you wouldn't open the restaurant in Madrid, Barcelona, or Zaragoza, but in La Pobla de Segur, how did they take it?

— I hope people continue to think that outside the city of Barcelona you can't make a living as a chef [laughs]. Not everyone is ready to live in a village. We are very happy with our daily commute from Salàs, where we have our house, to La Pobla, where we work. I think every day about how lucky we are, because we like the mountains, the greenery, village life, and the people have given us a very good welcome. We opened the restaurant with our eyes closed, and we found that it works, that we are full both during the week and on the weekend. The clients have become friends, because they return again and again. I would tell you that Pallars is a region that maintains its truth.

With the good reception you have had in these four years, have you thought about changing to a larger premises?

— Yes, we will make a change. We would like to have more space, more comfort for clients and for ourselves. We are staying in the region, and we are looking for a larger premises or to renovate the one we have.

I'll take up a dish you mentioned earlier, from when you first opened, the stuffed pig's trotters.

— We still have it. This week we have had it: pig's trotters stuffed with small squid, cooked at low temperature with a celeriac cream, the ink in the sauce and the small squid legs fried.

Finally, I ask you about the wines, as I know it's one of Jaime's specialties.

— We really like working with the wines of the region, such as the wineries Castell d’Encus, Celler Batlliu, Cota 730, and we also have wines from all over. We find that our neighbors ask us to taste wines from other wine regions, while those who come from outside want to taste the wines of Pallars.

How do you imagine yourselves in a few years?

— We would like to have more hands, more physical bodies to be able to do more things. For example, I make the bread for the restaurant, which is also one of my specialties, and they ask me for it to sell. If we had more bodies, we would make a bakery. And Jaime, a cocktail bar, because they also ask for it. We would like to grow with other projects, but it's the two of us at the restaurant, and we do everything from scratch for all the dishes. So El Raier, with more space, is the idea we are working with.