Karin Leiz: It is I who thought of turning a woman into a bubble for the Freixenet advertisement

BarcelonaI interview Karin Leiz (Seville, 1938) at the Flash-Flash restaurant in Barcelona, created by her late husband, Leopoldo Pomés, and Alfonso Milà. We look at the menu and count that there are currently up to fifty different omelets. During Leopoldo's lifetime, when she advised the restaurant, she managed to have up to one hundred and sixty. All different. We choose the Panadera (potato with bread with tomato inside) and the Gallega. We also eat peas with baby octopuses. And a bread with tomato that is perfectly dipped. It should be highlighted because it doesn't happen every day. When I pick up the cutlery to cut the omelet, she tells me if I knew that the journalist Nèstor Luján was allergic to metal. Karin has a prodigious memory, and the meal starts very well.

Did Nèstor Luján not go to restaurants with his own cutlery despite the allergy you mention he had to metal?

— No, it also surprised me because it had rapid consequences on the body if I used metal cutlery. At Flash Flash we had the Nèstor Luján cutlery saved in one place.

Do you speak German, Karin?

— I have always said that I am hybrid: I speak German, Catalan, Spanish, English, and French. I went to the German school. My parents, both German, met in Plaça Catalunya in Barcelona. Both under very different circumstances. My father was fleeing what he foresaw would happen in Germany.

Your four children are the co-owners of Flash Flash.

— Together with the nineteen nephews of Alfonso Milà, who had no children, and he gave his part of his property to the nephews. I always say that I am a prehistoric remnant of the restaurant.

Does it impress you to see yourself drawn on all the walls?

— No, I have my mind set on it. I was thirty-two years old; now I am 89. The idea came from the architect Frederic de Correa, a friend of my husband Leopoldo. Frederic told him: "You have to create a design that is related to your life." Have you noticed that the cap is the only thing with color? The drawing is in black and white, but the cap has color because it's a reminder of the time when people used to smoke in restaurants: this yellow color is what the walls used to pick up because of the smoke. Now the walls are nice and white; the drawing, in black. The cap, do you like it? Leopoldo Rodés left it to us. It's an English cap.

How did you come to think of putting yourself photographed on the walls?

— They held a casting at my husband's agency to choose girls, but they found that they only looked for physical perfection. And then he told me. Leopoldo and I worked together. Do you know what? We met on the tram, on Passeig de Gràcia, at the corner of Aragó street. We saw each other, and he didn't get on, but he followed the route by car until I got off the tram and he started talking to me. He told me he was very shy. I have to tell you that I never wanted to be a model. I only felt good if I had photos taken by Leopoldo.

On the menu there are omelets, as protagonists, but also many other dishes: fish, meats, vegetables.

— We did it this way because Flash Flash has a lot of regular customers, and that's why you have to have variety. The restaurant is always full. There are days when even here in the room where we are, at the back, it is dark because the bar is full of people.

I have read your books, such as the one on vegetables, herbs and sauces, and I was pleased to learn that you became fond of eating them from the family garden. You reminded me of the writer Mercè Rodoreda.

— My parents' hobbies were gardening and books. They made me stay there, in the garden, raking leaves, tidying it up. Besides, at home we ate a lot of vegetables; it was sacred for my mother that we did. We also ate herbs. I tasted them in the garden. I would say my mother was almost a nutritionist. I say almost because she had studied housekeeping. She studied it for three years in Germany. She knew how to remove very difficult stains from clothes.

How did it go that you wrote the first book, the one about vegetables?

— My children encouraged me. My eldest daughter, Juliette, did the illustrations. She knew the editors at Zahorí Ideas. I enjoyed doing it. The first book in Catalan I read was La Teca, by Ignasi Domènech, and I bought it when I got married because I wanted to learn to cook. My mother didn't want anyone in the kitchen. I studied philosophy and literature, and when I married Leopoldo, I realized that we came from two homes where we had eaten very well. I got by with the book La Teca. It helped me a lot, even though there are recipes that are explained imprecisely. I learned to cook by going to the market and listening to what people said. Little by little, I began to gather and write my own recipes. I kept them in a small notebook and a box. And one day I gave them to my children. That's when they told me I should publish them. In 2012, I published the first book under the name Las verduras de muchas maneras. Then another publication was made, in 2017, and they changed the title: 1460 recipes of vegetables to fill your table with green.

Is it a book for vegetarians?

— No, no. It is a book for everyone. I propose eating chard with cheese. Eggplants, the way I like them best, are truly escalivada, so the smoke gives them flavor. I worked on the recipes with the idea that they didn't always have to be eaten with potatoes. The book gave me a lot of work because I had about three thousand recipes collected. I'll tell you another recipe that I highly recommend, but it's not from the vegetable book but from the herb book: rabbit with rosemary, oil, and vinegar pickle. Lots of rosemary. You start by making a bed of rosemary in the pot. On top, you place the pieces of rabbit. Then another bed of rosemary. You have to use half a liter of oil and half more of vinegar. I use two large bunches of rosemary to make this recipe. It's very good. You add a few grams of pepper. You cook it one day and eat it the next, which will be even better. It's a very good recipe if you have guests, because that way you can be with them, and not busy with the kitchen.

Why do you think books became so well-known?

— Because I explain everything in detail, I don't assume anything is known. If I say that a mayonnaise should be used, I explain how it should be done. I also liked that there were no photos, I wanted illustrations because photos do not exactly correspond to what is being cooked, and I want people to feel free with the recipes, not to seek to replicate that photo. And I also asked that the pages breathe, that they have white space, so that everything wouldn't look cluttered.

Changing the subject, I'm going to ask you about your work at the design studio with your husband.

— We had a production company. I did everything there except pick up a camera. We did the art direction for the commercials.

Like Freixenet's bubbles.

— It was a project that fell into our laps; we hadn't even opened the restaurant yet. Mr. Josep Ferrer, who was then the owner of Freixenet, a brilliant businessman, came to us. And we hit it off immediately. He had seen an advertisement of ours, Terry brandy, in which a woman rode a saddleless horse. The spectators thought she was naked because we showed bare feet. Mr. Ferrer wanted something similar. Then it was I who thought of turning a woman into a bubble for the Freixenet advertisement as if she were a genie, all dressed in gold. It was a time when nothing could be shown, not even a low-cut neckline. It was the sixties. We didn't want her to be sexy either. We wanted them to be like little genies. I thought of a bubble and in the end there were up to fifteen. Every April we started working on it so that the advertisement would come out for the Christmas campaign. We worked a lot. It was a very daring advertisement, because Mr. Ferrer was. We even made a six-minute advertisement with a bubble sitting on the tip of a moon singing a song. He loved it.

You are a restless woman. You must be working on some project.

— Yes. What I'm doing now is for my grandchildren. They have become interested in my family history, and I am preparing a book for them about their father, mother, grandparents... They left to avoid living through Nazism, and in Spain they found themselves with the Civil War.