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, and which this week has turned fifty-six years old. 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 soaked. 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 Nestor Lujan cutlery saved in one place.

Do you speak German, Karin?

— I have always said that I am a hybrid: I speak German, Catalan, Spanish, English, and French. I went to 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 part of his property to his 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 that has color? The drawing is in black, but the cap has color because it is in memory of the time when people smoked in restaurants: this yellow color is what the walls used to get 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 is 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 must 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 many other dishes: fish, meats, vegetables.

— We did it this way because Flash Flash has a lot of regular clientele, 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's 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 the domestic science course. 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 to do it. 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 households 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 down my own recipes. I kept them in a notebook and a box. And one day I gave them to my children. It was then that they told me I should publish them. In 2012, I published the first book with the title Las verduras de muchas maneras. Then another publication came out, in 2017, and they changed the title: 1460 recipes for vegetables to fill your table with green.

Is it a book for vegetarians?

— No, no. It's a book for everyone. I suggest eating chard with cheese. Eggplants, the way I like them best, are truly roasted, so the smoke gives them flavor. I worked on the recipes with the idea that they shouldn't always 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 a pickle of thyme, oil, and vinegar. Lots of thyme. You start by making a bed of thyme in the pot. On top of that, you place the pieces of rabbit. Then another bed of thyme. You have to use half a liter of oil and half a liter more of vinegar. I use two large bunches of thyme 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 focused on 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 say how it should be made. I also liked that there were no photos, I wanted illustrations because photos do not correspond exactly to what is being cooked, and I want people to feel free with the recipes, not to look to replicate that photo. And I also asked for the pages to breathe, to have white space, so that everything wouldn't be too crowded.

Changing the subject, I'm asking 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 that of Freixenet bubbles.

— It was a project that fell into our laps; we hadn't even launched the restaurant yet. Mr. Josep Ferrer, who was then the owner of Freixenet, a brilliant businessman, approached us. And we hit it off immediately. He had seen an advertisement of ours, for Terry's brandy, in which a woman was riding a horse bareback. Viewers thought she was naked because we showed her bare feet. Mr. Ferrer wanted something similar. So I was the one who thought of turning a woman into a bubble for the Freixenet advertisement, like a genie, all dressed in gold. It was an era when you couldn't show anything, not even a low-cut neckline. It was the sixties. We also didn't want it to be sexy. We wanted them to be like little genies. I thought of one bubble, and in the end, there were fifteen. Every April, we would start working on it so the advertisement would be ready for the Christmas campaign. We worked a lot. It was a very daring advertisement because Mr. Ferrer was daring. 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.