The family with five Michelin stars that could open a bakery in Barcelona

LanceThe smell of bread, good bread, is noticeable from the moment you enter the Miramar restaurant (Paseo Marítimo, 7) in Llançà. It's like an invisible thread connecting the hotel rooms, with their sea views, to the restaurant. It ties everything together and makes you think of the French scientific studies that have confirmed that the smell of bread activates the brain's reward system, which is what makes you feel better. I mention this study to the Pérez-Serra family, and they tell me that The project to open a bread oven in the restaurant had always been the idea of the father, the chef Paco Pérez.The family is currently considering opening stores in other locations, such as the city of Barcelona.

"It all started with the pandemic, when my father began experimenting with sourdough starters and fell in love with it," explains Guillem Pérez, the restaurant's head waiter and a prize-winning poet. From all kinds of bread, they've moved on to sweets: croissants, loaves... chocolate bird, the sweets, the cheesecakes from the Llémena Valley, the brownies, the tea cakes, the Swiss breads, the sweet and fundraising cakes and, now that Christmas is approaching, the panettone.

While Guillem tells his story, his sister, Zaïra Pérez, is in the bakery. At eight o'clock on a Saturday morning in autumn, she has opened the large window that overlooks the street; hanging there are two frames displaying the prices of everything they deliver. She has positioned herself behind it to serve the neighbors who ask for the bread of the day or breakfast. And what breakfasts they are! The ones that come to the Amà bakery are the same ones served to the hotel guests. Interestingly, the bread slices can be made with either loaf dough or croissant dough: sweet or savory, or both at the same time.

"Next May, the Amà bakery will be two years old," explains Zaïra, who combines her work at the restaurant with acting. She's an actress, and she's just finished filming a movie directed by Aina Clotet. "As you've seen, we also have fig, strawberry, tomato, peach, and green mandarin jams, and we also make chocolate creams," she explains. Each season they prepare different breads; the autumn bread is made with carob, rye, and wheat flour and includes apple, figs, and spices. It has that shape that everyone associates with the artist Salvador Dalí, the one with the three crostini, an original idea for those of us who love the toasted part of the bread. In total, the Amà bakery has thirteen different breads, and among the most unique is the seaweed ciabatta, which is also one of the breads served on the tasting menus along with extra virgin olive oil.

Hugely successful croissants

We're having fun with the croissants again, because Zaïra says they're very popular"We make them filled with mascarpone cream, chocolate, and hazelnut cream inside and out." They look older than usual, and The croissant dough, but laminated in reverse, is also used to prepare Swiss breads, which are another of Amà's great successes.There are cakes, like the one filled with custard cream with figs and raspberries, that also have a croissant base.

We left the workshop and went to the Miramar restaurant's dining room. We passed through the lobby, which is both the restaurant's and the hotel's, and found Montse Serra, Guillem and Zaïra's mother. Awarded by the Catalan Academy of Gastronomy and NutritionShe explains who's who in the black and white paintings on the walls. She tells us about the family, about how Miramar began, as a small shack where her family started eating. Miramar began in 1939, when Guillem and Zaïra's great-great-grandparents arrived in Llançà and bought a fisherman's shack. Montserrat's mother, Isabel, at 91 years old, still has breakfast and lunch at Miramar every day.

In the dining room, Guillem is attending to the customers. "I've always been interested in film and literature, and I've been involved in the family business since I was little, especially in the summer," he recalls. As he grew older, he realized that he could nurture his creative drive by working in the dining room, just like his mother. "I started when I was 22, and I'm about to turn 30, and in that time I've done everything: receptionist, assistant sommelier, head waiter, and now head waiter," says Guillem, who adds that hospitality is the value he values most at Miramar. "I'm passionate about interacting with the customer and managing the team, that idea of knowing everyone's strengths and maximizing them," he explains. Just then, he introduces me to the sommelier, Toni Gata, who has worked at Miramar for 27 years, and suggests we try the pairings of wines from the sea, made near the coast, with the dishes on the menus.

Finally, in the kitchen, Paco Pérez explains that he's brainstorming ideas for new dishes for 2026. He sketches them beforehand in his studio on blank sheets of paper. He imagines them plated, and then brings them to the stovetop. When creating new dishes, he envisions them for the tasting menus (Sea, on the one hand, and Memory, Territory, and Culture, on the other) and for the à la carte menu. "We've always kept the à la carte menu alongside the tasting menus, because it's also a way for customers to try different dishes," concludes the chef, who boasts a total of five Michelin stars, between Miramar, Enoteca (inside the Hotel Arts Barcelona), and restaurants in Poland and Manchester. Finally, an interesting tidbit about the name of the Amà workshop: the logo is a hand, and therefore the meaning would refer to having it. by handBut as they have written it, with the two words together, it could be the simple past tense of the verb loveAnd there could never be a better word to describe the passion of an entire family for the hospitality industry.