The writer who was accused of being a Franco spy and who praised the fish of the Empordà and Negronis

Fig treesThere was a day, sometime in the 1970s, when Josep Pla visited the Motel Empordà, and he remained connected to it until his death. He became very close friends with Josep Mercader, the Motel's founder, and later with Jaume Subirós, Mercader's son-in-law. Upon Mercader's death, Pla asked Subirós not to change anything about the restaurant, to continue making the same dishes. His exact words were: "There are houses where the heir starts making changes, and then they collapse." He also gave him another piece of advice: "There are customers you'll have to watch out for, because they'll only come to see if it falls apart and closes; so don't change a thing."

Everything has been written and said about the writer Josep Pla, but there are two people in the world who can confidently conjugate both verbs. The first is Xavier Pla, the biographer, author of the book A furtive heart (Destino), who consulted all of Josep Pla's written documentation to write a book of more than 1,000 pages, which has sold over 15,000 copies. The second is the chef and head waiter. Jaume Subirós, who runs the Motel Empordà together with his children Jordi, Albert, Lluís and Sílvia, and his wife, Anna Maria Mercader, daughter of Josep MercaderSubirós knew Josep Pla for years, and it was he who prepared and brought him his meals while he was hospitalized in a clinic in Figueres, which he himself had found for him. To ask them about what Josep Pla ate and drank, we brought them both together, Xavier Pla and Jaume Subirós, at the Motel Empordà one winter midday. The conversation began with a Negroni in their hands, as they recalled that March 8th was Josep Pla's birthday. This year, 2026, he would have turned 129.

"Josep Pla once gave the Abbot of Poblet a Negroni, and when he finished it, he told him, 'Don't get hooked on it now,'" says Jaume Subirós, who remembers him fondly. Xavier Pla maintains that the writer was very fond of Italian vermouths, hence his obsession with the Negroni, which is made with equal parts gin, Campari, and sweet red vermouth. Subirós believes that the writer is always remembered as old, wearing a beret, with the aches and pains of age: "Why don't we take pictures of him as the robust, tall, and handsome man he was in his youth?" he says, adding that, as a customer, he showed very little financial acumen. He emphasizes this point because in his biography, Xavier Pla was able to verify that during his youth, in the 1930s, the writer was obsessed with the financial return of the family fortune. And he did it despite being far from the family farmhouse, because my father wouldn't cooperate, and besides, with his lack of tact, he only made things more complicated. In contrast, at the Motel, "he'd make a meal that cost over 3,000 pesetas, give us 500, and tell us to keep the change," says Subirós, who also remembers that he would bring back banknotes from his trips to Europe. "One day he gave me Swiss banknotes and told me not to take them to the bank; to keep them."

Bread with olive oil, soaked in milk

Since he often stayed overnight at the Motel, Subirós observed that the writer went to bed late, came down for breakfast around noon, and then had a glass of milk with a piece of toast drizzled with olive oil. Once the toast was thoroughly soaked in oil, he would put it in the glass of milk, soften it, and eat it like that. The mixture of oil and milk has always surprised Jaume Subirós, but he knows that Josep Pla ate it that way because he had few teeth and couldn't chew much. "With these hours he kept," Subirós says, "when I heard that Josep Pla was a Francoist spy, I thought: 'I wish all Francoist spies had been like that.'" Subirós believes it was impossible for him to work, because the writer was exclusively concerned with his pages and the pen he carried everywhere, with writing. In this regard, Xavier Pla comments that in his biography, based on the documentation he found, he wrote that for a few years he worked in an information and propaganda office in Marseille with his partner, Adi Enberg. There they prepared press dossiers; "it wasn't espionage"; "he did it for a few months to survive, and it's not true that he was a spy," states the biographer, Xavier Pla, who adds that when the dictator Franco entered Barcelona via the Diagonal Avenue as the city fell, he was in another car, following behind. "He was always interested in power, but it was he who managed to create a breach in the Franco regime to convince the censors that they should allow writing in Catalan."

Let's return to the dishes he ate. For breakfast, then, a slice of bread soaked in oil and milk. For lunch, thyme soup, and for the main course, perhaps a thrush or a corball baked in the oven, which was his favorite fish. And that's how he wrote it in the book. What we have eaten"I was curious about everything in life; I know few people who can speak knowledgeably about the philosopher Montaigne and about peas or fish," says Xavier Pla, who recalls that in 1925 he published Things seenIn this work, he writes about food for the first time. At the time, Josep Pla had been in Italy and had come to the political idea that Catalonia should have its own cuisine, and from there all the other texts he wrote later, such as Lobster and chicken (published in 1952) or the same What we have eaten (from 1972). Or also the Mallorca Guide, in which he dedicates lines to food.

At this point, the biographer, Xavier Pla, recalls that in the Mallorca Guide (From 1948), Josep Pla explains that he visited Pollença and went to an inn. There he saw that the menu included steak with potatoes and breaded hake. So, Josep Pla asked the owner what he would be having for dinner, and the owner replied: Mallorcan soup. "I want Mallorcan soup for lunch, too," Pla said, believing that the inn's customers were served mediocre food, while the owner kept the best for himself. In short, they finally brought him a plate of Mallorcan soup, and he managed to get everyone at the inn interested in the dish, and they ended up sharing it. "In 1948, Josep Pla had realized that restaurants were living apart from the country's culinary tradition, and he championed it so that no one would feel inferior, which is what the inn owner did, eating his soups in the back room," says Xavier Pla, who thinks the event could pass for something current.

From the anecdote, the writer drew a lesson. Or rather, a book. Jaume Subirós agrees, and recalls that the day his father-in-law, Josep Mercader, brought him the Catalan-style broad beans with his 1973 version, which was exquisitely light, Josep Pla rejected it and asked for the traditional Catalan-style broad beans. At the Motel, the reinterpretation of Catalan-style broad beans, with that touch of mint and that al dente bite of the beans, which are not softened, marked a turning point in Catalan cuisine, and today you can still eat them at the restaurant when they are in season. It is a sublime dish.

Years later, Josep Pla's sisters, Maria and Rosa, They confided to Jaume Subirós that the man wasn't eating anythingHe wasn't well. It was the last year of his life, 1981. Subirós found him a clinic in Figueres, and every day he was there, both at lunchtime and in the evening, he brought him food (rice casserole with thrush; meatballs with cuttlefish; grilled fish; fried eggs; orange peel). Some lunchtimes he would take him from the clinic to eat at the Motel, and then bring him back at 4 p.m. And so it went in February and March, in and out. For Saint Joseph's Day, Subirós took him to Perpignan. The next day, to Poblet. And in April, Josep Pla moved to Mas Pla. There, on April 21st, the sisters called Jaume Subirós again and told him that he was feeling very ill, but that, nevertheless, he had drunk the broth from a bowl and had known, just by tasting it, that they hadn't prepared it themselves, but that Lola de la Pera had cooked it. "He literally told the two sisters: 'You've never made a bowl in your lives; Lola de la Pera made it,'" says Subirós, who emphasizes the refined palate he maintained until the last days of his life. "And then it was said that Josep Pla didn't know anything, that he didn't know how to eat, that it was all a mask and false; it wasn't like that," says Jaume Subirós, and Xavier Pla nods in agreement: he himself also wrote it in his biography. Finally, the writer died on a memorable day, April 23, 1981. "We loved him very much, Josep Pla," concludes Jaume Subirós.