Sergi de Meià: "When I worked as a cook in a restaurant, I was always angry; now I'm not, because I work for love"

BarcelonaI interview the chef Sergi de Meià (Barcelona, 1977) at the Centre Comarcal Lleidatà, located on Gran Via in Barcelona. On the second floor, while a group of elderly people play cards, we sit at a table illuminated by large windows. The conversation begins with his origins in Lleida, from Vilanova de Meià, and we move on to the restaurant where I first met him, Sergi Ferrer-Salat's Monvínic, which has since disappeared and been replaced by the Finestres bookshop.

Your family is from Vilanova de Meià.

— My great-grandparents, from the houses Cal Tapis and Cal Guerra. I live now in Cal Tapis nou.

Are you alive?

— From Wednesday to Sunday. The other two days, I am in Barcelona, where my wife and my son, who is already studying at university, live. In Vilanova de Meià we have had two very good mushroom seasons. These days, if it rains, in two weeks we will have morels.

What led you to leave your life as a chef in Barcelona and go to your family's village?

— I wanted to change my life. Due to the pandemic, I closed my restaurant. I brought out projects I had written, in which I focused on orchards. I had written it since 2012 when I worked at the Monvínic restaurant! I called some American friends from Saint Paul, Minneapolis, clients I had met, and I proposed the project to them.

Who is it?

— It is a gastronomic, social and environmental project, which aims to revitalize the countryside of five villages that make up a single municipality with four hundred and fifty inhabitants. The capital, where I live, Vilanova de Meià, is the one that concentrates more population: two hundred and eighty. With the support of American friends and the generosity of Frigicoll, which has offered us a kitchen-classroom, I added more people, and I made a foundation out of it.

The Coma de Meià Foundation.

— Yes, I didn't want to start any company or restaurant. I incorporated it three and a half years ago. I think I have been privileged all these years, and that is why I want to give back to society what I have learned. I want to dedicate my knowledge to helping people at risk of social exclusion.

Therefore, does the foundation have a school there?

— Yes, it is a dual training: we have a cooking-restaurant school, and this has just been the second course. The qualification that students achieve is the professional certificate of basic restaurant and bar operations, taught by the Lleida Hospitality School. This year I have three students, two of whom have intellectual diversity. We offer very direct training: we start each day meditating, then observing nature, now spring mushrooms, then we go to the kitchen. We also offer them accommodation with flexible rent. With the training they receive a salary, which they must learn to manage because the ultimate goal is for them to be autonomous.

Tell me about the gardens you have and take care of.

— We started with a five-hundred-square-meter garden, and now we've expanded it. The idea is for it to be visitable, consumable, and educational. We also want to sell the produce to local restaurants, and we want to work with native seeds along with Cultures Trobades from Lleida. With the garden, from the beginning, we are affiliated with Slow Food Educa, which connects agricultural farming with education, so that a school plants the seed of a vegetable, then harvests it, and finally local chefs go there and teach them how to cook it. This year we did it with a school from Artesa de Segre.

Explain to me the Green Recipe recognition that the foundation has received.

— We have been chosen as a pioneering project to work against food waste. We have worked with six restaurants (El Celler de Can Roca, La Gormanda, el Rasoterra, el Cafè Pessetes, and also school kitchens) for which we have carried out audits or studies of how they worked and then we have proposed how they could reduce what they rejected. After a period of work, we have helped them to utilize more than 20% of the food. What they rejected has become a new product. For example, at La Gormanda, with Carlota Claver, we have turned the food scraps they had into vinaigrettes and sauces. If on average a restaurant has 30% waste, we give them working tools to reduce it to a minimum. After a year, they can have a positive of ten or fifteen thousand euros, because they use it as alternatives for more dishes.

Have you considered entering wholesale catering? I mean hotel breakfasts, for example.

— We want to do it, yes. And I mean that we have carried out this initiative with the help of the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries.

When someone asks you to recommend a restaurant, what do you tell them, what do you make them pay attention to?

— I tell him to follow the criteria of the Slow Food guide, where recommended restaurants cook all dishes from start to finish. I'm not saying you can't eat well in Barcelona, but we have to have criteria. Outside of Barcelona, there is an unexplored world. Many young people are settling in the Terres de Lleida and opening very good gastronomic projects. And we are not that far from Barcelona!

And if we haven't looked at any guide, and we look at a restaurant's menu, what clue do you think will tell us that that restaurant lights the stoves and doesn't dedicate itself to opening pre-packaged meals of the fifth range?

— The clue is the uniformity of the menus. If the nomenclature and the dishes are the same, it means everything is already precooked. It will be like this more and more because cooking requires many hours and a large team. The other day I was at an extraordinary restaurant, Trü, by Artur Martínez. Everyone was working behind the bar, all the recipes were prepared from scratch. And he works with local produce. The menu did not have the uniformity I'm talking about, where you go from one place to another and everything is the same.

Before you told me that you meditated with the students every morning.

— I started meditating during the pandemic. I do it every day. With the students, before classes, always. And I plan the foundation's activities years in advance, I collaborate on projects that excite me, like Perifèria Cultural, for which we cook at concerts for a hundred or more people. We don't have food trucks, no; we cook. The students and I. We use local produce, local recipes. It doesn't make sense that at concerts we eat hamburgers or pizzas because then you could be anywhere in the world. We make Catalan cuisine, based on the recipes of the towns where the concerts are held. We ask the neighbors, the grandmothers of the towns where the concerts are held what the traditional recipes are, and then those are the ones we will reproduce when the concerts are held. Last year we cooked in twenty-five towns.

Finally, what challenges do you still have to achieve?

— Opening a workshop where we transform the products we harvest from the gardens and sell them as prepared dishes. We will start doing this in Vilanova de Meià, and we will also initiate other work avenues that I cannot reveal yet. The foundation wants to help the territory, the people who live there. Look, I'll explain: we have an intern student from the business degree who was supposed to go to Balaguer to do her internship, and now she can do it with us, in her own town. Her life has changed because she doesn't have to travel kilometers, and she has also discovered that she likes cooking. That's why I would like to encourage everyone to join our foundation, which is proactive. We have also signed agreements with companies. It is very nice that so many things are happening in Vilanova de Meià.

I see you very happy, Sergi.

— Yes. And that's even though I've always considered myself lucky for my professional path, for all the restaurants where I've been able to work: El Reno, the Torres brothers, Monvínic. Now I have more work than ever. When I worked as a cook in a restaurant I was always angry; not anymore, because I work with love and for love. Nothing makes me lose my temper anymore.