"While Spain eats Manchego cheese, we have an unprecedented quantity and quality of cheese for such a small country."

PeraladaAt the Castell de Peralada restaurant, everything is in full swing at eleven in the morning, preparing for the midday and evening service, which takes place on the terrace overlooking the pond. The Peralada Festival has just begun, with a program that attracts lovers of good concerts. Summer has begun, and the restaurant's menu has changed. "I've been working there since day one," explains chef Javier Martínez (Barcelona, 1984), who recalls meeting the beloved Xavier Sagristà and Toni Gerez while working together at Mas Pau.

The cuisine that Javier Martínez practices today is the one he learned from the man he calls master, Xavier Sagristà. "He instilled in me the idea of making traditional Catalan cuisine, but without taking shortcuts, doing everything very well and little by little, and also with very good products," he explains. He then gives examples of the theory he just mentioned: "Let's make quails and debone them one by one; then we marinate the thighs, while we grill the breast and serve it with a scampi, all with a roasted garlic and hazelnut vinaigrette." The key is the product, the chef emphasizes, but also the slow way of cooking it.

I ask him for another example of a dish, and we move on to the rabbit. "We make cannelloni, filled with tender rabbit meat, and a pâté with butter," he explains. He assures us that the summer menu includes many products: chicken, mackerel, sardines, shrimp, crayfish. They also make the bread, and their signature dish is to bring it to the table, to start the meal, with four types of extra virgin olive oils and also different salts. It's the most civilized way to start a meal, one that reconciles you with life and the land: bread, Catalan olive oil, and salt. "We also serve an oil cake, which we make ourselves with extra virgin olive oil from Espolla; we don't add tomato," says Javier. They vary the four salts.

Among the dishes on the menu, Javier highlights the clotxa, inspired by the Terra Alta region, but he replaces the bread with a fried fritter dough, and inside he places a core of tomato, onion, garlic, all roasted, and cooked octopus. "We put the legs on top," he says. It's an elaborate preparation that's as surprising to the eye as it is to the taste. The same goes for the salted Swiss roll, filled with foie gras, asparagus, and port sauce. "We make the sponge cake without flour, and with the green asparagus stems we make a powder that we turn into powdered sugar," explains the chef, who recalls that the Castell de Peralada restaurant's menu has also included salted dogfish, Parmesan cheese, foie gras, and squid ink sauté.

Catalan cuisine, well prepared

"I wouldn't understand cooking if I didn't make Catalan cuisine," explains Javier Martínez, who adds that the foreign customers who eat at the restaurant get to know the region through the dishes. "We don't modify our cuisine to try to please the foreign customers we have at the restaurant, and that's why we don't use ingredients like avocado, for example." All of these dishes, completed with the cheese and dessert trolley, can be enjoyed if you choose one of the two tasting menus. The long one, finished with cheeses and three desserts, costs 165 euros without wine pairing; and the short one, without the cheese trolley and two desserts, costs 135 euros, also without wine pairing. The culmination of the menu is the small fours, unique, which Javier calls "vino to bar," and which consists of chocolates made with cocoa roasted by themselves with the grape husks, dehydrated, turned into a paste, and added to the fatty part of the cocoa butter. The result is chocolates that have as many flavors as the grape varieties grown at the Peralada winery. "It's one of small four unique, which no one else makes, and which closes the circle with the restaurant and the winery, which brings us the grape husks when they begin to make the wines."

Meanwhile, head waiter Toni Gerez (Llançà, 1961) has been preparing the cheese trolley. It's the first thing he does when he arrives at the restaurant in the morning. It's a fun job, which takes him two very good hours off duty. Then, at night, he puts all the cheeses back in the cellar until the next day. Toni remembers how he got started in the trade. Around 1981, he opened a restaurant with chef Paco Pérez and two other colleagues. After three years, they closed it, discouraged, and having done their military service in the middle of it. "Just as we were closing it, they told me there was a restaurant in Roses, in Cala Montjoi, that had just regained its second Michelin star and was looking for someone," says Toni. He called and started working. "Soon after, Xavi Sagristà came in, and we became friends there," he recalls. They became inseparable friends and colleagues, because from El Bulli, they both went to Mas Pau, where they quickly earned a Michelin star, and from Mas Pau to Castell de Peralada, having previously worked on another, short-lived, project.

"Every morning I arrive at 10:30 and go to the room where we keep the cheeses, stored between 4 and 8 degrees," he explains. They're covered in chests that don't have fans so they don't dry out, they just cool them down. Then he uncovers them one by one and puts them on the cart. After lunch, he cleans the boards where he served them and returns them to the door in the room. "Managing 300 cheeses, which we change very frequently, requires me to be in contact with suppliers. We have more than ten, and I tell them the ripening point I want for each one," says Gerez, who adds that France still wins in Catalonia: for starters, a single cheese can have both an industrial and a semi-manufactured product. "I always ask for farmed products." At the same time, Catalonia does not have any cheese designation of origin, while France has 40. Yes, 40 designations of origin. "We also need to create a seal that indicates Catalan production, and that is a seal of quality, because we don't currently have one."

And, despite the shortcomings, Catalonia is the leader in the Spanish state. "While Spain eats Manchego cheese, we have an unprecedented quantity and quality of cheese for such a small country." He affirms this and emphasizes it, because Gerez has traveled the Peninsula for talks and tastings and has confirmed it. "We are the anti-Manchego cheese; we'd rather eat Garrotxa than Manchego cheese," he comments.

At the Castell de Peralada restaurant they are betting for cheeses, because it is an extraordinary product that symbolizes a territory"With cheese, we sell territory, producers, stories, landscapes, proximity; it's a gateway to the country we're in," says Gerez, who as head waiter is known for personalizing his cheeses: "We personalize them not only with jam, but also with wine."

Cheese can unleash passions and hatreds among customers. Perhaps no other ingredient generates so much. "I encounter few customers who tell me they're bothered by smells, but when they do, I move the cart to the other side, to the opposite side of the street from the person who told me." Bad cheese odors may be related to the washed rind, which coincides with the same bacteria that humans develop when they sweat. "A rind washed with water and salt prevents fungi from developing, but on the contrary, it develops potent aromatic molecules, which are the same ones that people generate when we sweat: it's the so-called Brevibacterium"I don't find it offensive: I love it because it's very animal."

Finally, Toni Gerez explains what it means to be a head waiter: "I learned it from Juli Soler at El Bulli; head waiter means providing hospitality, taking care of the customer, pampering them, making sure they have a good time, interacting with them, making sure they have a comfortable table, providing friendly, caring service." Toni Gerez knows he's made it when the customer, when it's time to leave, already requests a return date. "Young people should be attracted to the job of front-of-house waiter because it's exciting; in a restaurant, the food should be good, but the customer takes away the memory of the person who served them." As Gerez says, the first memory of a restaurant is often the waiter who brought the dishes. That's why, he argues, front-of-house service is also the future of the restaurant industry.