Helena Termes: “A woman cried while eating the rooster combs at the restaurant because she remembered her grandmother.”

PalamósThe couple Jeffrey Ruiz (Badalona, ​​​​1992) and Helena Termes (Figueres, 1995) opened six months ago the restaurant La Cort del Mos in Palamós and say it feels like twenty years have passed. "It's been very intense," they say on a Sunday afternoon as they begin their first week-long vacation. They both met at theHotel Perelada, where they worked in different areas – banquets, Jeffrey; pastry, Helena – and had previously worked in the country's great restaurants – such as El Celler de Can Roca – and in cooking schools: Jeffrey, at the CETT hospitality school in Barcelona, ​​​​and Helena, at the CETT school in Girona. La Corte del Mos is their first venture together, and the first they want to maintain forever, because what they have achieved in six months with seven tables has been unprecedented. The warm reception from customers and specialized critics encourages them to think big. For now, they are nominated for the Cuiner Revelation award, which will take place at the Gastronomic Forum Barcelona, ​​​​at the Fira de Barcelona facilities, on Wednesday, November 5. A curiosity of the restaurant: the wine list is a handwritten notebook, in which 60% of the wines are natural. And the name of the restaurant is the union of the word court (both of pigs and of the nobility) and bite (of bite and the last syllable of Palamós). The photograph hanging on the bathroom door graphically shows the double game they play with the restaurant's name.

Six months and a nomination for a Cuiner Breakthrough Award. How have you experienced that time?

— In a very intense way, but the real difficulties we had were with the opening, not because we couldn't get the money from the bank, but because of all the paperwork and permits required to open a restaurant. All the talk about aid for young entrepreneurs isn't true. Now, once we were open, it was there because we had a very clear idea of the cuisine we wanted to create.

Doing so in a tourist town with so many restaurants is not easy.

— There are many restaurants in Palamós, yes, but not as many with the dishes we make. Perhaps it's starting now, and we're very happy about it because competition is always good. You're better if you have competition, because it forces you to do better.

I look at the menu and think that it is unique, different, and that there are few restaurants where I have been recently that have it. Perhaps in the Finger and Fact, from Girona. In Barcelona, ​​​​in the South, France, Pompeii...

— We define the dishes we make as new Catalan cuisine. They're traditional dishes, but we've given them a twist. If we made the recipes exactly as described in the Lfree from the Soviet Sent, from 700 years ago, we couldn't eat them. So we adapted them to today's tastes.

And how is this adaptation done?

— With new cooking techniques. Sous-vide cooking, for example, allows you to...

The cat suquet they make would be new Catalan cuisine.

— Yes, the kitten, who is also known as redfish, It's a different kind of stew because we make it differently: we add mushrooms to the broth to give it a mountain flavor, and we cook the potato separately, at a low temperature, and then we integrate it into the stew. Our goal is to ensure that the potato doesn't become mushy or mushy when eaten with the fish, which is what usually happens in stews. That's why we call our dishes new Catalan cuisine, because they're traditional dishes but with modern cooking techniques.

I was thrilled when I saw torta de banca (a type of cashew cake). Another dish I hadn't seen on the menu in a long time.

— And it's a shame. We make it with peppers and herring. The carne asada cake can evolve a lot, just as pizza has. I think we have an identity problem, because we have a recipe book, a quality one, but then we don't know how to defend it.

Give examples of dishes and ingredients that we don't know how to defend.

— Ginger. Appears in Book of the Sent Soví, And now we think it's an Asian ingredient, but it isn't. We buy it from the Japanese farmer in Pals, and we add it to the sofrito, to soften it, to make sosengues. It used to be used in marinades, too, because it was a way to preserve products in times when there were no refrigerators. However, the cinnamon we use today in roasts wasn't used before.

I'm going back to the fundraising cake. Tell me the recipe. Do you make the puff pastry?

— No, the base is Triticum. We add caramelized onion, then roast the pepper in the oven at 50 degrees one day, and the next day we leave it in the pan with the cooking water and Fòrum Cabernet Sauerkraut. We also add a pickled anchovy, prepared using Jeffrey's grandmother's recipe, and to finish, we add a Pauet stew.

It is an evolved recapte cake.

— And it was a huge hit. We're sure it'll be a recipe we won't be able to take off the menu.

I asked them about another dish, the pig's ear sandwich with Palamós shrimp tartar. I was surprised by the affordable price of twenty-one euros.

— It's a surf and turf restaurant, designed to be eaten with your hands, like the torta de recapte. In fact, our menu is designed for sharing, so we bring them to the table already cut. We keep our prices tight because Palamós isn't Barcelona, ​​and because we have everything so outrageously priced, I mean we measure the exact amount of each ingredient. There are dishes, like this one, where the profit margin is very small. There was one, with monkfish, that we had to remove because the margin was negative, as it's an expensive fish. It's also true that the prices at La Corte del Mos are understandable because we are both partners; we get a single salary from the two of us, who spend the whole day together. In total, there are three of us on the team, because we count on Hamza. Together we make a team.

Apart from the menu, I saw a blackboard with an off-menu dish.

— In six months, we've reached forty, off-menu. This one we have today is the wood pigeon stew with black sausage, chickpeas, and turnips. We always put the price on the side, because with off-menu dishes, we think the price should be very clear. And the nice thing about this stew is that we finish it in front of the customer. By the way, the pre-sofrito, the sauté, is made with onion and ginger.

I notice that they have so many dishes, that they haven't made them all in six months yet.

— Yes, we have so many between the two of us that we imagine two good years to put it into practice.

One characteristic of the menu is that there are less noble ingredients, such as pig's ear and rooster's combs, which I have only recently eaten at the Dit i Fet restaurant in Girona.

— Oh! Adrià and Júlia have helped us a lot. We know them from the time we shared at Celler de Can Roca. A woman in the restaurant cried while eating the crests because they reminded her of her grandmother, and also of her childhood. We make the crests confit, on the one hand, and with the rooster carcasses we make a sauce, which we reduce and then pour over the crests. Now, in the fall, we're making it with crayfish and mushrooms.

Finally, after La Corte del Mos, how do you imagine the future?

— We hope La Corte del Mos will be the epicenter of everything to come. We don't want it to ever disappear, because it's a very personal restaurant, but we want it to help us realize many other projects.