Francesca Baixas: "None of our dishes blow anyone's mind, but the warm olives we serve surprise everyone"

BarcelonaIt's midday on a Wednesday, and in the kitchen of the Franca restaurant in Barcelona (c. Roger de Llúria, 46) the three chefs and co-owners, Joshua McCarty, Gianmarco Greci and Francesca Baixas, are preparing the dishes for the evening service, which is what they offer from Tuesday to Saturday. They opened their doors on Friday, February 21 after spending a whole year looking for a place to open in Barcelona, ​​​​where they were excited to work after various adventures in restaurants such as Mugaritz (in the case of Francesca and Gianmarco), Manresa in California (in the case of Joshua) and at Follia in Sant Joan Despí, by J. I interview Francesca (Barcelona, ​​​​1990), and by her side are her colleagues. Things of destiny: Joshua and Gianmarco met at the North American university of Portland, where one was studying religion and the other philosophy. They promised each other that one day they would have a restaurant together. They have already achieved it. And her name is Franca, because they like the triple meaning of the word: sincerity, lingua franca because between the three of them they speak a mishmash of Catalan and English and free zone, which means a space without rules.

How have the four days you've been open gone?

— Well, it went well, but we were very nervous. We also had to cancel reserved tables at the last minute. One did not show up. And two others were cancelled at the last minute. Since we have just opened, we do not want to ask anyone for their credit card number, because we think it is aggressive. The fact is that when a table is reserved for us, the diner has the guarantee that we will keep it for them, but, on the contrary, the opposite does not happen. There is no such commitment when it should be reciprocal.

Friends and people from the sector came to you.

— The second day, yes, on Saturday. And my father came, and I care a lot about what he thinks. He gave me lots of praise, and at the end of the praise, he told me what he was going to improve.

How now?

— He praised our bikini, what do we say? bikini but it doesn't have cheese or sweet ham, just the bread, inside there is cuttlefish, processed in such a way that it looks like mozzarella cheese. It also has a sauce made with smoked pork, spleen, which we serve separately, and which you can dip your bikini in as you eat it. We serve it hot, and right now we are considering whether to add lard. My father also gave us many other compliments, but he told me that he didn't like one of our menu items, which is to bring all the dishes to the table when you choose the fish or meat menu.

Can you tell me?

— On the menu we have starters, and then a main course that can be fish or meat. The fish is the tail of a monkfish; the meat is the head of a pink loin. Then we bring this second course to the table with all its accompaniments, as if we were at home, where we are free to eat a piece of monkfish with a soft fish stew, Romanesco flowers, duchess potatoes (which is like mashed potatoes) and a radish salad. Once we bring it to the table, everyone is free to eat it in the order in which they want to eat it and how they want to finish the dishes: with the stew, with the Romanesco flowers, with the salad or with the monkfish.

And what is the option of the pork loin?

— We cook it with a reduced pork sauce with our own spices, such as anise and cloves. It comes to the table with beans, which we tie to the sauce with little brains and fermented peppercorns. We also put glazed turnips, with their leaves, and a mustard salad. The fact of bringing everything to the table, we want to imitate how we eat at home; my paternal grandmother, Meri, used to do it like that. We like that feeling of not having enough room on the table, because of the plates, because that is how the conversation flows, and the food accompanies and time stretches.

The prices are very good. I don't know if there is a restaurant in Barcelona that will serve a monkfish tail with all the accompanying dishes for this price.

— The fish option is seventeen euros; the meat option, sixteen. If you come to the restaurant and order this option directly, you can have dinner. We also recommend that you choose one of the starters, so that you can try our other preparations. If you do this, the average ticket, which will all depend on the wine you choose, ranges between forty and sixty euros per person.

Let's talk about starters. Which ones do you make?

— We want to explore Catalan pasta, which we have. These are macaroni (we are also making spaghetti), cannelloni and noodles in a casserole. We are asking ourselves questions to delve deeper into their cuisine. For example, we make spaghetti with a minced meat, because we want to do the double trick that a minced meat represents in Catalan cuisine, which is always to tie the dish together, and in this case, to tie the pasta together, because in Italian cuisine pasta is mixed with a sauce. We have started with a minced meat made with almonds, roasted garlic and parsley, but we will prepare others. The next one will be with saffron, hazelnuts and carquiñoles. The idea is to tie the pasta together in Catalan style.

What will you do with the noodles?

— We are wondering if we can drag other pastas. At the moment we are doing tests, and so far we have not liked them. We have put it on hold, and maybe we will come back.

That's why you say that their cuisine is invented traditional.

— Gianmarco knows how to explain what we mean by these concepts. He explains that the word traditional We consider it a genre. Until now, it has been avant-garde, but we believe that there are other ways of being creative, which is to delve deeper into the traditional genre. We do not reject avant-garde cuisine, but right now we find it more fun to be creative in the traditional cuisine genre. I myself put it another way. Until now, with avant-garde cuisine, we said that a dish had been created that no one had ever made before, but if we look at traditional cuisine from within, creativity is infinite.

Avant-garde cuisine, what would it be if we had to define it.

— Gianmarco would say that it is a cuisine of the senses, because it seeks an idea that surprises all the senses, including sight and touch. On the other hand, we want to make a cuisine that does not rely on sensory surprises, which does not mean that there are none, but rather that we seek the concept of cultural surprise.

A cultural surprise could be the hot olives that are offered as a starter.

— These are olives that we buy without salt, and we season them with citrus peel, herbs and we heat them. We keep them at room temperature, in the ronner, throughout the service, to serve them hot. And yes, they surprise. None of our dishes blow anyone's mind, but hot olives surprise everyone. We like surprises with an internal smile. Maybe it's a more feminine way of doing things.

This phrase that you just said, that none of your dishes blows anyone's mind, you say it because both you and Gianmarco have worked at the Mugaritz restaurant.

— I was at Mugaritz for five years, and that's where Gianmarco started. He explains that Mugaritz is the only restaurant that has taken a step further than Bulli had not. To put it another way, Bulli is modernist; Mugaritz, the first postmodern. And this is because Mugaritz has a discourse that questions whether dishes should be good. At Bulli this may also have occurred as a consequence of a texture that they had innovated, but it was not the central fact; on the other hand, at Mugaritz the main goal is to ask what it means for something to be good. If we transfer what Gianmarco says to art, it is when an artist asks himself whether paintings have to be pretty, which is a central aesthetic question in art. Well, in gastronomy, Mugaritz has asked himself what it means for food to be good. No one had ever asked this before and no one had ever investigated it as he did.

Do you want to continue investigating what you learned at Mugaritz?

— We like to be connected to the public. Restaurants are institutions that have had this double tension between selling food and proposing concepts since the beginning of the world, but at the same time it is necessary to fill the restaurant every day. At Mugaritz people do not come to eat, but to feed on concepts, that is to say the restaurant is on the border between food and becoming an artistic project, and if it is more of this second line, then it is an art gallery.

Fran, your face is used as a plate at Mugaritz. At the pop-up organised by Paradiso-Lab, it was served to us with flowers, which we had to lick.

— It was an idea from the chef Javier Bergara, who has been there since day one at Mugaritz. He suggested it to me and I accepted. I know that they have presented the side dish with flowers but also others with a veil.

I ask you again about your restaurant. How have the roles in the kitchen and in the dining room been distributed?

— We are all three chefs, but right now we have been distributed in different places. Joshua is in the kitchen, Gianmarco is in charge of the wines, and I am in the dining room. We are all co-owners, and our idea is that between the three of us everything is covered. We have hired a kitchen assistant and a dishwasher, who are the ones who keep the working hours, because we put in a lot of hours. The other day, when I went to get the car in the parking lot, I realized that I had exceeded the fifteen-hour ticket that I had put in.

I ask you about two dishes that have caught my attention, the nougat and the bowl salad.

— Turronada is a fried chickpea dough with bay leaf powder, garlic and mayonnaise. It reminds me of a familiar taste, like cod fritters, because the bay leaf and garlic remind me of it. It is a Catalan recipe, which I have read is made in Maresme, and that it is also made in the south of France and in Italy. And the bowl salad is fun. It doesn't have soup. We dress the chickpeas, cabbage, carrots, and add raw celery and turnip, so that it has a crunchy touch. And all of this with a vinaigrette with mustard seeds. To make it, we don't start by boiling it for five hours, because we want each ingredient, separately, to have a lot of flavour. However, in a bowl, the objective is for the broth to be very enriched by the ingredients that are added.

Finally, what are your dreams?

— Right now, as Joshua says, we need the service to be very good, we need to build customer loyalty, the restaurant is working and we find a balance between work and personal life. Our dream is what we have in our hands, the Franca restaurant. Have you noticed that we still don't have the sign up?