How did we discover what we call 'gastronomy'?

Perhaps these dates, so prone to overeating and heavy digestion, aren't the most appropriate to talk about this. But it has to be done sometime. I'm referring to good food and the few people who taught us to appreciate it. In a country that had suffered much hunger, and where frequenting restaurants was a privilege, the word began to gain popularity half a century ago. gastronomy to define a matter about which we knew nothing.

Of course, in many homes, good food was served during the holidays. And for special celebrations, there was always Les Set Portes. If we focus on Barcelona, or Catalonia as a whole, there isn't much more to say about a long period that began with the misery of 1939 and lasted, at least, until the Economic Stabilization Plan of 1959.

There were some exceptions: the Reno restaurant (Tuset and Travessera), opened in 1954 as a luxury restaurant reserved for the Francoist upper class, and the articles on food that Josep Pla and Nèstor Luján published in DestinationIn my opinion, what we would later call "Catalan gastronomic culture" was born the day Pla defined monkfish as "a fish requiring great skill." What is now so common began with the articles of these two figures.

I knew Josep Pla (very little), enough to know that he liked to eat, preferably for free. I also knew Néstor Luján (a little better), when he was already working in The Vanguard And when it came to food and drink, his word was law. Given his eclectic nature, he tried to hide the fact that he didn't like fish. After Luján came Carmen Casas, Luis Bettonica, and Llorenç Torrado. And Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, who was something else entirely.

In any case, until well into the 1980s, there was no restaurant criticism, because there were hardly any restaurants that deserved it, nor any food writers other than those mentioned. And the two temples of fine dining, the aforementioned Reno and Via Veneto (since 1967), were mostly dedicated to French cuisine. Like El Bulli in Cala Montjoi, which, thanks to chef Jean-Louis Neichel (Ferran Adrià was still in culinary school), went from a beach bar to a Michelin-starred establishment. It was almost a countercultural event to discover, in the old Gaig in Horta, or in Agut d'Avignon, or in Hispània in Arenys, that you could eat very well in Catalan.

I became intimately familiar with these restaurants after the French trend had passed (except for the indomitable Raco d'en Binu in Argentona) and the fervor for the new Basque cuisine had subsided. In Barcelona, and throughout Catalonia, people were starting to eat seriously. I say I became intimately familiar with them because from the early 1980s I sat down at Reno and Via Veneto two or three times a week. I didn't know anything about gastronomy, but I worked as a business journalist. And the companies would treat me. You had to eat a lot of lobster to put food on the table.

Somehow, I got used to associating extravagant meals with bankruptcies, payment suspensions, and mass layoffs. When the company in question invited you to a luxury restaurant and served a modest menu, you could expect an acceptable profit and loss statement to be announced. When the business owner urged you to choose from the menu and suggested the most expensive dish, you could be sure he was going to try to convince you that his financial collapse wasn't as serious as it seemed.

The most blatant example of this, in that sense, didn't happen in Barcelona, but in Davos, which at the time was a plutocratic gathering with relatively few attendees. Morgan Bank was in crisis. Naturally, they invited the press to a dinner consisting of mountains of the finest caviar. I'm not exaggerating when I say mountains.

Returning to the topic of gastronomy, it was fascinating to witness from afar (I started living abroad in 1990) the great transformation of Catalan culinary tastes. It's important to remember that everything here had been delayed: we didn't discover the hamburger until the 70s, with the Wimpy's chain, and something similar happened with pizza.

But once we joined the European Economic Community, things accelerated, and suddenly, chefs became rock stars. You'd come back one summer and everyone would be talking about sushi. The following summer, your friends would be telling you how to make a proper carbonara. And a year later, if you hadn't been to El Bulli and weren't raving about Ferran Adrià and his spherification techniques, you were nobody. You already know what's happening now.