"We have closed because we want to focus all our efforts on our other restaurant, the first one we opened in Barcelona and which has given us recognition, the Balón," explain Lena Maria Grané and Ricky Smith, the young entrepreneurs who confess that they believed in the Time Out Market project from the beginning because they thought it was "a quality gastronomic offer." That is why they took a chance, "but with the current number of visitors, especially from Barcelona, it is very difficult for us to manage a business of this nature," they continue to explain.

I interview Jordi Artal (Toronto, 1966) on an exceptional Monday afternoon, because in the evening he will be hosting large groups of congressmen from the Mobile World Congress. Everything is in motion in the kitchen, and in the dining room the waiters are setting tables with white tablecloths. I ask him about my mother, and he tells me how well she feels at 85 years old. Jordi was born in Toronto because his parents left to make their fortune, and, for visas at that time, it was easier to go to Canada than to the United States. His mother, Roser Artal, picks him up every day from his house in a car to go to work at the Cinc Sentits restaurant, which has two Michelin stars. She tells me that the women in her family are very strong, that his grandmother died at 101 years old. Together with his sister, Amèlia, Jordi opened the restaurant in Barcelona in 2004. He had never been a cook before because, in fact, he worked in a very different field (he was a marketing director in Silicon Valley, California). However, both proved to be very knowledgeable, and in 2008 the Cinc Sentits restaurant received its first Michelin star. At the end of 2020 it received its second. Amèlia is no longer in the restaurant, but Èric has been there for seventeen years.