Paco Solé Parellada He was a beloved and essential figure in Catalan gastronomy and culture. Owner of the 7 Portes restaurant, an engineer, economist, professor, and curious soul, he was much more than a restaurateur..He was a Renaissance man. With boundless curiosity, a generous heart, and a dazzling intelligence, he knew how to connect seemingly distant worlds—cuisine and academia, history and business, popular culture and gastronomy—with an open, rigorous, and deeply humanistic perspective.

Paco Solé Parellada, owner of the 7 Portes restaurant in Barcelona and professor at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), died early Thursday morning, according to a statement from the Catalan Academy of Gastronomy and Nutrition, of which he was a member.

Mayonnaise, the sauce resulting from emulsifying olive oil with egg yolk, salt, and a squeeze of lemon, is of Menorcan origin, not French. Research, driven by chef and doctor Pep Pelfort since 2022, suggests that the Duke of Richelieu, when he conquered the island of Menorca in 1756, knew it and popularized it in his country many years later. Since until now, no document existed on the island that recorded the sauce described step by step before the French had described it, the authorship was attributed to France. Furthermore, in France, when it had been written down, the recipe had been passed down as mayonnaise and mayonnaise, a fact that researchers argue is a typographical error: the backwards y is an h, which was the letter that the population of Mahón had in ancient times. For years, it was useless to formulate hypotheses about the name of the sauce, which clearly referred to the population of Mahón. Written documentation was the most important, and on the island there was none that described its preparation. Everything changed when, in a private library on the island, researcher Pep Pelfort found the Manuscript by Joana Caules, dating from 1750, in which the recipe is described in detail under the title "to make a raw fish sauce." What's new now is that the book has just been published in the 7 Puertas collection of historical Catalan cookbooks, and has become the 10th volume of the enormous work begun by the great Barcelona restaurant located on Passeig de Isabel II.