Francesc Solé Parellada, Paco, as his friends called him, left a void in the Catalan and Spanish academic, business, and gastronomic world on June 19th.A legacy that was evident this Wednesday at the tribute to his life organized by the Polytechnic University of Catalonia and the CYD Foundation – a foundation dedicated to promoting and analyzing the Spanish university system, co-founded in 2002 by Solé – where more than one hundred people attended, including his personal friends. The president of Banco Santander and president of the Knowledge and Development Foundation (CYD), Ana Botín, was in charge of the closing remarks. The banker met Solé in 2002, when, together with Francesc Santacana, they proposed the idea for what is now the Foundation. She was amazed and quickly convinced: "Paco managed to be a bridge between very different fields that initially didn't understand each other, such as business and universities, or innovation and culture," Botín emphasized.

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.

At home, they always said that the best sauce is hunger and that water isn't tasteless if you're thirsty. We're so passionate that we needed to be gone to realize the value of what we had. That Paco was a unique character, a genius, an enlightened man, and a Renaissance man, is known by all of us who have enjoyed close contact with him and those of us who have met him occasionally. But aside from all his knowledge, which is already sufficiently important, Paco had flair, a particular style with a good patina of humor that made all this knowledge painful. One might think it was a technique acquired from so many years of teaching as a professor of economics at the School of Engineering, but in reality it was a mixture of innate aptitudes, others inherited, and the immense curiosity that made him wiser every day. He was interested in everything and everyone: technology, history, literature, painting, music (how we will long to hear him play) All of me by Ella Fitzgerald on the piano at 7 Portes), the country's economy, and, of course, the cuisine. Cuisine in capital letters, without exclusions or borders. However, since she took over at 7 Portes, she realized how fragile our Catalan cuisine is. Over all these decades, she has fought tirelessly, not only to showcase a coherent, sensible, and landscape-adapted culinary heritage, but also to delve into the roots of a precious legacy of rice dishes, fricandoso, and flans, which we have received for free and, ungratefully, have swept under the rug. Paco, we will miss you and mourn for you a lot. Rest assured, we will not stand idly by. We will not allow any of the work you have done to be lost, and we promise you that we will continue to be... the resistance from chicken to casserole!

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.