"We've been having breakfast together listening to Serrat for forty years."

Chef Paco Pérez noticed Montse Serra long before they exchanged a single word. "I always saw a girl walk by with a blue wasp and a red tail," he recalls. He had no relationship with her, but he and his brother had played soccer since they were children. One day, while Paco was doing his military service, his brother asked him if he could help them at the hostel during Holy Week, since they didn't have a cook. It was 1984, and that's how Paco started working at the Miramar hostel in Llançà, which would eventually become a two-Michelin-star hotel.

"We had a small window that led from the kitchen to the dining room, and through there I would pass the dishes to Montse. That's how I saw her, always accompanied by the music of Joan Manuel Serrat." Paco was offered to stay there during the summer, and he couldn't say he hadn't fallen in love with Montse. The wasp in Port de la Selva.

Forty years later, Paco and Montse still welcome the day that begins with Serrat's voice. He feels practically the same as he did when he was twenty-two. "Montse spreads a lot of joy; she's a person who loves to live life, is fun, has a big heart, and has never stopped being the little girl she is."

Life, says the chef, is knowing that there are happy moments and sad moments, and that being alive is just that, "going through moments." "Finding the person to share them with is one of the most beautiful things that can happen to you," he affirms. For him, love and cooking are one and the same. "Cooking has always been love. Who doesn't remember a mother or a grandmother and that dish that you never forget?" Happiness, Paco Pérez asserts, "is what comes in a moment when you are open and receptive, like, for example, when you sit at a table ready to eat something made with love, whatever it may be."