Joan Roca: top restaurant’s “structures will be very hard to keep in the future”

Barcelona (Gastroteca.cat). – In the interview, cook Joan Roca admits that top restaurants will be very hard to maintain in the future due to their lack of competitiveness and the numerous staff involved. The Celler de Can Roca restaurant is currently ranked as the 5^th best restaurant in the world in Restaurant Magazine. Cook Joan Roca and his brothers Jordi and Josep run the famous restaurant in Girona. When asked about this important classification, Joan Roca stated, it’s “very hard to believe, as it’s very hard that anyone has been able to classify this. Thus people have to be quite rash to rank the best restaurants of the world from 1 to 50. Therefore, this cannot be taken seriously.” This modest outlook reflects the Roca family’s concept of traditional, innovative home cooking.

“I learned how to cook with my mother”, said Joan. Since the age of 11, Joan Roca has been whipping up traditional foods in his home kitchen. He and his brothers later attended the Girona Catering School. Travelling to places such as France influenced the team of brothers. “We learned a lot there. Thus, little by little, going from one place to another, taking things from other country’s cuisines as well, we have developed our own way to understand modern cooking.”

Joan Roca also elaborated to CNA his concept of Catalan cuisine. In addition to traditional, local cuisine, Roca stressed that Catalonia acts as a “sponge land”, adapting to new ways of cooking throughout the years. “We have had a spirit of inconformity and we have often questioned, “Why is this always being done this way?” “Is this technique used by our grandmother the best one?” This spirit has made Catalonia an important referent in the world of modern cuisine.

Joan Roca also reflected on the future of high quality cuisine. While he thinks that top chefs will continue working, he admitted that he does not know how great restaurants will be in the future. The chef stressed the fact that top restaurants have enormous “structures that are very hard to keep” due to their possible lack of competitiveness in relation to other restaurants. He thinks that there will be very few of these culinary temples that today people occasionally visit, which has become less frequent in the last years.