There are 129,000 people on the waiting list to dine at El Celler de Can Roca, a three-Michelin-star restaurant in Girona, Spain. It opened in 1986 and has twice claimed the No. 1 spot on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list.
I’d never been to a Roca restaurant before, so with great curiosity I joined a three-day immersion into the gastronomic world they’ve created.
My final meal of the weekend included several dishes I’ll never forget, including pigeon with olives, blackberries, and anchovies. But, during dessert, I was asked to wear a virtual-reality headset. It revealed tiny Indigenous people dancing around a cacao tree somewhere in Central America. This vignette delivered sensory overload instead of sensual pleasure, the traditional goal of haute cuisine.
Has gastronomy taken a wrong turn, drifting into an obscenely expensive and overly mannered irrelevance? These days, it seems to be held captive by lists and guidebooks with hidden commercial and political agendas.
But now, the new Hotel Esperit Roca delivers a less choreographed version of this food, along with a beautiful and restful place to spend a few nights. Minimally designed to reveal maximalist views of the Pyrenees, this 15-room property is the latest addition to the Roca family’s empire, which has grown to include a boutique hotel named Casa Cacao, an ice-cream shop, seven restaurants, and a wine bar. All are located in the region around Girona, with the exception of a new restaurant at the Macallen distillery, in Scotland.
The key players are Joan Roca, the cook; Josep Roca, the maître d’hotel and sommelier; and Jordi Roca, the pastry chef and chocolate-maker. Their parents, who ran a simple roadhouse in a working-class neighborhood on the edge of Girona, taught them well. The Rocas are savvy entrepreneurs and charming, seasoned performers. Still, their default settings are humility and kindness—even when they’re showing off.
They are part of a rich tradition of creativity in Catalonia, a region in northeastern Spain, which has produced the architect Antoni Gaudi, artists Joaquín Sorolla, Joan Miró, and Salvador Dalí, and the chef Ferran Adrià, whose now closed restaurant El Bulli was another powerhouse in modern Spanish gastronomy.
In the Rocas’ small corner of northeastern Spain, an hour-and-15-minute drive from the Barcelona airport, the new hotel occupies a 19th-century fort called Castell Sant Julià de Ramis. Located 10 miles outside of Girona, it also includes an 80,000-bottle wine cellar, a distillery, a brewery, an exposition space, and two new restaurants.
At the appropriately named Normal restaurant, in Girona, the Rocas serve food that, as one brother described, “reminds us where we come from.” The chef Elisabet Nolla cooks casserole dishes over a live fire in an homage to her mother and grandmother. The amuse-bouche—a creamy green-onion soup—set the comforting tone of a superb meal. It included a warm salad of seasonal vegetables with dried apricots and cured duck breast as well as grilled sea bream in a cava-infused beurre blanc sauce.
Lunch at Esperit Roca, a more formal affair, reflected the bold modernist cooking and theatrical dining style that have won the Rocas their reputation. The experience begins with the delivery of a wooden globe whose five arms offer amuse-bouches with the flavors of Japan, Peru, Korea, Turkey, and Thailand. I was politely amused. But next, a composition of sweet potato and carrot purées, mussels, and sea urchin growled with the Rocas’ talent.
As delicious as it was, I was still pondering the future of fine dining. And yet, on the way home, I remembered the delight in receiving a Sony Walkman as a Christmas gift many years ago. At the time, that, too, seemed revolutionary. To me, it was exciting, but to another, older generation, distressing. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so quick to rush to judgment about V.R., A.I., or whatever the next thing may be. After all, 129,000 people are excited about this type of dining experience for a reason.
The next day, Joan Roca had the last word. “What we want to eat right now hasn’t been invented yet, which is why I’m looking forward to returning to my kitchen tomorrow morning,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. If haute cuisine has a future, odds are that this talented trio of Catalan brothers will find it.
The writer participated in this travel experience through the Premium Events Collection for American Express Platinum Card Members
Alexander Lobrano is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL. His latest book is the gastronomic coming-of-age story My Place at the Table: A Recipe for a Delicious Life in Paris
