Conversation between the chefs Joan Roca and Gastón Acurio

Thank you very much for being here and for participating in this dialogue and supporting this project, which is important to us. What we are trying to do is to establish connections, dialogues between cuisine and gastronomy, other arts, to see to what extent other disciplines can help us, to see how the open heart of people, more and more people come with an open mind, with an open heart, to see to what extent we can, playing with this interdisciplinarity, go a little further in the effect of influencing their emotions. There is also a kind of ethical obligation in restaurants like yours, restaurants that bet on the avant-garde, the obligation to always go a little further. To go a little further, until recently it was to go a little further in the search for new flavors in a dish. Now, fortunately, we live in a fascinating time for cooks because we live in the kingdom of freedom, where suddenly a tomato can move a person and be the star of a dish and not have to resort to expensive products, where the stages begin to clean up and one does not have to resort to a lot of covers and decorations and so on, but can use organic elements like this to build experiences. But in this world where we are demanded a role in this sense, suddenly this fascinating goal appears, which is to be able to incorporate everything that happens around us. Sometimes it will be the arts, sometimes it will be social aspects, sometimes environmental aspects, to incorporate them in the staging, in the tasting menu, in the dishes, in the stories, and build almost like stories, notebooks, scores, with acts, consequences, where in the end what you are looking for is no longer just to excite the senses, but that the story continues with a reflection in the house, with a deeper feeling, in a more intimate relationship that remains in time through what you have achieved with moving the diner, which goes beyond the sensory tasteful fact and penetrates the feeling in the mind. So to be able to build these experiences, each one in its own way, because each one takes it to a trajectory. In my case, as you know, Peru, with its fascinations and contradictions, leads you to create a world more linked to the arts, popular art, the environment, social aspects, and to build stories. What I know about your project is that it is absolutely coherent with the moment, what Catalonia means, etc. So I am very excited to be able to wait for that moment in which we can continue learning and sharing. I think it's fascinating, it's beautiful. In fact, as you say, you also have an open window to that connection, to those dialogues. You also have a project in which you are going to look for this synergy. How is it going to be? Well, we, in a first stage, started by writing a script. For example, the script that is a journey through Peru through time. Nature, millions of years ago, when man was a harvester. Then you keep traveling and you get to when man becomes a farmer and pre-Columbian cultures are created, whose engineers gave life to what 50% of the products we have today consume the world. The country, the potatoes, the tubers, the grains, the tomatoes, etc. Then you keep traveling and you get to this meeting, this war that is between Francisco Pizarro and the Inca Tahualpan. And you go through a stage of 500 years of different migrations from Italy, Japan, China, until you get to the current moment. All this through the products of each moment and trying to represent in the dishes that moment so that you can travel. Through this notebook, this script, this book, this video, this music that accompanies you and tells this story that you can follow. Not happy with that, now we are inside the new restaurant. A space where this representation can really incorporate an exclusive music for this story, or some images or even a live theatrical representation for a story to reinforce this act, this moment, which intends to tell something that goes beyond the dish itself. Now we are writing, for example, a journey through the landscapes, through the desert, through the highlands, through the Amazon, through the Andes. And in each space, link it with an art. The sounds of the desert, which sounds contradictory, but in reality there are many sounds. How can you put those sounds in the moment that these dishes appear? Or the reflections of the highland, a very high area, a 4,500 meters high pampa, huge, where there are reflections. How can you reflect that? Or the crossroads, the color, the exuberance of the Amazon. Or the Andean melancholy, which clearly leads you to poetry. But there we have to see if in the theatrical representation of this menu a poet can fit, reciting something, because you can also fall into eccentricity. So there has to be a rhythm, a very precise moment to theatrically represent this proposal, which also, as we mentioned a while ago, is a need of the restaurants that bet on this style. Because every day more young boys with training have the resources, the ability to make a great cuisine in small spaces. So only the restaurants that do unique things, that are not copyable, that are irreplaceable, that are neither better nor worse, they are simply unique. So they justify themselves.