It is very likely that the spark of Vidal Gravalosa’s vocation was ignited at Casa Julio, the business run by his parents in Nou Barris, which he remembers as “one of those places where they would leave the tureen in the center of the table so that you could repeat.” The boy, an only child, studied Hotel Management at the Autonomous University, but he had already been abducted by the kitchen and he was not going to miss the opportunity to learn alongside figures such as Neichel, Santi Santamaria, the pastry chef Oriol Balaguer or in the two houses which he still considers his best school: El Celler de Can Roca, where he says they taught him cooking and many other things – “I will always remember those conversations with Montse, the brothers’ mother”, – and Lasarte, in Barcelona.
Gravalosa would go on to work as an executive chef for a company, manage a bunch of cooks, and earn a good living. But he was already thinking about the idea of ??opening his restaurant. He achieved it in 2010, in a tiny venue in Poblenou, where La Forquilla premiered, and where he managed to play all the keys in the restaurant, without any help. “When I was serving tables, there were customers who asked me to come into the kitchen to congratulate the chef and I told them that I was the chef myself”-. The house would become a success and he kept it until 2018, when another dream would take him to Tarragona to start a project with two friends. He wipes his smile as he explains that it was “one of those wrong decisions you make in life.”
But the passion for the trade does not strike her down with a setback, so she tried again, and although she did not choose the best moment – “we were going to open on March 14, 2020, the day the state of alarm was decreed” -, La Forquilla was reborn in an old motorcycle workshop that it had to reform, at number 152 Calle Aragó, deserted at that time, and once again managed to gain a regular clientele.
He confesses, reviewing that path, that he is part of the last batch of professionals with a way of living the trade. He does not regret the hours and days and years dedicated in body and soul, the effort to support himself when things get complicated, when everything becomes more expensive, the rent, the raw material; when he recognizes that he has not found the complicit help that he would have liked. And he says that if before you worked with the illusion of seeing a future and earning a living with a job that you were passionate about, “now you struggle to stay on a tightrope and in restaurants like this the objective ends up being to survive”. And despite the sincerity attack, he assures that he is still in love with his job, “because when you like what you do and the clients repeat, it fills you up.”
He understands that it draws the attention of those who visit him for the first time to see him address all fronts; he buys, cooks, serves and does the dishes. But he asks that he be valued not for that apparent acrobatics, but for the final result: the rhythm of the service flows and the delicate and impeccable cuisine is undoubtedly worth the visit.
This multitasking chef’s life could be made easier with a single tasting menu proposal, but he refuses to deprive his customers of the option of choosing à la carte (he admits a maximum of 20 covers). The menu, which costs 65 euros without the pairing, starts with some starters (paprika grisini, potato tile, suckling pig’s ear pork rinds) to move on to exquisite starters: assorted tomatoes with pickled mussels and tomato and potato foam, a White asparagus with its cream, a hollandaise and Iberian jowl cubes as tasty as the rice with baby squid and red shrimp from Vilanova. They are followed by the San Sebastian-style hake with potato parmentier and cockles, a correct matured beef tataki with mustard ice cream and two desserts, the Maresme strawberries with txacolí and muscovado and the very sweet brioche French toast with carrot and raspberry.
