The chef Sergi Arola, who has been living in Chile for a few years, stars in the new episode of the podcast Quédate a Comer. Arola, who made a lightning trip to Barcelona to participate in a tribute concert for his brother, who died during the pandemic, explains that he probably will not return to the Catalan capital, where he would miss the complicity of meetings with him too much.
After summarizing his career to tell the youngest about his role in haute cuisine, he acknowledges that there were times when he became “the parsley of all gastronomic sauces”, and also how he had to reinvent himself when the crisis It affected him fully and in 2016 he was forced to give up his great professional project and close the restaurant in Madrid that he had opened with the dream of staying there for the rest of his life.
The cook laments that many small businessmen like him were stigmatized by that crisis “and we were branded little less than spendthrifts.” And he explains that thanks to having chosen a profession that allows him to work anywhere, he was able to get ahead: “My room for maneuver is the world”, which has allowed him to work in countries where the language was Chinese or Turkish. without speaking a word. “Fortunately as long as I have hands and health I have a future and this is given to me by this wonderful job that is cooking.”
Although he does not consider himself nostalgic, and “without detracting from past, present or future times, because everyone is happy with what they have”, he is convinced that he lived through the glorious years of the type of cuisine he likes. “It was, making a parallelism, the swinging London of the 60s with the Beatles, the Rolling, and in between were The Kinks and The Yardbirds, maybe I was The Kinks or The Yardbirds, while the Rolling and the Beatles were Adrià and Santa Maria”. Today, he adds, “there are wonderful chefs, but it’s not swinging London, that’s another story.” Looking back, although he also looks to the future of haute cuisine, he says that “if you think about how many people are dedicated to this profession, I am convinced that I am so overwhelmingly lucky that I have no right to complain.”
Arola reviews different moments of his career and confesses that he felt a certain disappointment when creative kitchens were filled with experts in multiple disciplines, “pushed by gastronomic competitions that forced us to take scholarly classes and it seemed that you needed a botanist, a physicist by your side , a chemist or a designer”. He also confesses his admiration for Carles Gaig, whose cooking was a source of inspiration for him when he opened his first restaurant in Madrid. He acknowledges keeping an extraordinary memory of the “naivety” of creativity that motivated them so much in the years of the Joves Amants de la Cuina collective and of his work alongside his admired Àlex Montiel, at l’Aram . Arola reflects on what all that meant, the role that El Bulli has played and will continue to play, either as a museum, or on the contribution of cuisine in Spain to the modernization of sun and beach tourism that had become outdated. He also explains what his life is like in Chile and its potential for top-quality agriculture and shows his vision of the restaurant business thinking of young people who decide to start a business in a field in which, according to him, it is usually better to be tail of mouse than Lion’s Head.
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