The aroma of freshly baked bread reaches the Maritim de Llançà promenade, where some friends have just sat down to share, looking at the sea, the “pintacoques” bar, the focaccia or the brioche that they have bought in the back room that the Miramar restaurant has just opened. . This is A mà, a bakery where they make bread and pastries, but they also ship the garums, misos, peanut butter, chocolate or jam that they prepare for their small hotel. There is a line in front of the window open to the street on the side façade of the Miramar, which smells like home.
This small business was an old dream of Paco Pérez, who during the pandemic perfected the work with bread that they had undertaken a couple of years ago for the restaurant. But above all, what the cook wanted was to recover the smells of his childhood, when he was sent to the oven for bread or when he went to the back rooms of Casa Juanita to buy fruit or vegetables, to the Tomasitas, two sisters who sold sweets, or to the Teresitas, always with the freshest from their own garden. And recover that relationship with the neighbors, who are now happy when he is the one who looks out the window to serve them. In the day-to-day life of the small back room are Jean Lech Bielinnski, Federico Brega, Patricia Newman and Zaira Pérez and María M. Vila, responsible for the graphic image.
To me it is a complete novelty in a house that in recent years has been completed with the renovation of the hotel or the garden to which is now added the warmth provided by that freshly baked bread that is sent through the window to the neighborhood. Miramar is becoming more and more a welcoming house at the same time that Paco Pérez’s haute cuisine continues to grow in excellence. It’s about closing the circle of moving forward year after year. And this can be seen in numerous techniques and ingredients with which you immerse yourself in that marine universe of the privileged landscape that you inhabit, and which ranges from the sand, with shells, to the shore, rocks or underwater.
The variety of fish and seafood, always with the presence of algae, is enormous. Pérez cooks from the sea potato, an invasive species that he turns into an exquisite snack that invites you to lick, prawns, shrimp, turbot, mullet, scallops, mussels (delicious and innovative is the dish in which he uses the most superficial part, like a veil, while inside it combines a cream of the mollusk with a garum of the same.
The garums are essential, as is the presence of misos that are enriched over time (there are two-year-old ones), with the flowers and herbs from their own garden and with a maturation process of the fish or even a combination with a fermented Pérez continues to explore and grow, out to sea and opening new windows.