Robert Lechuga is convinced that both having grown up in a family of farmers, with orchards in Cabrera de Mar and stalls in Mercabarna, as well as his father’s love of hunting and his love of fishing since he was a child, determined that he would end up being a cook “I was born attached to the product.” He also assures that he could not have ended up in a better home than Albert Adrià’s Bodega 1900, where he entered to do an internship and was in the kitchen for almost a decade. “There was strictly seasonal cooking and that is what they taught me.”
He does not intend anything else at Casa Parera, in Mataró (Nou Street, 20) where he entered after greatly missing his job after that parenthesis that the pandemic opened (when La Bodega and the El Barri group closed) that seemed endless and They did not compensate for specific advice. “I have been cooking since I was so little that I had to climb on the marble in my grandmother Amelia’s kitchen.” Today, he assures, he would not change life and work in Mataró, nor that network of families, neighbors and friends that has been woven around that modernist building that Casa Parera occupies and that gives life to the neighborhood. On the one hand, his complicity with the owner, Anna Carbonell and her partner Agustí Gómez. On the other hand, the one she has with her father-in-law, Agus, who attends the living room next to her. Or with his own grandfather, Claudi Uñó, from whose prestigious Uñó pastry shop come the brioches with which Robert Lechuga prepares a succulent sandwich of Iberian cheeks, shitake and a version of Robert sauce. At 86 years old, the man is still the first to arrive at the pastry shop and the last to leave, and he often goes to eat at his granddaughter’s restaurant, which is four steps away.
Also very close is the Duo Casolà takeaway store, which Esther Gómez (the chef’s wife) opened jointly with David Fernández. The two had worked together at Bodega 1900, where she directed the production kitchen. If the shrimp croquettes served at Casa Parera are bought from them, the Iberian ones – like the cheek – are supplied by the company of Agustí Gómez, Anna’s husband.
All these synergies are reflected in the atmosphere of complicity that permeates the restaurant’s two dining rooms. The dishes, perfect for sharing, take us back to the times when Lechuga was in charge of La Bodega, which was one of the best gastronomic taverns that Barcelona has ever had, and where the key was in simple preparations that turned into excellent dishes, always based on good product at its optimal time of seasonality.
Here he is not looking for sophistication, but rather for simple dishes to which he tries to add value, such as the salad in which he replaces the tuna with confit sea bass and in which the potato, of the monalisa variety, is just right and the mayonnaise integrates perfectly. . This shrimp croquette from Duo Casolà arrives, with the concentrated flavor of the shrimp; the stracciatella and walnut salad with candied cherry tomatoes to which the chef adds an extra – not too necessary – sweetness by incorporating honey.
Well-dressed Barbastro tomatoes are one of the hits when summer arrives. In these spring days, they replace them with others of the same type grown in an orchard in Premià. Also reminiscent of the times with Adrià is the tasty Navarra asparagus that Robert Lechuga cooks just right so that it is crispy but not excessively raw and which is accompanied by a cream of the discarded part, yolk, black garlic, hazelnut and lemon. To finish, the flan with the same recipe from the Bodega, delicious. “It excites even those who thought they didn’t like flan,” says the veteran of the room Agus Gómez, who explains the success of the wine tastings that they organize from time to time and that already have regulars who take advantage of it to have a good time. a while. They are mostly clients from the neighborhood where this house is a meeting point.
