On Sunday morning I received a message in the chat from Antonio Ferrer. The last time I had seen him in Girona, a brief meeting after many years of absence and in which, after breaking the ice, we agreed to resume a friendship inherited from my father. But the message had not been written by him, but by his family, to announce to me that “with great sadness in our hearts, we inform you that Antonio has left us.”
Barcelona and Catalan cuisine are indebted to the generation of chefs who dignified the gastronomy of Catalonia before Ferran Adrià and his crazy followers emerged. And I say crazy because you have to be crazy to dedicate yourself to a job in which you are alone until you are successful. Without Antonio Ferrer’s generation, without that culinary sofrito, Adrià, Roca and Santamaria would hardly have emerged.
If you ask the new generations of gourmets about Antonio Ferrer, there will be very few who will know how to tell you two lines in a row about his exploits, but there was a time when in the Gòtic neighborhood there was a must-visit restaurant called La Odisea, and Like Ulysses in the kitchen, Chef Ferrer made diners reach the Ithaca of pleasure based on a delicious menu and a wine cellar that lived up to the demands of the best sommeliers.
I ate many times at The Odyssey. Almost always with my father, who had used Antonio’s kitchen to hold meetings with other local, national and international leaders. And the conversations during meals were as excellent as the alcoholic conversations after dinner. In those days people drank a lot and, if possible, very well.
Antonio was a man from Zaragoza whose origins – he was a child from the humble neighborhood of San Gil – did not condition him when it came to realizing his dreams. When you talked to him, you had the feeling that he was building sand castles, but his silica, thanks to his tenacity, almost always ended up turning into reinforced cement.
Of my agapes in La Odisea, I remember the one we shared with Pablo Milanés and his then wife Yolanda Benet. This was what lunches and dinners were like at La Odisea, a restaurant where you had the feeling of being at the expense of whatever Antonio wanted, and with Ferrer at the helm, the best thing was laissez faire. Antonio was intelligent and cultured, the best self-taught person I have ever known, and when a painter or writer became a guest at his restaurant, the great Ferrer invited him in exchange for drawing him or writing an immortality on a white napkin. I suppose that the collection, a fantastic cultural legacy from the last third of the 20th century, is preserved by his wife Teresa, an exceptional ceramist, by the way.
But since Antonio was a restless ass, he decided to close The Odyssey when it was at the peak of the wave to buy a castle in the Empordà. A real castle for a dreamer seems like the perfect plan. L’Odissea de l’Empordà was, in the end, a project that was too complex, even for chef Ferrer and his indomitable character. The space was beautiful and the food had the flavor of the landscape, but this time, the Ulysses of Catalan cuisine did not find the desired Ithaca.
My father’s death distanced us, but before the separation, we had managed to build a good friendship. Some winter Fridays he would call me to ask me if he wanted to have dinner with Teresa and him in the kitchen of the new Odyssey with the incentive – he announced to me, although it was not necessary – that he had a surprise for me. The surprise was a bottle of Petrus that we drank while he spoke and I learned to the rhythm of the chup chup of the pots.
Antonio Ferrer, the great cook of The Odyssey, has died. If memory were fair, he would deserve a place on the Olympus of fire geniuses.
