When, as Joaquín Luna wrote this week, the fashionable exclamation is “Lie!”, also in the gastronomic field, a serene and credible discourse is appreciated, strung together by normal people who give the impression of believing in what they do and what they say. Reflection arises at a table at Gat Blau (Borrell, 122), where a few minutes after taking a seat in a corner with a good viewing angle of the dining room, one wonders why there are not many cozy restaurants without catalog interior design (here the successful reform was carried out in its day by the studio of the architect Manel Julià). And, above all, why don’t we find more often that figure of the spontaneous, attentive and close hostess that Jo Mestres represents so well.
Someone who knows her well confesses that in the early days of the Gat Blau she slipped away when it was her turn to keep the bills for the diners, whom she actually perceived as her guests and for this reason she was uncomfortable charging them. The anecdote gives an idea of ??who this woman is who was previously a music teacher and an all-rounder at a school in the same neighborhood, where everyone loved her. She recognizes herself lucky to have had several vocations throughout her life and to have been able to fulfill her dream of opening a restaurant. He likes to tell how lucky he was to meet and have hired the chef Pere Carrió, whom he describes as more than family and with whom they would end up associating and leading a well-integrated team made up of Josep Capell, Elia Prats and Abigail Rivas in the dining room and Ireneo de la Peña, John Dateuido and Mark Panganiban in the kitchen.
The Gat Blau started in a neighboring place where Jo Mestres had thought to serve coffee and some dishes. That was too small, so in 2015 they decided to move a few meters away. Its offer would expand and diversify between the menu, the successful lunch menu at 14 euros and that more gastronomic one in which vegetables and legumes have been gaining prominence (the fennel tatin or roast cabbage are already classics), while the chef could develop his project, based on that local cuisine and small producers with whom he has evolved.
A kitchen and a product that show their way of thinking, cooking and eating. With the pandemic, he put an end to that lunchtime formula that he himself considers to be as affordable as it was unsustainable and now they offer a menu and gastronomic formula at 26 euros to eat, from Wednesday to Friday and on nights and Saturdays at noon a la carte and tasting menu by reservation, at a price of 40 euros.
Two great influences marked Carbó: the Slow Food movement to which he has belonged for many years and the first issue of the Opcions magazine that came into his hands, in 2008: he understood that the rebellion that he already practiced by making his own boycotts when buying, but could also move towards a positive discourse of sustainability, ecology, closeness and craftsmanship.
And that is achieved in this restaurant where you eat well, but where the most attractive thing is the complicity with the team, the customers and those small producers with whom they work hand in hand. When we praise the tasty lamb neck terrine as one of the best dishes on the menu, Carbó talks about the Cal Pauet farm and his excellent work with the Ripollesa sheep or his organic diet. With the same enthusiasm, he describes the tomatoes they buy at Can Fisas, in Molins de Rei, with which he prepares a refreshing salad with beetroot and fresh oregano, or the fruits and vegetables from El Troç d’Ordal, where he has bought the peaches that garnish a delicate macerated amberjack; of his fidelity to Ecopollastre that now they cannot serve them and that is why there is no chicken in El Gat Blau. He talks about dairy products from La Cleda or dried fruits from Can Galderic or wines from Celler 9. They have more suppliers and they would like to grow, but he himself wonders how they are going to do it if they have been so well served for so long and nothing is missing.
