Jordi Roca: "I had moments when I wanted to leave the Celler because I felt that it was the focus of my discomfort"

The youngest of the brothers from El Celler de Can Roca, Jordi Roca, stars in the new chapter of the podcast Stay for a meal, where he tells how he has lived through the very long process of recovering the voice that he lost almost eight years ago due to cervical dystonia. Roca says that he always thought that he would speak again, although he confesses that he has gone through very hard times, in which he felt dependent on others and isolated. “When you realize that you do not control your body to do something that you have always done, you feel vulnerable, useless, displaced by yourself, you feel dependent and that makes you feel bad.”

The last, as the creator of El Celler’s sweet cuisine likes to call himself, explains how the family experienced his improvement, including “his mother’s patatús”, who needed an ambulance when her blood pressure dropped when he went to see her. During the podcast, Roca accepts the challenge of pronouncing those words that he would not want to be left without having said in the hypothetical case that he returned to silence and tells of some complicated episodes that he has experienced in recent years. “At times when you cannot intervene, you watch how things happen and you stop. And putting on the handbrake helps you control yourself and stop that impulse that we sometimes have to want to say ‘that now’. I have known how to put myself in the background or third plane and silence has given me tools to better understand everything that happens around me”. He explains that the disease has made him “more cautious, more patient and calmer, and that is one of the keys that has helped me recover my voice.”

The youngest of the Girona brothers claims the importance of using words while being aware of the power they have. “Because sometimes we use gossip without thinking or sometimes a praise from someone you admire gives you light.”

Jordi Roca explains that suffering could have contributed to triggering his disease and points out that although the peaks of stress in our lives are not bad, it is to accumulate that anxiety that ends up generating everything from strokes to heart attacks and many other problems that put our lives at risk. life.

“We have to value ourselves, and act like on airplanes, where they ask you to put on your oxygen mask first because if you don’t have air you won’t be able to help anyone. We always tend to focus on others and we don’t think we have to think about ourselves, not out of selfishness but for survival”.

In the conversation he reflects on the competitiveness in haute cuisine and remembers that it is an area that has nothing to do with sport, but is totally subjective. “When you don’t control it, there’s no point in being number one, two or three, and it’s not worth obsessing over.”

He admits that he feels motivated again. “I have had to recover the illusion, the game, the fun because it was something that used to give me life and that at some point I lost due to stress, because of how I lived; I lost the game, and getting it back was a prelude to getting my voice back.”

Paternity, issues of family reconciliation or the role he occupies in the family, as a younger brother who has been with his siblings for many years are some of the issues on which he reflects, as well as on a complicated and excessive puberty. He also confesses the stress that going to public events where there are a lot of people causes him, “it still happens to me and when it happens I move away a bit”.

Jordi Roca points out the importance of receiving psychological help when going through complicated stages and warns of the danger of identifying with an emotion that can be dangerous if it leads you to make drastic decisions. “You can screw up a lot and change your life, I have had moments when I wanted to leave the Celler because I felt that it was the focus of my discomfort, others in which I wanted to leave my partner because I felt that it was the focus of my discomfort and my problems , and in many moments objectively they were because it was where I dumped my problems, at work and in the couple. But when you get to know yourself, you realize that it is you and your way of seeing that work or partner relationship that conditions you”. For him, he explains, “nothing has changed, but everything has changed: for me El Celler was oppressive, as much as receiving customers. Now I adore them, I go to the table to meet them, something unthinkable. I love my partner more than ever, I want to be with her and I am thankful that I did not take very heartfelt emotions lightly that told me to get out of here, leave it, change something in your life. Because it is not changing your life but changing it starting with you”.

He also reflects on the moment that the restaurant he runs with his brothers is experiencing, on the replacement in charge of the business or on how he sees haute cuisine at this time. “I am super optimistic because when we talked about the Spanish kitchen revolution that happened at one time and that seems to have passed, I like to see it as a romantic movie that begins when the couple falls in love and usually ends when they get married or live together, Well that’s when the film begins and that’s when Spanish cuisine really begins, when it settles down, when each house begins to make its own, different, unique discourse, with personality, with authenticity. Now it is beginning, it is not ending, we are not in postmodernity, or in the post-avant-garde or in the post-hosts, we are fully involved in it”.