LA: But it’s these pallets that have shaped, these few pallets have shaped this entire nation’s food culture in a sense.
EL: Yeah, exactly. And so those kinds of stories and history just fascinated me. In Catalonia, Pais Vasco, Galicia, really suppressed regions during the Franco Era, a lot of recipes were hidden.
LA: After the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 when General Franco asserted his dictatorship, regional identities across Spain were suppressed.
EL: There were secret dining societies where they could make their traditional dishes, but they couldn’t let the government know they were making them because they would be arrested. Franco wanted one Spain under one flag, and he didn’t allow all of the Galicia, Catalonia, Pais Vasco, Asturias, the South, nobody to speak their regional languages, to eat their regional foods. He wanted a homogenized Spain, and that really showed up in the food. And so to be able to tell that story, pre-Franco, post-Franco dictatorship was fascinating to me, just fascinating history.
LA: After the break, Eva visits the town of Roses in Catalonia where the world-renowned restaurant El Bulli established what was known as Modernist Cuisine in Spain. There is this sort of respect for their own local histories and the kind of food and culture that has passed down through these generations.
EL: Such pride. There’s such pride. And especially in our first episode in Catalonia, Barcelona, Costa Brava, that’s where Ferran Adrià comes from, which is probably the most well-known chef of Spain. He had El Bulli for many, many years. Number one restaurant in the world, a year waiting list, and it wasn’t easy to get to. I went there back in the day and it’s like plane, train, automobile. Then you got to scale a mountain and then take a goat and then you go down-
LA: You got to earn it.
EL: You must really want to have to go to that restaurant because it’s the hardest place to get to. He has since closed, but he has many disciples that worked in El Bulli and he really created the molecular gastronomy movement. And he consciously wanted to elevate Spain’s cuisine to the level of France. He’s like, “I was kind of tired of the French cuisine being the standard of excellence.” If you were French trained, if you learned in France, if you worked in France, it was like this bar of excellence. And he’s like, “We have amazing chefs and we have amazing food and we have amazing history.” And he wanted to elevate that and put a spotlight on it. And he did. I mean, if you see, Spain has skyrocketed to the top of gastronomy lists in a very short amount of time, and that was a conscious effort on really behalf of chefs like Ferran Adrià .
One big takeaway I had from just doing the whole show of Searching for Spain was the way of living in Spain. They got it right. My gosh, they love to live. They love a vermouth hour, hora de vermouth. If somebody says, “Hey, do you want to go have a drink?” They mean right now? And you go, “Okay.” And you go. There’s no, “Let me check my calendar. Maybe next Tuesday at 5:00 PM.” It’s right now.
