Text by Lydia Itoi
Photos by Maria Marvila
Llançá, Girona 9:00 AM: The sea is molten silver, and the silence is golden. No sign yet of the infamous tramontana, the frigid blasts of wind that blow equal parts madness and genius. However, there is a single cook stirring the first pot of the day in the Miramar kitchen, and 89-year-old matriarch Isabel Buxedas has already settled herself in the entrance to read the newspaper and keep an eye on things.
On the wall behind Isabel is a gallery of black and white photos, a framed family album showing Miramar in bygone days. Founded in 1939 by her late husband’s parents, it was a classic beach bar, complete with plastic chairs and vinyl tablecloths and tourist menus for summer visitors and pilgrims hiking the Cami de Ronda trail around the Cap de Creus. Isabel and her husband Laureà added modest rooms and a restaurant. Over the years, under Chef Paco Perez, Miramar evolved and joined the movement of Iberian techno-emotional vanguardists. The hikers still trek past on the coastal trail but no longer drop in. A different sort of pilgrim finds their way to Miramar now.
In my case, I have come to Llançá looking for technique. I’ve been wanting to come for some time, ever since I received Paco Perez’s book Cocottes, Cazuelas y Cacerolas (Planeta, 2018) as a gift. At first glance, it seems to be a typical easy-one-pot-meals-by-a-celebrity-chef cookbook, published to commemorate the 10th anniversary of his Enoteca Paco Perez in Barcelona’s Hotel Arts and probably a commercial book project sponsored by Le Creuset. It offers comforting traditional dishes likebaby fava beans a la catalana or monkfish stew with step-by-step illustrated instructions. It is just the sort of book to invite the timid home cook to grab their Le Creuset enameled cast-iron pot and rediscover the kitchen.
However, attempting to follow any of Paco Perez’s “easy home cooking” recipes is masterclass in technical finesse, not to mention a lot of work. Most of the recipes are built around highly idiosyncratic bases and stocks made to very exacting specifications. The vegetable stock, for example, calls for bok choi, precisely 50g and 20g of shimeiji and enoki mushrooms respectively, ginger, fresh peas in their pods (only if in season), 1.5L of soft mineral water, and Sempio brand jang sauce in addition to a mirepoix of more common aromatics.
The marine fumet appears in many recipes and calls for exactly 8.5g kombu, 3g dried wakame, 13g dried shiitake (using fresh will change the result irrevocably), 30g sliced leek, 2g of something called “junco marino,” 3g of something else called “hinojo marino” (sea fennel), 2g lemon peel, and 1L mineral water. I am a serious home cook with an excessively stocked kitchen, but I don’t have all of those ingredients just lying around in the pantry, and I live 355km from the sea. Google says “junco marino” is some kind of coastal sea rush (J. maritimus) that the ancient Egyptians used as pens, but it is less helpful in telling me where I can get my hands on it in a culinary grade, let alone just 2 grams of it. And to weigh out 8.5g of kombu, I might have to get one of those pocket scales that drug dealers use to measure down to milligrams.
Unfortunately, Paco Perez gives little quarter to cooks who cut corners, whether they are home cooks or not. If this mise en place is not done or the recipe not followed to the letter, you simply will not achieve the most incredible chili bogavante (see Cocottes page 95) or black squid ink rice (page 104) imaginable. Even a recipe as prosaic as arroz con leche (page 210) blew my mind.
These subtle techniques are a revelation without being a revolution, amplifying flavors with surprising and confident juxtapositions. The recipes in Cocottes subtly introduce new ideas into traditional dishes, rather like creating new words to express new emotions without changing the vernacular language. This book was not slapped together as a quickie commercial side venture: it has soul.
So when I went to Miramar, after a three-hour train ride to Barcelona followed by a two-hour drive up the infamously wild coast, I was unconsciously expecting to find a traditional restaurant with hints of innovation woven inconspicuously into the small print, rather like the much-besplattered cookbook I was bringing in hand.
The 61-year-old chef, after all, has been there since the 1980s in relative obscurity–at least, as obscure as a chef can be after receiving one Michelin star in 2006 and another in 2010 plus a small constellation more for his other restaurants in Barcelona, Britain and Berlin. My friend, food and culture journalist Juanma Bellver, fondly recalls lazy days by the beach 10-15 years ago eating the gambas in ceviche, the beer chicken, the bacon and lobster canneloni, and the oyster tartare with caviar.
It was therefore a surprise to find at Miramar a cutting-edge kitchen working at warp speed.
Miramar kitchen, 10:30 AM:
While more cooks have gathered around the now bustling stove, others are fanning out in the rest of the kitchen. Like the age rings in a tree trunk, a kind of timeline of culinary techniques could be measured by the distance from the central stove where huge pots are stewing, caramelizing, and simmering. As a mere kid, Paco Perez left home to work as a dishwasher at Michel Guerard “because France is France.” Among the tallest stock pots in the very heart of the kitchen, I spot a classic red Le Creuset Dutch oven. On the wall under the clock, there is a Barça sticker, lest anyone should forget their allegiances.
In the starters station, there are two squeeze bottles of pale liquid, propped up just so on towels, slowly dripping hands-free into a misty vat of liquid nitrogen to form tiny pearls. Spherifications are being lifted out with perforated spoons. el bulli closed in 2011 and the copycats have left spheres and foams to follow other fads. Paco Perez sees himself as carrying on where Ferran Adriá left off, just as Ferran had hoped other chefs would when he shared his techniques with the world. His perseverance is vindicated by his tartlet of anchovies and olives, a virtuoso sonata of spherifications that appropriately opens the “Memory, Territory, and Culture” menu.
At the vegetable station, two cooks are picking through foraged sea lettuces and frothing up lyophilized codium powder, a process oddly reminiscent of preparing ritual matcha in a Japanese tea ceremony. Another cook is carefully measuring rectangles of a tawny gelatin using a bright green plastic schoolkid’s ruler. Just outside the door, there is a small kitchen garden that provides herbs and knowledge of living plants. Paco’s prized hierba luisa plant is there, a massive 30-year-old specimen that provides the cup of calming herbal tea he drinks every night after service.
Across the hall, there is a workshop-cum-office space that other chefs might self-importantly style their “experimental lab” or “fermentation center.” At Miramar, it looks more tinkerer’s garage than mad scientist’s laboratory, but it certainly keeps up with the latest culinary developments. An OC’OO kimchi fermenter sits next to a vacuum distiller, its Korean program buttons translated into Spanish. Here they soften hazelnuts until they are the texture of garbanzos. There is a kind of file cabinet of lyophilized powders of everything under the sun, garums and misos lining the shelves, koji fermenting under a towel, and fish curing on hooks in the dry ager. Two chocolate melangers are going full tilt, churning out a delectable homemade Nutella that a commis lets me sample with a mischievous grin.
Of the myriad techniques that are employed at Miramar, lyophilization might be the most prominent at the moment. It seems that they have freeze-dried everything they can get their hands on, from yuzu, French sorrel, algae of all kinds, and huitlacoche to moss and fig leaves, pulverized into a rainbow of concentrated powders they call “pigments.” Freeze drying has a long history, stretching from the Incas to NASA space exploration. Drying at low temperature retains more nutrients than simply dehydrating, so it is an ideal preservation technique. It’s also amazing how much flavor can be concentrated in 20 grams of powder.
Fortunately, Miramar elevates lyophilization from the low gastronomic standards of military MRE field rations. Using these pulverized lyophilized pigments like a painter´s palette, they form the flavor base of everything from super-intense stocks to the featherweight spongy structures he calls “ethereals” or, if the vacuum-inflated sponges have been hollowed out by freezing and partial sublimation, he calls them “structures.”
Every dish coming over the pass is a visual and technical marvel, like another meticulously crafted tartlet of ceps tweezered onto the most fragile of crusts. The tart is small, so the enormously rich, creamy flavor of what Paco Perez calls the “casi mantequilla” (“almost butter”) mushroom filling is an unexpected and delightful shock.
He and his team discovered this “casi mantequilla” technique while experimenting with fresh cream in a vacuum distiller. When 20g of a lyophilized (freeze-dried) powder, say spinach or codium or carrot or whatever, is mixed with 600ml of cream and vacuum distilled at 55C for an hour, the fat separates from the whey and becomes a light, unctuous substance like butter, maybe even better.
The “casi mantequilla” substance was actually a byproduct of another process. As a chef who is highly concerned with sustainability, Paco was pleased to find that this fascinating new technique was also reducing food waste. I was pleased to find something so buttery south of the French border. Most restaurants in Spain refuse to touch butter before the dessert course.
Chef Perez is also obsessed with using up every bit of the plant or the animal, creating migas of fish skins and stomachs, or finding new ways to serve the membranes of sea cucumbers. One of the most beautiful dishes is an anchovy, thin as a membrane, suspended in a brittle transparent film of its garum. It is an anchovy transformed into a suncatcher.
In a few weeks, however, the lab space will be remodeled and transformed into a bakery with a sales window where the townspeople can come and buy a loaf of artisanal bread. Miramar continues evolving and adapting, always experimenting.
Family Meal, 12:00 At noon sharp, the entire Miramar staff is gathered at attention in the kitchen to review the day’s battle plan. One table will contain a guest who won’t eat anything raw, while their dining companion refuses to eat anything cooked. One table cites allergies to pineapple and wasabi, which means anything with the Polish pineapple garum is out. Another guest is coming to a restaurant named Miramar but does not eat anything that comes out of the sea, animal or plant. It is a tribute to their professionalism that not a single eye rolled during this recital. This team will make sure everyone leaves happy.
The Miramar of today may be a modern fine dining experience to stimulate and challenge the senses, yet the essentials remain. Behind its two Michelin stars and avant-garde dishes, Miramar is still very much a family affair, the tried-and-true recipe of traditional European restaurants. Look closely, and the faces stay the same. Take Toni Gata Reina, who started working at Miramar at 17 as a part-time waiter. Whenever the bar got too busy, Paco would pick him up on a scooter to help bus tables and take orders. Today, Toni is Miramar´s sommelier, still with his boyish youthfulness; he has literally grown up alongside and inside the restaurant. The plastic decor and platos combinados are no longer here, but the sea, the sun, and the feeling of family continue to suffuse every corner.
Paco Perez himself married into the Miramar family when he won the heart of Isabel´s daughter Montse, the redheaded girl of his dreams, and her parents offered to let him take over the bar-hotel that had been founded by her grandparents, Julia and Ildefonso. Montse runs the dining room when she isn’t taking care of the dogs. Paco´s right-hand man in the kitchen is his nephew Julen Rodriguez Perez, but his left-hand man, Richard Villar Montoya, might as well be family too. His son Guillem is a poet and writer, but he is also an admirable dining room majordomo and the future. Guillem´s partner Maria is an artist and photographer who shot the photos you see in these pages. His daughter Zaira, who is an actress currently living in Mexico, brings Mexican flavors like Oaxacan mole to Miramar (for lyophilization, of course) and helps out in the dining room whenever she comes home to visit.
Staff meal is the first thing that goes on the stove in the morning, and it is served out every day at precisely 12:15 by Paco himself and eaten together as a family.
Family is fundamental.
But so is geography. And life. And beauty.
Sunset walk, 17:24 PM: There is something magical about Cap de Creus, the fistful of bare rocks and cliffs jutting into the sea just 25 kilometers south of the border with France, that inspires artists from Salvador Dalí to Josep Pla and Ferran Adrià. Maybe it is the limpid light or the psychosis-inducing tramontana, but somebody should do a scientific study, or possibly bottle the local water. How is it that this rugged promontory of 200 square kilometers has fostered so much creative genius?
Dalí once said about the landscape of Cap de Creus: “I have been made in these rocks. Here I have shaped my personality.” Looking at the dishes that are parading down the runway, Paco Perez can clearly say the same, despite the minor technicality of having been born in Huelva.
These fantastical rock formations carved by wind and sea leave an impression on the mind and the spirit, on the canvas and the page and the plate. The wave of 10 snacks that start the 2023 “La Mar d’Amunt, Mar 23” menu is a tsunami of textures, tastes, and ideas, many of them inspired by the vistas surrounding Miramar as well as the other creative minds that have been nourished here.
Miramar is not even 40km from el bulli as the crow flies, longer if you follow the treacherous but stunning coastal road. It is impossible not to notice the striking parallels between Paco Perez and Ferran Adrià, personal and professional. They were born just a few months apart, and they grew up on opposite sides of the Cap de Creus in working class families. Both started doing grunt work in restaurants at a very tender age. At 17, Paco even started a restaurant in Roses with partners Jordi Cervera and Toni Jerez, who would later go on to el bulli. Paco says he would also have gone to Cala Monjoi himself, but he was offered the opportunity at Miramar in Llançà at Montse’s side. The choice was obvious.
Beginning in 1993, Paco did finally stage at el bulli every year for 6 years, and he couldn’t sleep the first night for excitement. If el bulli was leading a revolution, Miramar was about evolution. It was about taking inspiration and exploring further, incorporating radical concepts and making them work in real life. Creative fire always gives off sparks, but they die out on dry ground. Paco caught one and has been carefully nurturing the flame. Miramar, which faces the same sea, is el bulli’s quieter twin, the one still carrying the torch.
Chef Perez, who has been working in restaurants for five decades since the age of 12, has found the secret to culinary longevity: an eternal child-like curiosity married to a very grown-up desire to add something to the family and collective legacy without burning out. He has worked hard all his life, but he is also having fun, challenging himself with the new, always learning. That sense of wonder and creative play keeps him going.
His primary way to play is by drawing. The creation of new dishes starts not in the lab, but on a piece of paper, like the doodle one chef is studying while she paints a golden stripe onto semispherical molds. Paco draws a picture, and the team finds a way to bring that picture to life.
One of Paco’s pictures is printed on the back of the menu, a sinuous line drawing with fishes and faces entangled in a childish scrawl.
In the center left of his drawing, I see a fish with large, multi-colored scales resembling The Rainbow Fish (“El Pez Arcoíris” in Spanish), the 1992 children’s book by Marcus Pfister.
One of my favorite dishes in Miramar’s tidal wave of snacks is a red mullet ceviche playfully sculpted into a fish called Iris.
Coincidence? Apparently, yes. Paco had never heard of the Pez Arco Iris, which by another coincidence came out about the same time he used to make up stories about the adventures of a fish called Iris for his daughter, Zaira. These synchronicities between parallel events add another layer of fun and mystery to the experience.
January 2024: Miramar is closed for a much-deserved holiday after the Christmas festivities. Visitors are thin on the ground, and it is a tough time for local restaurants. It is time to take a break to recharge the old batteries. Paco, however, is busy drawing new drawings, dreaming up new dishes.
