Interview: Spanish chef considers Chinese cuisine fascinating

Joan Roca, the chef of the Spanish restaurant El Celler de Can Roca, twice crowned the best restaurant in the world by the prestigious British magazine "Restaurant" (in 2013 and 2015), considers the Chinese cuisine "fascinating".

Joan Roca made these comments in an interview with Xinhua held in the Basque Culinary Center (BCC), in the city of San Sebastian, on the occasion of the presentation of the "Basque Culinary World Prize" held this week.

According to him, China's cuisine is very diverse and it has "soul".

"It has a lot going around, a lot of tradition and a lot of history and especially it enjoys a great diversity and a great strength, a great personality, a great intensity of flavors," he said.

"This year we will probably go to Shanghai," Roca said, noting that it has not been confirmed yet. "We are very likely to go to Santiago de Chile, California and Shanghai this year, we were thinking of Shanghai or Hong Kong."

The tours of the Roca brothers (Joan, Jordi and Josep) arise from the idea that they have always considered very difficult to open branches of their restaurant around the world, but at the same time they do not want to "give up on its internationalization and getting to know other cultures and cooking in other countries".

Thus, the restaurant closes for five weeks and 38 team members travel to different countries to cook.

"The idea is to pay tribute to these cuisines we are going to visit, learn from them," Joan Roca said, adding: "The whole team lives an important personal and professional experience and it enriches us a lot."

"We will approach the Chinese cuisine with great respect, knowing that we will never know everything and that we will have to return many more times to understand something," he said.

"The only thing we will do is to pay a tribute our way, trying to cook with the products they have there, approaching its culture ... bringing our experience with us and introduce it as a part of our cooking," he explained.

During the tours the Roca brothers do not forget the social work they also carry out at home.

They visit culinary schools with few financial resources and teach them classes at the same time they allow some students to participate in the service. They also give scholarships to two students of each place so that they can work in El Celler de Can Roca for four months.

After being recently named "United Nations Goodwill Ambassadors", the Roca brothers will work for the benefit of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). In this sense, they will carry out a project in Nigeria that includes a centre aimed at studying the food and agriculture potential of the area so that "those fresh products they cultivate are not spoiled".

According to Joan Roca, all this work, to be recognized for the first time with the "Basque Culinary World Prize", reinforces the new role of the chef in society.

"We advocate for a humanist revolution, we propose that people are the most important, the most important in the team, in the restaurant, but also in society," Roca said, stating that "we must make the cuisine a tool to transform society." Endit