An Activist Who Cooks

Pep Romany brings heritage cocas, with local toppings, into high cuisine, and he means it as a manifesto rather than a menu. He uses local vegetable varieties and heritage wheat flour from the Blat de la Marina project. He cooks over oak wood instead of gas, which is slower, harder and worse for a service, and better for the food. He insists he is a farmer who cooks rather than a chef who farms, and the distinction is not modesty. It is a claim about where a dish actually starts. His season finale is the last chapter of the whole journey: soil, seed, hands, and finally fire.