The chef of the Barcelona restaurant Dos Palillos, who turns fifteen in 2024, stars in the new episode of the Stay to eat podcast. During the conversation, he tells of his first professional steps in Italian cuisine and how he became head chef at El Bulli.
Albert Raurich explains that before joining the team, Ferran Adrià found out that he had had an incident that caused him to be briefly imprisoned. The cook narrates his peculiar arrival at Montjoi cove: “They looked at me thinking that he was a criminal.” He also recounts what his childhood, adolescence and early youth were like, marked by undiagnosed hyperactivity and a passionate way of being. “I am a very passionate person, I give myself one hundred percent: either I do it or I don't.”
Raurich talks about learning in the times of El Bulli, both in the organization of work and in the search for knowledge, which according to him is the great obsession of those who had their great school in Montjoi cove. He also talks about her mother, Aurora, who died a few months ago, and about her connection to nature and her healing gifts, which he once used to calm the tension in her kitchen. The Bulli.
The chef says that the Japanese sommelier Tamae Imachi, his partner, is the one who has helped him the most to understand the sensitivity and many of the secrets of Japanese cuisine. Raurich questions the limitations of the hours he is forced to work in the restaurant, and explains that he believes that the number of hours should be adapted to what each job requires and be able to pay for overtime.
He also talks about the need to reconcile and have a life outside of work and about salaries in the sector, about what they earned at El Bulli and the compensation that in his case he found beyond the economic. And he reflects on his sense of fidelity. “My Chinese horoscope is dog and I am very dog in the sense that I am very faithful. To my friends, to my partner, to my family, to the people who love me. Because it is my character and I put this fidelity before all the interests that there may be, of course the material ones.”
