French chef Romain Fornell stars in the new episode of the Stay to Eat podcast, in which he reflects on what truly drives him to expand his businesses and on his entrepreneurial but realistic spirit: he explains that he is not afraid and that he is aware that some businesses They work and others don’t and the important thing is that there are more restaurants that work well than the other way around. He assures that the same courage that leads him to open also leads him to close when it doesn’t work, because he knows that the ability to react is the key and that if he loses money it could sink the rest of the businesses and lead them to ruin.
Fornell, whose Barcelona restaurant Caelis is celebrating its 20th anniversary, tells of the beginnings of his profession and his arrival at the old Barcelona Ritz, the first place where his Caelis was, which years later he would move to the Hotel Ohla Barcelona, ??and how he faced, at a very young age, leading to a team in which the majority was not for the work and “they wanted to kill me.”
Fornell talks about the unmotivated kid he was until he discovered his passion for cooking and the lack of empathy with the team he had when he started as a chef. “When you are 23 years old and you have to direct people who are double or triple your age and who are also complicated, you take out your claws.” But, he says, “it didn’t take me long to discover that screaming was not the way.”
The chef confesses his love for Barcelona, ??a city that he considers gastronomically “the best in the world” and recalls how he lived the moment of the gastronomic revolution that he encountered when settling in the Catalan capital as a young man of French culture. “My position, without being entirely from here or there, allowed me to be the perfect observer.” He maintains that although on his day in his country the gastronomic leadership of El Bulli may have been annoying, it was stimulating, as it can be in sports, that another team spurs you on and makes you move forward. “I believe that there will never be a confrontation between chefs from France and those from here because there is mutual admiration and respect.”
Fornell analyzes the figure of two of the characters he most appreciates and admires, the chefs Alain Ducasse and Albert Adrià, who came to run a temporary restaurant together in Paris, and explains what unites them and what differentiates them.
He acknowledges that he himself is not a creative chef: “This must drive you crazy. Having to create so that they can say that you are a creative genius is entering a loop of suffering that I don’t want to enter.” He considers that he has not made a contribution to gastronomy; “but I have known how to adapt the cuisine of a French chef in Barcelona. Yes indeed”. And he assures that it is as exciting for him to run a Michelin-starred restaurant as it is to run a neighborhood bistro.
He also reflects on leadership and confesses that he has always liked to command. “I already liked it when I played rugby and was the captain. Even if he wasn’t a great player or even if we lost the game, I knew that those 14 people would have broken walls for me. And in the kitchen it is the same. You have to have a team that trusts you and you have to lead.”