A senior executive who abandoned finance to run the family restaurant, an Architecture student who put his career on hold to work at Xavier Pellicer's Àbac after trying its tasting menu, a biochemist who fell in love with cooking when he was studying Law. The stories of Juanjo López Bedmar (La Tasquita de Enfrente), David Andrés (Via Veneto and Somiatruites) and Diego Gallegos (Sollo) are just a sample of that group of cooks who ended up in the profession after taking a drastic turn to their professional careers and to which the young chef Jordi Cunill also belongs.
It was in 2015, in his second year of college in the United States, when he had a kind of revelation that pushed him to leave the country and Aeronautical Engineering to go to London and try his luck at the Le Cordon Bleu cooking school. Until that moment he had never thought about being a chef, nor had he felt a passion for the kitchen, but he was clear that one of his favorite sensations was the one he experienced when he went to a restaurant, talked with waiters, cooks and other diners, and contemplated the hustle and bustle. in the living room and kitchen. So he decided to see if it would give him that same feeling to be on the other side, in the heart of a restaurant: the kitchen.
He cut his teeth as a cook in well-known restaurants such as Noma, in Copenhagen, but it was his time at Gresca, Can Jubany or Coure that marked his way of understanding the job. It has simple preparations, powerful flavours, traditional recipes and a great emphasis on fresh, quality and rigorous seasonal products. “Simplicity done well is not easy to achieve,” says Cunill.
At Rabbit's, whose name is a nod to the chef's last name, he has sought to distance himself from the proposal of Café de Paris, the other establishment he runs and that led him to leave his home in Sant Feliu de Codines, the Sis Quartos. In this place with an informal atmosphere, six months old, it offers a wide variety of tapas and dishes designed to share, paired with music from the 80s and 90s and served mainly at the bars that dominate the space (there are barely any low tables). .
Because Rabbit's is a tribute to the bars, to the Coure where he started and where he spent many hours, to which he went with his friends and to the bars of his life. A space that lacks those boundaries between diners that the tables impose and that seeks to encourage conversation between clients and with the waiters and cooks, what made him fall in love with the profession.
Tapas and dishes come out of the kitchen non-stop. Canyuts recently arrived from the Ebro delta and prepared on the grill (which is on the menu), which gives it an exquisite touch. Cockles from the Rías de Galicia, Guillardeau oysters, lamb ribs, a creamy fricandó croquette, salad or zucchini flower stuffed with sausage and brie cheese. But to dip bread you have to resort to stews such as tripe or oxtail, that chup chup with which the tradition is kept alive.
