When David Grussaute, award winner at the Ibiza Gastronomy Arwards, arrived on Ibiza, what shocked him most was the smell of food everywhere, “in the good sense of the word”. “I was very surprised to be on the beach and to be hit by the aroma of fried paella or grilled squid from a beach bar,” he recalled yesterday, still with a sense of relish.
A quarter of a century later, that love affair that Grussaute felt for the local cuisine and that marks his creations at the Unic restaurant has been rewarded with the Gastronomy Innovation Award from the Academy of Gastronomy of Ibiza and Formentera. When collecting his award, the chef made it clear that he is “more about cooking than speeches”. Even so, he moved all those attending the gala at the Oku hotel by his humility when thanking the jury’s opinion. “This is my first award, so for me it’s like receiving an Oscar or a Goya,” he confessed.
The chef of Es Tragón, Álvaro Sanz, also defined himself as a person who “talks little and cooks a lot” when he received his award for gastronomic relevance. The Academy of Gastronomy thus distinguishes Ibiza’s first Michelin star, renewed for the third consecutive year last December.
On the other hand, José Torres, Racó, is far from being a person of few words. The executive chef of Port de Balansat, Es Nàutic, Ses Escoles and Club Náutico Ibiza was voted the best cook of traditional cuisine. As he explained jovially, he started in the kitchen when he was only 14 years old, “a little bit deluded”, he joked.
To the beach to flake fish
From a very young age, Racó knew he wanted to be a cook. At the age of ten he was already preparing “in a hut next to the house” torradas or rice with some of the chickens that his family raised.
The products of the land are still his predilection and he does not hesitate when asked about his favorite dishes: for dessert, some simple dried figs with toasted almonds and, as a dish, a salad of peppers, tomatoes and garlic, all of them roasted and seasoned with peix sec, in this case orenol (common flying fish).
A neighbor of Racó, owner of the old Pascual restaurant in Port de Sant Miquel, encouraged him to accompany him one Saturday to learn the trade, just the day after finishing the EGB.
“I thought I was going to be on the beach having fun, but it turns out that I was all day cleaning fish or the pans”. He stayed there for another two seasons, until the restaurant closed, “37 years ago now”, and he moved to the kitchen of the neighboring establishment, the Port de Balansat, which this year celebrates its 50th anniversary.
José Torres, ‘Racó’, and Es Rebost de Can Prats received the gastronomy awards dedicated to traditional cuisine
Another restaurant with tradition honored at these gastronomy awards was Es Rebost de Can Prats, also for its dedication to traditional cuisine. The great-great-grandfather of its manager, Cati Marí, built a house in the center of Sant Antoni in 1904 for his son after he married.
After years of operating as a grocery store and warehouse for agricultural products, the house was converted into a restaurant in 1994, just at the time when Cati Marí’s parents were thinking of abandoning the restaurant business. “Since 1970 we had been running Es Molí, which was very big and had nine employees. I was fed up with restaurants and I was looking forward to starting an antique store when I inherited that house,” recalled Cati’s mother, Lina Prats.
But her daughter, who was finishing her studies in Palma, convinced her parents to start a home cooking business. “We only wanted to make tapas, but they began to ask for more things and we started with the dish of the day”, Prats explained.
She is no longer at the stove, but Claudio Vidal, to whom she revealed all her secrets, keeps the frita polp, the sofrit pagès or the arrós de matances among the star dishes of the popular restaurant.
Charity Gastronomy
The Gastronomy Academy also wanted to pay tribute at its gala to the solidarity initiatives undertaken by the catering sector to help the people most affected during the covid crisis. Chef David Reartes and the mayor of Vila, Rafa Ruiz, collected their distinction for the Cocina Central Ibiza project, while the director of operations of MAF Ibiza, Juanan Martínez, and the mayor of Santa Eulària, Carmen Ferrer, shared this award as representatives of Santa Eulària Contigo.
For the full article, please visit Diario de Ibiza website here.