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Carles
Abellan
The art of making tapas
Carles Abellan was born in Sabadell in 1963 and, as he
himself admits, "entered the world of catering by chance,
or as the result of professional disorientation, at a time
when it was not fashionable to be a cook". At the age
of 22 he entered Barcelona's new School of Catering and
Hotel Management, not realizing that this decision was to
mark the rest of his life. While he was studying, he worked
at Els Pescadors, a restaurant on Plaça Prim in the
Poblenou district of Barcelona; later he went to work at
L'Odissea, then at La Dama. Later still he worked in the
kitchens of the Hotel Melià, where he met Christian
Escribà and other colleagues who introduced him into
the Group of Young Chefs, where he met Ferran Adrià.
One day he remarked to Adrià that he would like to
undertake a stage at El Bulli. "Come in Holy Week,"
said Ferran Adrià. "There," says Carles
Abellan, "in the restaurant on Cala Montjoi, a new
world opened up to me, a universe that interested me from
the start. It was at El Bulli that I decided I wanted to
go on being a cook. I am convinced it was there, at that
time, that it happened. Previously circumstances had led
me to see a very old-fashioned type of cookery and some
fearsome kitchens. At El Bulli, people were doing research,
trying out new recipes, by Girardet, Bocuse and Maximin...
The head chef was Xavier Sagristà, an interesting
man, with long, dyed hair ." In 1990, six years later,
Carles Abellan left El Bulli.
He taught cookery in schools in Sant Just Desvern and Santa
Coloma de Gramenet. For just over a year he worked in the
district of Singuerlín, where the challenge was finding
work for the students. He was so successful that ninety
percent of his students found jobs in different hotels and
catering establishments. But one fine day, at Barcelona
airport, Carles Abellan met Ferran Freixa and Juli Soler,
who offered him the job of director of Talaia, a restaurant
in Barcelona's Port Olímpic. As Carles Abellan admits,
such an ambitious proposal could not be refused. It was
a challenge. He tells the story with all the enthusiasm
of the first day: "The premises were absolutely empty.
Everything remained to be done: we had to decide where we
would put the kitchen, the kind of refrigerators we would
buy, the shelves, the tables, the chairs, the staff we would
hire, and I spent six months designing the project with
the help of the team from El Bulli". Talaia opened
its doors in July 1994 and La Vanguardia ran the following
headline: "El Bulli in Barcelona". It was a very
difficult start. Relationships with the first team were
very complicated, the definition of the restaurant was not
sufficiently clear and the business management was onerous
until one day Juli Soler said to Carles Abellan: "You
are the new manager" and Talaia became a new Barcelona
landmark with a new concept: designer tapas. But Carles
Abellan was mulling over the idea of building his own restaurant.
He left Talaia and accepted a proposal from Ferran Adrià
to run a restaurant in Andalusia, the Hacienda Benazuza
in Sanlúcar la Mayor.
Two years later, in 2000, Carles Abellan finally decided
to open his own restaurant, Comerç 24, which occupies
an old warehouse at the Born market on Carrer Comerç
in Barcelona. Carles and his brother Xavi, an architect,
drew up the plans and made various models; interior designer
Alfons Tost designed some of the furniture, chose the colours
and gave it the finishing touches - and the result was a
restaurant with a original personality, unlike anything
else in Barcelona. The kitchen had to be within sight of
the customers so that everything was as transparent as possible:
"a veritable statement of principles". When Comerç
24 opened in June 2001 it offered a product it has maintained
till the present day. At Comerç 24 the typical menu
does not exist, there are no first or second courses: the
product it offers is highly unusual in the catering field.
Comerç 24 is located in La Ribera, an area where
Barcelona's mercantile history lives side by side with its
finest Gothic buildings, an area with a new urban orientation
which accentuates leisure and culture, good eating, and
the discovery of the past.
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