El Celler de Can Roca.
Carrer de Can Sunyer, 48
17007 Girona
Tel. 972 222 157
info@cellercanroca.com
An incubator of ideas and projects. At times the soul of the
restaurant; at other times, the brain. Our research, training,
sustainability and creativity station. A place to think, reflect,
share, grow, investigate, cooperate, exchange talent and knowledge
with the outside world, and to take care of ourselves.
There came a time when we became aware of the need to have a space to continue to grow creatively and to innovate in parallel with the active pace of day-to-day service in the restaurant. The birth of El Somni was visualized and functioned as an embryo of La Masia in 2012, which a couple of years later, in 2014 and 2015, would host the creative and logistical development of the restaurant’s first two world tours with its entire team in conjunction with BBVA.
In this traditional Catalan house from 1898, built into a triangle without distances from Can Roca in one vertex—our past, the roots—and El Celler de Can Roca—our continuous present—we have a space that looks into the future, and which also works as a meetings center to gather projects. It has a scientific laboratory and a demo test kitchen that works as a classroom on Tuesdays to host and share master classes with the trainees, and the rest of the week for the development of new culinary projects and research. The upper floor has a reference library and a transversal creativity room for the development of new projects.
Tuesdays for the Team
On Tuesdays we share time and space with our teams at La Masia (i+R), which we conceive as a parenthesis in the hectic and precise rhythm of a restaurant of the kind. In this parenthesis, we find vital deep reflection and share training, values, dialogue and creativity with our dining room, kitchen, management and communication teams. It is an opportunity to listen to them and to take care of ourselves emotionally with the guide of an expert in emotional management for elite teams, Imma Puig, who helps us release the pressures of success and sharpen the gears and relationships of our complex human machinery. We share our experiences of the week, we present the new dishes straight out of the Roca Lab to the dining room team, teach cooking techniques, and share our philosophy. For our trainees, Tuesdays’ programming at La Masia is a complement to their practical learning in their daily activities at El Celler de Can Roca.
Today, La Masia (i+R) is our consolidated (R&D) center, although we have named it (i+R): “i” for innovation, investigation, ideation, imagination… and “R” for Roca, recreation, risk, renovation and roots, reflection...
There is also an intangible Masia that escapes its walls, which is a universe of ideas, the mind and heart of El Celler de Can Roca, the creative talent that not only underlies the transversality of 3 brothers in a creative synthesis, but also goes beyond when it adds the human capital of our team, and grows exponentially when it opens its doors to collaboration with specialists, artists and artisans from different fields who come to our open house to contribute with their talent.
La Masia is a space open to the whole team, who can come visit if they need to consult a book in the library, organize or work on a thought, think, create, rediscover. A space of creativity; of a cross-sectional, multidisciplinary dialogue that nourishes the restaurant with ideas. From here we also recover contact with Earth through a botanical project—Earth Animated—or we experiment with the senses to travel to the soul of a product. Through distillation and fermentation, we look for smells and flavors that allow diners to embark on an emotional journey with the complicity of memories—Fermentation 4 Innovation—and, why not, make wines from everything except grapes—Ars Natura Líquida.
