Six years ago the director of the Picasso Museum, Emmanuel Guigon, had the good idea of organizing an exhibition on Picasso’s cuisine. Since his arrival in Barcelona, the artist from Malaga has shown his interest in gastronomy: his first contribution, this letter he drew for Els Four Gats and allowed him to eat for free at Father Romeu’s tavern: at the end of the 19th century, a ticket for 30 meals cost 60 pesetas.
If Picasso was so interested in food, its human and cultural factor, his museum in Barcelona had to create a space where the pleasures of gastronomy would become reality. According to Guigon, chef Romain Fornell has undertaken to set up a Parisian bistro in a palace in Barcelona. A restaurant whose menu exudes a love of French cuisine and also of Barcelona, Fornell’s adopted city for twenty years. The result is Cafè Pablo, a restaurant with two interior rooms, an interior patio and a large covered terrace decorated with posters of the Belle Époque and of that Paris that was the party of the 1920s.
With Cafè Pablo Fornell expands the list of Goût Rouge restaurants, the group of restoration composed of Caelis, La Plassohla, Rooftop Ohla Barcelona, Azul Rooftop Barceloneta, Tejada Mar and Café Turó. Cafè Pablo wants to be one hundred percent French and one hundred percent Barcelonan: “I don’t know how to do it, but that’s how I am,” Fornell quips. The answer is in a letter that Fornell calls a “culinary journey”: the French recipe books of foie micuit, Picasso snails in Burgundy, entrecôte in brown sauce from Paris and small crayfish from Robuchon harmonize with the “meat” croquettes. ‘olla” and slices of Iberian ham and the very Catalan bread with tomato.
Since the gods are also in the kitchen and a museum without an audience does not exist, Guigon, the director who increased the number of Barcelona visitors to the museum from four to twenty percent Picasso He believes that Café Pablo, with its twenty-euro lunch menu, is another good reason to visit the Moncada Palace: “A restaurant for eating well and, above all, for meeting up with friends.” It is without a doubt the best of the menus.
