Gastro SER | Ramon Freixa: cocina catalana, corazón madridista

·48 min·3 clips

Chef Ramón Freixa, fresh from winning two Michelin stars, discusses reinventing his career at age 50 and his Madridista heart.

1. Gastro SER, hosted by Carlos Cano on Cadena SER, interviews chef Ramón Freixa following his receipt of two Michelin stars at Ramón Freixa Tradición and Atelier on Velázquez 24 in Madrid. 2. Cano hosts solo from the studio, with Freixa as the sole interview guest; before the interview, reporter Marina Fernández covers the vending machine reform and food journalist Luna González speaks with four Spanish cheesemakers. 3. The episode's central thesis is whether Freixa's career-long pattern of resetting successful projects represents deliberate maturity or restlessness, and how a two-concept restaurant under one roof can be financially and creatively sustainable. 4. A Spanish government Real Decreto, announced by Minister Bustín Duy, will require at least 80% of products in hospital and residential care vending machines to be healthy options — fruit, plain yogurt, unsweetened juice, or nuts — along with mandatory drinking water fountains in the same buildings. 5. Antonio Banderas visited González Vías winery in Jerez and tasted a wine from 1728, of which only around 50 liters remain in a bottle holding over 500 liters, the rest having evaporated to a semi-solid state; enologist Antonio Flores, whose father preceded him and whose daughter now works alongside him, describes the wine as a Palomino vinified sweet that witnessed the French Revolution, Trafalgar, and World War II. 6. At the World Cheese Awards 2025, a Swiss 18-month raw-milk gruyere won best cheese globally for the sixth time for Switzerland, while Spain earned 20 Supergold medals, with winners including Hechizo from Zarcillera in Lorca, Lece's raw cow's milk original from the Basque Country, Cura del Romero from Valle de los Molinos in Toledo, and a goat semi-cured from Pajarete in Cádiz; the 2026 awards will be held in Córdoba. 7. Freixa's new Velázquez 24 address contains two legally and operationally separate restaurants: Tradición seats 120 and focuses on traditional Spanish cooking including the family canalón recipe and lubina Wellington, while Atelier seats only 10 and operates as a constantly evolving tasting menu. 8. The two restaurants share neither kitchen, staff, nor internal corridor — to move between them, staff must pass through the dining room — a deliberate design Freixa credits with preventing the rhythm of a full 120-seat service from contaminating the focused pace of a 10-seat experience. 9. Freixa explains that Michelin stars belong to restaurants, not chefs, and that the two-star gap when he closed Hotel Único on December 31 was an unavoidable parenthesis; he compared sustained quality to completing school notebooks gradually throughout the summer rather than rushing them at the last minute. 10. Freixa and his husband David decided to open their own project after 15 years at Hotel Único, prompted in part by longstanding encouragement from friends Toño and José of Atrio restaurant, who repeatedly told them to create something of their own. 11. The catering division — serving the Bernabéu stadium, the Real Theatre, and the Prado Museum — is the primary revenue engine of the Ramón Freixa business, which Freixa describes as 'baskets with eggs very well distributed,' where no single leg is the most important. 12. The top-selling dishes in Tradición are lubina Wellington and the family canalón recipe; Freixa notes that a dish his father created almost 50 years ago — potato ravioli with black botifarra — remains on the current Tradición menu and has not gone out of fashion. 13. Freixa's parents founded Rincón Freixa in Barcelona after their partnership in an Italian restaurant called El Cabaletto collapsed; the impetus was spotting a 'local alquiler' sign on the way to the cinema; the restaurant earned its first Michelin star in 1988, a year after opening. 14. Freixa identifies a recurring pattern across three generations: his parents' reset from El Cabaletto to Rincón Freixa, his own reset from Barcelona to Madrid, and now the reset from Hotel Único to Velázquez 24. 15. On the question of labor conditions, the host raises listener messages from former workers who contrast current progressive rhetoric from chefs with past practices; Freixa defends his 16-year-old self going to a pastry kitchen at 5am unpaid as legitimate formation-phase learning, but affirms that professional staff at his restaurants now work 8-hour continuous shifts with compensated rest days. 16. All five double-starred restaurants in the 2025 Michelin Spain gala had connections to Catalan cuisine, including Freixa, Bombar, Boscana (Joel), and Enigma; Freixa describes the coincidence as 'rare' and says all were deserved. 17. The episode moves between formal interview questions and relaxed tangents — Freixa discusses changing jackets (white for Tradición, black for Atelier) as a mental switch, and recounts his DANA emergency-alert wedding in September with 300-plus guests including many Michelin-starred friends. 18. Freixa is Catalan-born but has lived in Madrid long enough to consider himself deeply madrileño, sings the Real Madrid anthem at the Bernabéu, and addresses the recurring questions about his identity with mild amusement. 19. Listeners who follow Michelin-level Spanish gastronomy, the business side of running high-end restaurants, or the family history of Barcelona and Madrid fine dining would find most value in this episode. 20. Those seeking only cooking technique details or listeners who do not understand Spanish will find little to engage with, as the conversation is entirely in Spanish with no translation.

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