This Food-focused Hotel Is a Love Letter to Catalonia—and It Might Have One of Spain's Best Restaurants
Roca is the Spanish word for 'rock,' but in European foodie circles, it's also a name that carries a certain cachet. That's because husband-and-wife team Josep Roca and Montserrat Fontané opened a restaurant called Can Roca in 1967 in Girona, about an hour north of Barcelona. It quickly became known for authentic, homestyle food like arròs a la cassola, a rice casserole often made with rabbit, prawns, and vegetables.
The couple's sons added to the legacy in 1986 with El Celler de Can Roca, which today is a Michelin three-starred restaurant reported to have an 11-month waiting list. Each brother has a specialty: the oldest, Josep, is a sommelier; Juan is the head chef; Jordi, the youngest, handles dessert and pastries. Together, the trio is synonymous with some of the most inventive expressions of Catalan cuisine.
Their most recent project, Esperit Roca, which opened last year in the hills outside Girona, consists of a 16-room hotel, a restaurant, and a distillery, and it will soon include a culinary research academy. Near the French border between the Pyrenees mountains and the Mediterranean, this part of northern Catalonia has a 'great cultural and gastronomic sensibility,' Juan told me when I visited in November. The restaurant can source Palamós prawns from Costa Brava and lamb from local farms in the Ripollès region. Plants like mugwort, gentian, and pine are grown on site and used to produce gins, fortified wines, and other spirits and liqueurs.
Esperit Roca occupies Castell de Sant Julià de Ramis, a military fortress from the 19th century. By day, guests can go hiking in the mountains and visit nearby sites like the Sant Julià church and the ruins of the ancient town of Kerunta.
But dinner is the main event. I entered the restaurant—which was awarded a Michelin star in late 2024—through a giant dome that houses an 80,000-bottle wine cellar, then sat down to an eight-course tasting menu."Near the French border between the Pyrenees mountains and the Mediterranean, this part of northern Catalonia has a 'great cultural and gastronomic sensibility,' Juan told me."I first had a mussel-and-sea-urchin salad with carrots, sweet potatoes, and yellow beets, dressed in an orange vinaigrette. Next, I tried Mediterranean turbot prepared three ways: as loin, fin, and carpaccio, with kalamata olives, semi-dried tomatoes, and a pil-pil sauce made with oxalis flowers.
I also had mar y montaña, a popular Catalan dish that translates to 'sea and mountain' and is usually a combination of fish and meat; this plant-based version was made with plankton, algae, asparagus, and basil.
Some of the most memorable moments came from culinary tricks and wild aromas. Succulent red prawns were made punchier with 'prawn-coral distillate,' a liquid extracted from the shellfish that was reintroduced as small droplets to infuse the dish with the prawn's essence. An enchanting dessert, bosque lluvioso (rainy woodland), was made of black chanterelles and powdered pine needles, infused with a distillate of soil. It tasted like the earth itself.
Touches of theater continued until the final course: a plate of madeleines, served with a lemon, cinnamon, and Earl Grey custard and delivered with a worn copy of the 1932 play Blood Wedding, by Federico García Lorca. It's a passionate, and ultimately violent, tale of a bride torn between a former lover and her husband-to-be, the man her family wants her to marry. Slightly gimmicky? Sure. But I leafed through the text just as hungrily as I dug in to the dessert, moved by the spirit of drama and flavor that the evening had stirred.
A version of this story first appeared in the April 2025 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline "The Good Earth."
Read the original article on Travel & Leisure
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