By The Best Chef NEW CANDIDATES Top100 2022 Comments Off

New Candidates 2022 the best chef — Fina Puigdevall and Martina Puigvert – New Candidates 2022

Fina Puidgevall and Martina Puigvert

Les Cols

Since May 1990 Fina Puigdevall has been managing the Restaurant Les Cols d’Olot, as well as being both the owner and chef of this establishment situated in the mountain range by which it is known and her own birthplace.

Fina Puigdevall’s cooking conveys much with few elements. When creating the dishes, she likes to remove everything that she considers is not essential, while not losing the essential poetry. It is a light and essential style, purified but generous. It conveys sincerity, balance, austerity, and naturalness, in an authentic and emotive way, with imagination, intuition and sensitivity. It is a style of cooking which reflects her own way of being.

The culinary proposals which this restaurant offer is rooted in the land and the landscape surrounding it

For this reason, Puigdevall has initiated a process of research and recuperation from the area’s traditional vegetable growing. She works with a very particular vision of products which we can find in the Garrotxa area: buckwheat, the Vall d’en Bas potato, sweetcorn, poultry (chicken and duck), “fesols de Santa Pau” (a small white bean), ratafia, the Olot “tortell” (a kind of ring shaped cake or doughnut), pork and sausages, wild river trout, snails, wild boar, truffles, sweet chestnuts, turnips, wild mushrooms, herbs and even flower.

She likes to offer the most intimate and familiar but with an up-to-date language. She emphasises on the most modest products; the nature and the landscape are her source of inspiration; she likes to adapt the products of the land and her environment and give them a different meaning; the presentation of her dishes plays with the emptiness of the dish: the tradition/avant-garde contrast. The philosophy that has inspired the architectural refurbishment of the restaurant is the same philosophy that inspires her cuisine.

Fina considers her team as a part of her family because of the good understanding created between them through the years

She believes that the aim of her restaurant is to offer happiness. Therefore, she attaches a great importance to the ritual and wants her guests to enjoy each one of the pleasures that surround a table: the luxury of the light and the silence; the importance of the gesture and the look; the serenity of the atmosphere; the hospitality.

Martina Puigvert Puigdevall

Young chef Martina Puigvert is an up and coming star in Spain. She’s the daughter of Fina Puigdevall, the head of Girona-based Les Cols, which has earned two Michelin stars for its loving devotion to produce from the local region.

Along with her older sister Clara, and younger sister Carlota, Martina now works at Les Cols, where she is Head Chef and Head of Culinary R&D.

Martina studied Gastronomy and Culinary Arts at the Basque Culinary Centre, and has worked at Lua in Madrid, Koy Shunka in Barcelona, and restaurants in the US and in Bolivia.

The young chef explains what having local produce at the heart of the Les Cols experience means

“By depending on local products, we’re completely connected to the weather, which can be an inconvenience when it comes to creating dishes, given we never know exactly when a product will arrive, let alone how long they will last.”

“Not everything is in our hands. Nature plays a very important part in this project, supplying us with one product or another. And it’s then that we do a good job.”

She says that being able to spend time working on R&D has helped her improve communication between the restaurant and the allotments.