When he opened Racó d'en Binu, 54 years ago, Francesc Fortí served scrambled eggs and sherry consommé for 50 pesetas, but also American-style lobsters for 1,400.
In the original menu of that 40-room family inn converted into a “food house” the pizzas and homemade rice dishes of Fortí's father coexisted in happy promiscuity with the French-style kidney skewers or the pheasant with grapes and applesauce. .
“What eccentricity is this, Francesc?” some of the diners asked him.
“Who is going to come and spend a fortune on lobsters in your battle restaurant?”
But Fortí was always clear that his was not going to be a battle restaurant, that what was going to disappear in the medium term were the Roman-style squid and potato omelettes, replaced by glossy hare civets, partridges "with grapes ” and Chateaubriand sirloins with béarnaise sauce.
An old letter from Reco D'en Binu in which the seal of the Hotel Colón still appears, where the premises were initially a restaurant.Nacho Alegre
The restaurant lobby, designed by Jordi Garcés and Enric Soria.Nacho Alegre
“Build it and they will come,” said James Earl Jones in
Field of Dreams.
And Francesc Fortí created in Argentona, a city that barely had 6,000 inhabitants near the Barcelona coast, a stronghold of classic French haute cuisine.
An institution in the wake of the legendary Auguste Escoffier, the chef who
refounded Gallic haute cuisine in the
Belle Époque .
Clients from all over Europe began to frequent him.
Soon Francina Suriñach also arrived, from Sant Pere de Torelló, in inland Catalonia.
She came, as she herself tells us, “to do the season and learn how to serve a table in a high-class restaurant” and she ended up becoming Fortí's head waiter and wife.
Together they consolidated a business that obtained its second Michelin star in 1979, at a time, according to Fortí, “when the French guide recognized good cuisine, not design, supposed intellectual discourse or luxury.”
The time tunnel is full of puff pastries
Francesc welcomes us in the Racó lobby, designed by Jordi Garcés and Enric Soria.
The 76-year-old chef is ecstatic.
As he has been doing for more than five decades, he has gotten up at dawn to lock himself in the kitchen cold room to make the puff pastry that he uses in his fruit cakes.
It is a “slave” routine but one that, as he admits, continues to make him very happy: “I come from a lineage of hoteliers,” he says.
“This business is my life.
My great-grandmother's grandfather, whose last name was Soler, already opened an inn next to the main church of Argentona in 1792, and it records that five of Napoleon's officers stayed during the French invasion of 1808.
A waiter at Reco D'en Binu holds one of the restaurant's most emblematic desserts.Nacho Alegre
Sea urchins, one of the star dishes of Reco D'en Binu.Nacho Alegre
The place where we spoke, noble and ancient, of splendid rusticity, was a large hotel that lost a large part of its parish in the mid-fifties, "when tourism began to move to the beaches located further north."
Hence, Francesc and his brother Albino, heirs of the modest family emporium, were in charge of converting it into a restaurant and pouring into it all their artisanal learning, as students of the gourmet Alexandre Domènech.
Fortí now remembers those feverish weekend excursions, in the seventies, to Paris, Lyon and Marseille to “eat, learn and accumulate experiences” in some of the best traditional French restaurants.
From there they imported his recipe for success, a reinterpretation in a Catalan key of those culinary traditions sculpted in marble.
“At that time,” recalls Fortí, “there was no haute cuisine beyond the classical French school; the good restaurants were those that knew the Escoffier tradition and practiced it.
The
nouvelle cuisine
to offer a decaffeinated substitute.”
From the most prosperous and rewarding period of his business, Francesc rescues anecdotes such as the occasion when he went to Paris to represent Catalan gastronomy in a large-scale cultural exchange event: “That coincided with the coup d'état of Tejero, the February 23, 1981″, he remembers, “and it was about to be suspended.
At the last minute, when I had already decided not to go to Paris, because there was a lot of uncertainty and the conditions were not met, Jordi Pujol called me to his office as president of the Generalitat and demanded that I go, out of responsibility and patriotism, to "to give a good image of Catalonia in a difficult time."
The restaurant is located in the same space that once housed a hotel.Nacho Alegre
Fruit cake, the best-known dessert of Reco D'en Binu.Nacho Alegre
So he embarked on a Homeric journey of 1,200 kilometers by road, crossing a militarized border with the ingredients for his dishes in tow, to offer a series of banquets to top-level French personalities: “After 72 hours locked in a basement, cooking Against the clock, we served the banquet, and Giscard d'Estaing's foreign minister said that our
garotes
[sea urchins] were the best he had ever tasted, something extraordinary, because garote is a very French dish.
So
President
Pujol was able to boast, the next day, that we Catalans had gone to France to teach them how
garotes
are made .”
Fortí regrets, with some humor, that his display of patriotism did not receive more reward than the (late) payment for part of the raw materials used in serving the banquet: “I never heard from Mr. Pujol again.
But the day he needed something from me, he had it.”
Anatomy of a fall
The cook looks back and remembers the “exciting and hopeful” seventies;
about eighty “formidable”, of full consolidation of their business, and about ninety catastrophic, in which almost everything fell apart and they found themselves, without warning, “completely alone”, within the four walls of a premises with hardly any customers, in full process of decomposition, like a stranded ship.
He attributes it to fashions, “which are capricious,” but also to the “betrayal” of his brother, who was then embarking on a new relationship that prompted him to fly alone, turning his back on the project they had shared. .
“It was his right, of course, but he was a bad brother and a very unfair competitor,” Francesc recalls.
“He even said that we had closed the restaurant and he spread malicious rumors among our former clientele.”
Added to this, always according to Fortí, was “the envy of those who secretly despise you when you are at the top and then find a perverse pleasure in things starting to go wrong for you.”
Immersed in a long journey through the desert, Fortí and Suriñach came to consider “drawing the blinds.”
The owner of Reco D'en Binu.Nacho Alegre
According to science communicator Katie Steckles, mathematics offers an infallible recipe to get out of any labyrinth: never change direction.
At all crossroads, choose the right path.
If you alternate left and right, you will most likely end up hopelessly lost.
But stubborn perseverance always ends up paying off.
Fortí had never heard of Steckles, but intuition led him and Suriñach to apply precisely that recipe.
They persevered.
They stuck to their puff pastries, their frozen orange soufflés, their sea bass al papillote, and their sea urchins with glazed hollandaise sauce.
And, already in the second decade of the new millennium, unconditional perseverance began to bear fruit.
“There was never plan B,” concludes Fortí.
“There couldn't be.
I only conceive of two types of cuisine, the good one and the other, and I never considered switching to the other to see if the flute sounded.”
Today, the restaurant is going through its best moment in almost 30 years.
It has recovered its prestige and clientele and attracts a new profile of diners, increasingly younger, attracted by the authenticity it exudes, its unexpected success on social networks and a menu that brings to the present genuine echoes of a distant past.
Love's labors lost
El Racó and its unique history have inspired a documentary that has just been presented at the Malaga Festival.
It is titled
Binu, historia de dues estrelles
,
and it began to take shape a few months after the confinement of the spring of 2020, when the journalist Ricard Ustrell, director of the production company La Manchester, happened to stop at the premises and felt transported to the park. Jurassic of culinary excellence.
Guillem Cabra and Mar Clapés, directors of the feature film, tell us from Malaga how they were involved in what they describe as the rescue operation of a true relic: “Ustrell called us to tell us that there was an extraordinary story, of commendable resistance against the passage of time and fashions, which deserved to be told.”
Terrazzo floors, canvas walls, memories and recognitions in the immutable interiors of this restaurant in Argentona.Nacho Alegre
Cabra describes Francesc and Francina as “two coherent and persevering people, with very solid values and a work ethic that has allowed them to survive all kinds of vicissitudes and setbacks.”
Clapés finds it “completely irresistible” that the “extraordinary” cuisine of this pair of pioneers “coexists with the naturalness that allows them to serve you a common bottle of Rioja in a plastic decanter.”
In the Racó they found “a neatness and attention to detail compatible with a radical lack of artifice that we found very gratifying and very from another era.”
Cabra and Clapés' film begins with a priceless scene: Fortí becoming indignant because the wall telephones that he continues to use to collect his reservations have not been working for several weeks now and the company responsible does not offer him satisfactory solutions: "Do what you have to do" , the veteran chef ends up telling them, “but make sure you fix them!”
In the words of Cabra, “Francesc resists the reality that he has always known being replaced by a very different one, not necessarily better, and that makes us think that perhaps we should not resign ourselves to living in a world in which telephones They no longer work because no one cares to make them work.”
Detail of one of the corners of the premises.Nacho Alegre
The film crew and the restaurant staff shared a few months of very intense coexistence.
Fortí and Suriñach became accustomed to the continuous presence of “the film people,” even inside the narrow chamber in which Francesc makes his puff pastries.
The film also collected what Clapés and Cabra describe as “a small treasure tinged with melancholy.”
In the documentary, Francina appears serene and resolute when she states that she will never retire, because work is life and retiring would be something like entering a branch of death.
Francesc completes his partner's reflection by stating that he intends to continue dancing as long as his body lasts.
After all, what he is enjoying these days is, for him, like a second life.
People have returned to his restaurant, he once again enjoys the opportunity to share with the world the fruit of his experience: “I have always said that I do not cook to get customers.
It's the other way around, I need clients to be able to continue cooking.”
After the long conversation in the lobby, Francesc invites us to go “from theory to practice.”
Sitting in the magnificent dining room designed by Antoni de Moragues, with the fireplace whose ashes Francina continues to tend to every day, as the first task of her day, we are served a complete tasting menu washed down with a glass of local wine.
Soldiers parade around the table as loyal and diligent as the house pâté, the prawn squitxada, the puff pastries with pickled pepper, the prawn pancakes, the unbeatable chef-style hedgehogs in hollandaise sauce (the same ones that once represented to Catalan cuisine in the land of Escoffier) or the snails of Burgundy.
Also two of the most popular dishes, the spectacular sea bass al papillote or the succulent Francesc sirloin, followed by that tandem of high-quality desserts that form the orange soufflé and the fruit cake.
After the banquet, we entered the kitchen for the last time to say goodbye to Francina and Francesc.
The chef takes the opportunity to tell us about a veteran customer (“one of many”) who has returned to visit the establishment these days after a long absence: “Before leaving he told me that he was very satisfied, that he hadn't come in almost 40 years and He had found everything exactly the same, as always.
I told him: I'm glad, but don't take another 40 years to come back, because you won't find us here anymore."
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