Carles Abellán could have easily succumbed to the small oak syndrome whose main symptom is stunted growth due to being lost in contemplation of how the big oak grows ever bigger but he did nothing of the sort. Starting work in the world of cuisine in the kitchen of elBulli together with Ferran Adrià he there spent most of his professional career before taking over the reins of his own career. In 1984, he decided to become a chef examining in the process the ways of working, studying, investigating and creating at that time current in the day by day work of the Cala Montjoi restaurant. Captivated by that constant preoccupation with cuisine, with this way of living cuisine as a creative and intellectual experience, he shouldered responsibilities, became much more mature, learned from this culinary environment and started to think that maybe one day, in the future, he could become too the owner of his own restaurant.
He remained working in elBulli for six years before deciding to follow a new professional route. He went away from Roses for a couple of years to give cookery classes, but shortly after this, the Adrià-Juli Soler duo set their eyes on him again offering him the management of a new venture that was then about to see first light in the Olympic port of Barcelona: the Talaia restaurant. He took the first significant decisions of setting up and defining the style of the place which was in the public mind a new version of elBulli in the Condal City of Barcelona.
Subsequently, he made the leap from there to the Hacienda Benazuza restaurant in Sanlúcar la Mayor, also with Adrià; and this ended up being the last stage of his career when he had the chance to work side by side with the chef from Roses because shortly after this he opened his own first restaurant, Comerç 24, in El Born.
Comerç 24 is a dream come true which has finally shown to the world the real scope and personality of Carles Abellán as a chef; it also marked a starting point for his later adventure: a tapas bar in the strict sense of the word, Tapaç 24 (Diputació, 269); and in a near future, the responsibility of providing culinary offerings for one of the mythical restaurant establishments in Barcelona: el Velódromo, which is still being restored.
To define the work of Abellán as a chef is relatively easy because he himself has laid down a theoretical base which gives his whole culinary creativity meaning. His menu, presented personally, offers "author cuisine in small portions, designed for both tasting menus and à la carte; small dishes designed at his own discretion to be either shared -these are mostly strictly based on the product- or taken individually. A traditional cuisine free from outrageous creative antics, which changes daily in line with what is available in the market".
Comerç 24 is both the fruit and the banner of what Abellán calls "glocal cuisine". This neologism he invented establishes the fact of belonging to a group of chefs located in specific nouvelle cuisine situated in contemporary Barcelona as the interpretative home ground for an inevitable global cuisine due to the interests, knowledge and raw materials harvested from all over the world. There are no boundaries in the world we live in which can stop the most exotic materials and far-away techniques from coming to the kitchen of Comerç 24, but there is indeed a curious, openness and expectancy of vision shared by this chef along with the rest of the Barcelona professionals taught in the same roots, all of whom are conscious of belonging to a concrete atmosphere filled with a common view which they project in each one of their dishes.
The definition of "glocal cuisine" doesn't come from the cuisines it takes as its point of reference (every cuisine in the world is capable of contributing something to this chef); but derives from the point of view the observer who perceives the world. If we want to talk philosophically about it, resort could be had to Berkeley's dictum Esse est percipi (To be is to be perceived) although it might be better for us not to get tangled up in such matters.
Miguel Ángel Rincón