Lucía Freitas, the cook of the sea.
Like so many other chefs, **Lucía Freitas** discovered cooking in her family. “Whenever something special had to be cooked, my father and I would do it in the Bilbao kitchen, the wood stove,” she says. Her father was the one who discovered fire and also the raw material.
“He planted the seed for me to be a cook. Although in my house they were all letters, they realized right away that I liked to get into the kitchen alone and the hours passed," she says on the phone, returning from Madrid to Santiago, after cooking at the pop-up fair. up of crafts and Galician gastronomy Knowledge and flavors. And today she can boast of her first Michelin star.
But nobody said that reaching the award was easy. When she wasn't in the kitchen, Freitas was on TV. glued "to the Arguiñano program or to Canal Cocina". The Arzak book that they gave her became her bedside reading. That is why when she decided to dedicate herself professionally to what had been more than a hobby as a child and adolescent, going to study in the Basque Country was the most obvious thing to do. "And it was ignorance," she now admits. “I did not know that in Santiago there is one of the best schools in Spain. But my idea of cooking always came from there: my book by Arzak, Arguiñano… For me, the Basque Country was a benchmark and I dreamed of going there”.
The sea and the orchard is her world.
She went from Bilbao to Barcelona, to Jordi Butrón's pastry school. “I always set goals for myself, I analyze my life well in advance and my life has always been to have a restaurant. That was always my dream,” she explains. “I never understood very well why cooking and pastry did not go together, for me they go hand in hand, it was incomprehensible to have a restaurant and not be a cook and a good pastry chef. You want everything to be yours in the restaurant.”
Lucía Freitas enjoys cooking as well as pastry. “I don't like being limited, when I've worked for other people – she worked at Celler Can Roca, Mugaritz, Tàpies, El Bohío–, she kept changing, she couldn't be just in the kitchen or just in the pastry shop. I define myself as a cook and pastry chef”, she says she.
And she adds: “When you have a restaurant you have to be a good cook, a good pastry chef, a good manager, know how to organize a pike well, you have to enjoy everything... I enjoy cooking some cheeks as much as organizing the washing of the dishes in the most effective way. It's everything, it's a life, you have to enjoy all the parts that having a restaurant entails”.
Always first class raw material.
Because cooking is not a job, it is her life. She is not a cook the hours she spends in the kitchen of her house, A Tafona, her restaurant, her dream, she is always a cook and pastry chef.
After years away from her land, when the time came to give shape to her dream, she decided to return home, to Galicia, to Santiago. "I was working in Mallorca, and I was homesick, I had been away since I was 19 and when you work in this sector you don't have much free time to go back and visit your family," she says.
Her idea was to “work for others”, at 27 years old, she seemed too soon to set up her own restaurant, but she had no other option. "There were no restaurants that wanted to do what I did," she recalls. Today she also admits that being a woman at this level of cuisine is not easy either: "Because they don't trust you to give you a restaurant."
"And sometimes trains come by and you have to catch them: I had the opportunity to take over a restaurant, I had the money I had, which wasn't much." She opened A Tafona and began to develop her cuisine that she defines as “very based on the sea and seasonality”. But as it is for any Galician, she says.
curly oyster. Freitas is a cook of the sea, of her Galician sea.
The market of the Plaza de Abastos, which she has next to her, is her supplier and the heart of that kitchen in which she does not stop creating. "In my house I like to give things that are not usual, cook things that people do not do at home", She was counting last Monday in Madrid while she was preparing a curly oyster or a rooster's comb.
"A creative cook who only does jack, knight and king has to be horrible," she also said. Ella freitas she believes she is lucky to have clients that allow her to continue creating and growing. A Tafona began as a restaurant with "a good menu of the day and a gastronomic part". Until two years ago everything changed.
“I was a mother two years and three months ago, a month after becoming a mother, some Americans ate at my house and I had the opportunity to advising on the opening of a Galician restaurant in New York – tomino – . I was in charge of designing the menu, the kitchen, looking at suppliers... It comforted me a lot because when you go through bad times, an opportunity like this reinforces you when it comes to valuing your work. And financially, it meant that I was encouraged to invest in my dream”.
He reformed A Tafona, removed the menu of the day and focused on the gastronomic part. Nine and a half years after opening it, The experience "has been very hard, but also very rewarding." Now he has completely fulfilled his dream and every day when he enters it he still does not believe it.
Lucía Freitas is one of the cooks who is valuing Galician cuisine beyond her product. Perhaps what failed in Galicia for many years, she believes. And the job that she and other chefs have now is "to recover the tradition and renew it". "We have to realize in the kitchen that we have here that respect for the product is above all else," she says.
To Tafona, Tomiño in New York and now Lume.
And from that respect for the product and its desire to continue growing, in "just over a month and a half", she opens her second dream, very close to the first, only separated by her favorite place, the Plaza de Abastos de Santiago: it's called Lume, it will be on Rúa das Ameas, "One of the most gastronomic" in the city and it will be for all audiences, she explains.
"It's going to be a direct kitchen, it's the center, so much so that diners look at the kitchen only and exclusively", she tells. "It's like a theater, to see how the cooks prepare the ingredients that we are going to buy every day in the Plaza over the fire. It will be a more informal version, where we can have a couple of dishes to share."
“This is how I close the circle, I am already complete, I no longer have to give up any client, I want Tafona to be seen as something special, not every day, to come, get carried away and enjoy. And Lume is to go any day of the week, have a snack, informal, enjoy how people are cooking for you, people for whom cooking is their life”.
*Article published on June 13, 2018 and updated on November 22, 2018 after the publication of the new Michelin stars.