El Celler de Can Roca in Girona is one of the world’s best places to eat — and the brothers behind it have just opened ahotel. Eddi Fiegel is first to stay
High on a hilltop in the Catalan countryside outside Girona, on a wet Thursday afternoon in June, I was being driven into the clouds. Only 15 minutes earlier I had been ambling my way through the narrow medieval streets of Girona’s old town, but I was now heading north out of the city towards the French border. Suddenly, my taxi turned off up a country lane lined with cork oaks, their lacy leaves forming a canopy overhead, and we began our climb.
At the top of the Sant Julia mountain, a vast circular building with a curving, copper-toned concrete roof came into view, part fortress, part millionaire’s modernist mansion.
I had arrived at Esperit Roca, the new five-star hotel just opened by Joan, Josep and Jordi Roca, the superstar trio of brothers — one a chef, one a sommelier and the other a patissier — whose three Michelin-starred Girona restaurant, El Celler de Can Roca, has twice taken the No 1 spot in the World’s 50 Best Restaurants awards.
Since then, the Rocas have become A-listers of the culinary world and beyond, owing to their innovative fine-dining reinterpretation of traditional recipes, embracing of food technology (such as sous-vide water baths) and theatrical presentation (the Rocas were using smoke-filled glass domes long before they appeared on MasterChef). The hotel is the latest addition to the brothers’ growing empire, which already includes, in Girona, a small boutique hotel (Casa Cacao, which opened in 2020), three restaurants, an ice-cream parlour and a sandwich bar.
Inside the small, elegant but uncluttered reception area, the star of the show was undoubtedly the surrounding landscape. Enormous floor-toceiling windows followed the curves of the building looking out through the wanton rain and cloud cover to the plains of northern Catalonia’s lush, wine-growing Emporda region. The petrol-blue Pyrenees, Montseny and Gavarres mountains loomed on the horizon.
Possibly because it was midweek — and the hotel had been open less than two weeks — there seemed to be hardly anyone around, apart from the suited and bow-tied hotel manager and receptionist at the front desk, and a couple of anoraked photographers nursing drinks at the bar. Soft Ibiza chill-out sounds played on the PA.
The hotel is unlikely to remain quiet for long. Esperit Roca forms just one part of a huge new Roca brothers project within a mountain-top complex, which also includes a new restaurant in the hotel — and another standalone venture lower down the mountain — a vast wine cellar, an exhibition space and a distillery. Oh, and a helipad.
“Our philosophy has always been to stay in and around Girona,” Joan says when we meet at the hotel. “It’s a small city, but Girona is where we were born and raised, and it’s our home. This mountain also played a strategic role in Girona’s past.” Sant Julia was the site of an ancient Iberian, Bronze-age settlement called Gerunda, which predated the city the Romans later named Girona.
The mountaintop buildings are not as modern as they first appear. Initially built as a 19th-century fortress with a moat, the complex was remodelled in 2018 as a luxury hotel (the Sants Metges) and gem museum, only to close following the pandemic.
“It all seemed to makesense,” Joan says. “Josep is an extraordinary sommelier and we’ve been accumulating wines, with lots stored in different places, so we needed space for a cellar. We’d also had the idea of creating an exhibition telling the story of our restaurant, El Celler de Can Roca. And as Casa Cacao is always full, we thought this was a good opportunity to have the exhibition space and the wine cellar all in one place, as well as a hotel to complement Casa Cacao.”
The Rocas had good reason to open up some new tables, Joan says. “In 2023 we discovered that we had 129,000 people on the waiting list at El Celler. We had no idea there were so many, as we had never asked!”
Staggered by this revelation, the brothers had the idea of opening a new dining venue to enable more people to get a table, where they could enjoy a election of El Celler de Can Roca’s greatest culinary hits from the past 30 years. The fortress complex provided a solution. When it came to adapting the old hotel, there wasn’t much to do. The buildings had already been modernised; there was a large L-shaped outdoor swimming pool and the decor was, for the most part, ready to go.
Leaving the industrial-style polished plaster pillars, wooden floors and compressed-earth textured ceilings intact, the brothers simply pared things down, swapping jewel-toned sofas and large, abstract artworks for blank walls and neutral, oatmeal-hued upholstery.
“We tried to adapt the hotel to our taste,” Joan says. “Also we wanted a space that was friendly, comfortable and authentic. There’s beauty in the landscape, so there is no need to put artwork in the rooms.” In my duplex, as in each of the hotel’s 15 rooms, it’s unquestionably the views that provide the wow factor — not least in my bathroom, with its freestanding bathtub facing the mountains. The minibar was filled with the Rocas’s own beer and Casa Cacao chocolate.
Where the Rocas have really made the hotel their own, unsurprisingly perhaps, is at dinner. My visit to the hotel’s (unnamed) restaurant included an exceptional starter of tomato salad with lime vinaigrette and cucumber juice (£15), followed by buttery-soft confit hake with rocket pesto, asparagus, garlic and parsley oil (£24), offset by a crisp, local white picapoll wine.
The next morning, after an excellent night’s sleep, breakfast was a gourmet affair. There was tender, deep-red jamon iberico glistening like polished leather, fresh blueberries and raspberries that tasted of the sun, and a cake stand teeming with homemade pastries and chocolate brownies by the pastry chef Jordi.
I could easily have spent the day exploring the countryside, which is peppered with medieval hilltop villages, or the coves and beaches of the Costa Brava, 30 minutes’ drive away. However, keen to see the new exhibition space, I made my way down the mountain.
As foodie exhibitions go, this is as flashy as they come: 50ft-high, state-of-the-art, black-edged screens show interviews with the Rocas and their colleagues while information panels trace their culinary history from childhood. On display are cooking utensils, quirky serving dishes and weird and wonderful gadgets (a 1997 water-bath cooker, for example), cookery books and photos.
But the real showstopper was yet to come. After browsing in the small shop area, which sells everything from a Roca brothers baseball cap to cookbooks and beer, I was led through a heavy, curtained door into a crater-like domed space.
The haunting baroque arias from Handel’s Triumph of Time and Truth oratorio filled the room, which contained nothing but a small city’s worth of wine racks. (The plan is to eventually store 80,000 bottles, making it one of the largest cellars in the world.)
Another door led into the new Esperit Roca (greatest hits) restaurant, where smartly dressed Japanese tourists and Catalan women in designer dresses sat by picture windows looking out to the countryside beyond.
I had been fortunate enough to eat at El Celler de Can Roca a few years ago, but my dinner here trumped it easily. Perhaps that’s because the new menu is made up ofthe original’s most popular dishes, not to mentionexceptional wines (eightcourse tasting menu from £97, mains from £24).
Most memorable was the Contessa (as Viennetta was known in Spain) of white asparagus icecream and truffle shavings, and Todo la Gamba (All of the Prawn), an elegant mix of tender, plump, prawn globesmarinated in seaweed vinegar and katsuobushi (fermentedtuna) alongside a crispy fried prawn’s head, all in an intense, terracotta-hued,silky prawn velouté. Star pudding? The Cromatismo Verde (Shades of Green), mixing apple granita with avocado mousse and a tangy sorbet of lemon and Granny Smith apples with tarragon sugar.
Esperit Roca is everything you might expect from these pioneering chefs: stylish, often unashamedly commercial and a class act throughout.
Back in my hotel room afterwards, looking down from the mountaintop, I could see this was the perfect place for three gentlemen from Girona who conquered the world.
Eddi Fiegel was a guest of Hotel Esperit Roca, which has B&B doubles from £296 (esperitroca.com), and of the Costa Brava Girona Tourism Board (costabrava.org). Casa Cacao has B&B doubles from £194 (hotelcasacacao.com).
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