Joan Roca
El Celler de Can Roca Girona, Spain
Joan Roca doesn’t use his fridge nearly as much as the rest of us use ours. This is because he lives next to his restaurant and, between the lunch and dinner services, heads home to cook for his wife and two children, and sometimes his mother (pictured with him). His fridge at home is a smaller affair but it’s still filled with the kind of local specialities that would make the rest of us salivate: king prawns from Palamós, Galician cow’s milk cheese and black olive tapenade. For when he’s feeling lazy, Roca keeps Iberico ham and local boudin blanc on hand to eat cold, and plastic boxes of chopped onions and tomato sauce so he can whip up a pasta sauce. While the cheese and meat are Spanish, the spices are not; there are piles of Mexican and Asian chilli peppers ready to add heat to a paella or risotto. “I get most of my food from work,” he says. “Or the market in Girona, where I go with my daughter on Saturdays to see what’s new. It reflects the seasons and products around us.”