Joan Roca i Fontané (1964, Girona, Spain) Chef. After growing up and working in the traditional Catalan family restaurant, he studied his academic course at the Escola d’Hostaleria de Girona, where several years later he became a professor. Nowadays he runs with his two brothers, Josep –sommelier- and Jordi – pastry chef- his own restaurant, El Celler de Can Roca. In his cuisine, he creates harmony with traditional flavors and modernist technics, fruit of a continuous investigation committed with innovation and creativity.

His deeply rooted educational vocation has led him to collaborate as an advisor for several national university programs and international culinary institutions, as well as the publication of reference books. Through the Cooking Tour Experience, with BBVA support, he has led not just the first World Tour experience of a restaurant, but also a powerful culinary talent development program that has just started in Latin America this year and will have international continuity in next annual editions.

Through a transversal vision of the creative process, his restaurant project dialogues and engages both with science and peasants, technology and sensitivity, product and sensorial anthropology. El Somni, the first multisensory gastro opera even performed, involved the chef with more tan 50 artists and sensory experts along a two year creative work and experimentation. Nowadays, the restaurant is leading a botanical research called Terra Animada that has catalogued more than 3000 wild species for its recovery and reintroduction in gastronomy, with the objective of educate society on nearby natural environment knowledge and awake ecologic sensitiveness by realizing its richness.