Madrid is now full of restaurants offering cuisine in which our country is a world reference. In the 70s of the last century, Madrid could represent many things, but it certainly was not a symbol of almost anything in the world. So, a young entrepreneur who had already had the courage to bring one of the main Parisian luxury brands, Hermès, to the capital, dared to take on a new challenge. This restless young woman was determined to make Madrid a center of fine dining, in which Basque chefs would play a leading role. Juan Mari Arzak, Karlos Arguiñano, Martín Berasategui, Ramón Roteta, Pedro Subijana and some others found in Carmen Guasp the necessary stimulus to bring to Madrid the taste of a cuisine that, since ancient times, cherished values to contribute to the modernization of the capital of the kingdom. It was 1976 and in Madrid on I Gastronomy round table She summoned them under the inspiration of this young woman, aware of the role that the courage to open windows and doors should play in the new Spain and give color and flavor to the capital of a country that aspired to much more than what it had experienced for almost forty years.
Shortly after, in 1979, she opened the legendary El Amparo restaurant, where the linen tablecloths, the sommelier, the menu full of haute cuisine suggestions and a management full of commitment to supreme quality, made her business a unique reference of those years. Together with the famous chef Ramón Ramírez, they constituted the fundamental basis for the establishment of New Basque Cuisine, also in Madrid, because there the necessary alliance was achieved to provide the city with a cosmopolitanism that it lacked. She had created Bogui a few years earlier, a place where Pascua Ortega squandered the imagination of an almost absent interior design, then in the gray tones of a dying dictatorship.
Today, recounting the merits of this young pioneer fills us with deep emotion. Not even sadness, because she was a model of optimism and joy that should not be eclipsed. I believe that neither Madrid nor Spain sufficiently recognized what it meant for the city to obtain these two Michelin stars in the late 1980s. Today, this whole universe of stars is very common in our country, but at the time, paving the way for a new way of understanding gastronomy was exactly its thing. A creator of modernity, a teacher of what would later become the women who forged the high-level gastronomic identity of this country.
Other projects continued later, but the main thing was to lay the foundations of a Madrid in which enjoying today a list of magnificent restaurants is not complicated, because from the old Puigcerdá alley it created what no one imagined in that time of hope and renewal.
I imagine in the silence of these letters his clear smile, his always accurate words, his discreet elegance and his love for a well-finished work, and I can only think of the void he leaves us. It is not easy to find women of such discretion, with silences so full of projects, with a capacity for modernity so dissonant with the dark times of yesterday and today. Her leadership was so simple and at the same time so perfect that talking with her about culture, contemporaneity, art and sensitivity was a delight for every sensitive mind.
An unforgettable memory deserves his eternal friendship with Pilar Citoler, the other face of avant-garde modernity in sad Madrid at the end of the seventies, who made of this couple a mirror in which any lover of color, of light, of the very essence of life could see themselves. Contemporaneity, Citoler and Guasp have always gone hand in hand since then.
Now that you are gone, all the linen tablecloths mourn your absence, all the greatest tableware remembers your care, all the restaurateurs of the infinite north cannot forget what you did, all the sommeliers who opened the unopened bottles of luxury that had not yet arrived miss its flow, so they weep with me for every tear of the undrunk glass. This champagne that we didn’t drink will still hold in our glasses, don’t doubt it.
Our Pilar will take care of every detail that you have left unfinished, because she knows that your heritage has made us the custodians of a sense of elegance and good living that can hardly be found other than in your placid smile with which you said goodbye to the one who loved you most.
And finally, in this southern city that you loved almost involuntarily, we all mourn your early absence and will continue to idolize your taste for taste, your sense of elegant measure, your luxury without stridency, your smile without hubbub, your love without measure. We will always love you. Cordoba is far away and alone, even more alone without you.
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