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Montse Guillén, pioneer in the internationalization of Catalan cuisine and art, dies
Va tenir de parella l'artista Antoni Miralda i fou una persona clau en el maridatge entre art i gastronomia. Avui al matí, el FoodCultura, li ret un sentit comiat
From the kitchen of an old farmhouse in Meranges, where she began preparing meals for hikers with her parents, to arriving at the trendy venues of Manhattan, Guillén not only exported Catalan gastronomy to the world, but also made food much more than a necessity, turning it into a way of thinking, creating and sharing.
In the 1980s, she had already made her mark with the MG restaurant, on Tuset Street in Barcelona, where she herself described it as "a crossroads of influences, passions, daring". But the big turning point came in 1984, when, together with the artist Antoni Miralda, she opened El Internacional Tapas Bar & Restaurant in New York. Located in Tribeca, a neighborhood of bohemians and celebrities, this space was not just a place to eat, but a kind of gastronomic laboratory with artistic touches and a clear social vocation. Names such as Warhol, Basquiat, De Niro and Grace Jones passed through its tables, who discovered Catalan cuisine in the first restaurant to introduce Spanish tapas and Catalan pa amb tomàquet to the United States.
A multifaceted businesswoman, she knew how to innovate and use gastronomy as another artistic expression, in line with the other disciplines with which she often worked. After that New York adventure —which lasted until 1986—, Guillén continued to open restaurants, lived between Miami and Barcelona, and stopped in cities such as Tokyo, Buenos Aires or Zurich, with proposals where food was an excuse and pretext to explore many other things. At the same time, she launched, also with Miralda, the FoodCultura initiative, a non-profit project that wants to explore the connections between gastronomy and areas such as art, science, anthropology or even technology. A kind of living archive of flavors, rituals and objects that has not always had the support it needed. In fact, a significant part of his collection, with thousands of pieces, has ended up in Santander, in a private collection, after the idea of creating a museum in the Casa de la Premsa in Barcelona did not come to fruition.
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