El Celler de Can RocaThe row of birches inside the glass wall

Three brothers, three territories

Girona, Spain — One tasting menu, the same for every table.

Kitchen, wine and dessert each belong to a different brother: Joan cooks, Josep looks after the wine, Jordi makes the desserts. The official site has one word for the arrangement, fraternal, and describes the kitchen as a place tied to the land it buys from.

A meal runs about three and a half hours. The restaurant's own estimate: twelve courses and four desserts between sitting down and standing up, with several small plates ahead of them, and no shorter version of the menu.

The story starts in the parents' bar at Can Roca in Taialà, outside Girona, where the counter served as living room and desk, and the stews of the mother and the cooking of the grandmother came down from there. In 1986 the first Celler opened next door to that bar; later the whole restaurant moved to the stone house at Can Sunyer, and kitchen, dining room and cellar have been under one roof since.

A triangle drawn around the room

The plan of the dining room closes into a triangle, which the official site calls the triangular cloister. Light enters through the middle of it, past a stand of trees, crosses the glass and lands on the wooden floor, where the grain of the boards and the shadows of the trunks run into each other and are hard to tell apart.

Each table carries three stones, one for each side of that triangle. The site gives the reason in a single line: privacy, without blocking the view. Tables are separated by timber screens and glass rather than by solid walls, so the far end of the room stays in sight even when the next table is close enough to hear. The same light that comes through the trees falls across them.

Solid, liquid, sweet

The three brothers hold three worlds apart: Joan has the cooking, Josep the wine, Jordi the desserts, and the official site writes that relationship as one word, fraternal. The kitchen is described as a place joined to the land, a store cupboard and a habitat at once, and the daily work is done with a group of small growers who have come up alongside the restaurant rather than for it.