Josep Pla (1897-1981) was not insensitive to the pleasures of the table, although he greatly preferred those of the after-meal: coffees, Johnny Walker whiskey, ‘cigarrillus’ and conversation. In fact, it seems that the pleasures of the table were for him a toll to reach those of the table; a toll that could sometimes be shaken off with three sips of thyme soup and as many bites of a French omelette, especially as he was celebrating his birthday.
The tribute dinner to Josep Pla held last Friday at La Taverna del Mar in S’Agaró on the occasion of the 125th anniversary of the writer and journalist’s birth was both very Planian and very unplanian. Very flat because it lasted between coffees, Johnny Walker whisky, ‘cigarrillus’ and conversation until late and because the menu was created and cooked by Jaume Subirós (from the Motel Empordà in Figueres, Pla’s fetish establishment) and Lluís Planas (from the host restaurant , belonging to the Hostal de la Gavina, also a fetish establishment in Pla). Very little flat because it is unlikely that the honoree would have endured the stupendous parade of battered anchovy bones, rock mussels, courgette flowers stuffed with Empordanet curd, peas with black sausage, lobster and chicken, mint sorbet and ‘taps’ from Cadaqués.
Testimonials
They attended the dinner as testimonies of the humours, the ways, the philias and the phobias of Pla the sisters Julia and Carina Ensesa, fourth generation of the lineage that founded in 1932 and still runs the Hostal de la Gavina, an inexhaustible legend of Mediterranean luxury; Joan Sagrera, the last, although for a long time, Pla’s driver, and Gonzalo Valero Canales, Pla’s lawyer.
Pla frequented the house of Josep Ensesa Montsalvatge and his wife, Carmona Viñes Trueta, in the exclusive garden city of S’Agaró when Julia and Carina were children and teenagers. The family had an excellent Cordovan cook. She called Pla and said that she would go that night and that she would like to have pig trotters for dinner. But once there she said that she wasn’t hungry and that a French omelette was better. Of an egg and that she could not finish. She sometimes stayed to sleep at the Hostal de la Gavina, where she also spent some time. Room 113 is named after him. What interested Pla in S’Agaró was the cultured conversation of Josep Ensesa Montsalvatge. For that and not because of the delicacies and the comfort, I often went there from October to May, not in the summer months.: too many cars on the roads, it said. Remember that he died in 1981.
No way
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We learned about Pla at dinner that he was “a gentleman who was greatly annoyed by pedants.” “When he spotted one, he was a dead man,” added the chatterbox, with an eloquent karate chop gesture, surely aimed at the pedant’s neck.
Pla did not coincide in the Empordà for a few years with Ferran Adria at the head of the Bulli, another Empordà institution. “I wouldn’t have eaten there, but he would have admired Adrià because he appreciated innovation and daring,” Sagrera said.