The excellence of El Celler de Can Roca just for you and your guests.

El Celler de Can Roca was born with the motivation of becoming the haute cuisine restaurant dreamt by the brothers Joan, Josep i Jordi Roca, and since 1986 it has been luckily awarded with recognition from all over the world up to receive three Michelin stars and be considered in 2013 and in 2015 the best restaurant in the world.  
It is a reward to the constant hard work and effort of a family, a team which includes Mas Marroch.
And in Mas Marroch, you are also the star. The stars are, for us, all the people we welcome at our home.

Photos: Oliva Fotògraf, Wedding’s Art, El ramo volador, Black&Blanc Fotografia.

The Space

The Mas Marroch (Country House) is a XV century Gothic house located on the outskirts of Girona in a natural environment. Contiguous to the Country House there is a newly built wide space for banquets following the architectural lines of maximum integration with the surroundings and with minimalist aesthetics looking for the complete modularity and adaptation to any kind of event.
Attached to the Main Room, an auxiliary glazed highly illuminated room delights you with a glance to the fruit plantations of the same house.
The Centenary Gardens surrounding the house are a magnificent setting for outdoor celebrations in the middle of the nature before the beauty of the stones that build the Country House. They are also ideal to savour the aperitifs, an open view of the meaning of the present gastronomy for the Roca Brothers. Wide and elegant, illuminated and romantic, the colour changes of a surprising landscape in every season are an extraordinary ally to our seasonally adapted cuisine.

And our new space, The Agora. We have created this singular ecosustainable building so you and your guests can enjoy under a natural pergola made of Km Zero stones. 

The space is not meant to be the protagonist in Mas Marroch: an ambience of simplicity and the research for the essential shall prevail. The decoration is never intended to have a main role because the environment should never attract the real interest of a celebration: you are the protagonists, the atmosphere is an harmonic accompaniment. Straight and clean lines, blacks and whites, simplicity in the shapes, basic colours, minimalism.
With the old sheds of the Country House as a starting point, the current design of the banquet’s space of the Mas Marroch is a piece of work by Sandra Tarruella’s interior design study. Her study, specialised in the decoration of restaurants and hotels, is also responsible for the transformation of the old Torre de Can Roca into the current El Celler de Can Roca. It was a finalist in the FAD awards of 2009 intervention in which she created a modern yet cosy ambience playing with the light, spaces and materials.

Mas Marroch is a space open to the organisation of any kind of event. An adjustable space which manages to create different environments without having to move anywhere else. A changeable space: and auditorium, a living room, a fair, a concert, a classroom, an event’s hall. A hermetic space where you can enjoy a celebration without disturbing or being disturbed. An isolated space: in the middle of the nature, surrounded by forests and fruit plantations, an oasis of calm and tranquility.

And finally, in the same plot of 8 hectares that surrounds the country house, a wide parking space that will make the access highly convenient for your guests.

Avant-garde and tradition

The knowledge of the classic cuisine added to the culture of the academic cuisine together with the application of concepts and advanced techniques, make the masterful formula of our cuisine. It is a contemporary cuisine with traditional roots; sometimes futuristic, sometimes present, sometimes the heir of the cuisine passed on generation after generation. We integrate our grandmother’s cuisine, our mother’s, the current one and we also take a  wink at the gastronomy we think the future will grant us. We are very proud to be the third generation of the Roca family in front of the stove.

In Mas Marroch we want you to experiment the pleasure for the haute cuisine that brings hundreds of people from all over the world to enjoy a table in El Celler de Can Roca. That is why we propose a culinary idea that combines new dishes with our classics: Timbale of apple and duck liver with vanilla oil (1996), Iberian suckling pig (2000), or European Lobster parmentier with black trumpet mushrooms (1988) are dishes that are part of the gastronomy culture of the country and are still present in our cuisine. And among the most recent, some of the innovative desserts created by Jordi: Milk desserts (milk caramel, sheep’s milk ice cream, sheep’s milk curd-cheese foam, sheep’s milk yoghurt and milk cloud); the fragrances adapted or the Lemon cloud (bergamot cream, lemon compote, lemon distilled-water granita, muffin ice cream, lemon sugar).

Our cuisine is solidly built on the foundation of the cuisine of El Celler de Can Roca. This enables us to adapt to banquets the techniques of the best cooks, the highest level research and the knowledge of the best products. We do so applying the adequate treatment to every product in order to obtain its maximum value and take it to the table in its best condition.

The creative process of the El Celler de Can Roca cuisine has as a starting point several concepts that create a masterful formula out of the inspiration of the Roca Brothers. The result is a cuisine that works as a generational and social link, in which everyone can feel happy: it is modern, traditional, classic, contemporary, thoughtful, daring. In Mas Marroch we adapt at a large-scale some of the dishes of El Celler, from the classics to the most famous worldwide, from the avant-garde dishes to the most creative, up to the novelties that emerge from the Roca Brothers’ stove.

There is no party without wine

Wine is celebration, the wish of fortune, the yearning of health, the raise of your glass, the toast. And yet, it is much more than that, wine is to taste, feel, converse. We see wine as a tool to share, as a culture. The Mas Marroch proposal is an opportunity to approach wine with knowledge and intensity, an entrance door, open to a fascinating universe of emotions. The more you know the wine, the higher the capacity to enjoy it as well as the satisfaction through its moderate and responsible use.
The Sumiller’s Bistro of our aperitifs, a bar where to savour wines especially selected by Josep Roca, offers the possibility to know special wines, taste wines which are not always in the usual business circles, either because of the grape variety, its origin, because of its price in restaurants or because it is very hard to find because its production is very limited.
And at the table, you will have the guarantee of the research work and the knowledge behind El Celler de Can Roca in order to offer the most suitable wine for each occasion: harmonies among dishes and wines adjusted to flavours and aromas criteria and also associated to cultural habits of memory, customs and geographic origin. The most adequate wine for each moment and each situation. 

A sweet world

A wedding, a christening, a golden anniversary, an anniversary… the sweetest day.
Sweet feelings, sweet emotions, sweet memories. It is a day for you to feel on top of a cotton candy cloud, with the excitement of a child with a caramel fruit, with the euphoria after scoring a goal, intoxicated by a perfume’s scent, by the tenderness of childhood memories. A day to feel you are part of a sweet world.
The desserts we propose, from the creative, imaginative and usually transgressor Jordi’s sweet cuisine in El Celler de Can Roca, are ideal for their freedom, their subtleness, their evocative and surprising ability.

As Jordi says, “a stroll, a landscape, a smell, a story, a noise, a transgression, an emotion… any path can take us to creativity”. The sweet moment of a meal allows us to take risks and surprise, far from the rigour and seriousness of the propositions of the main courses of the menu; it is that moment when the limit between the established and the fascination is possible. But this cuisine that can be qualified as emotional and which takes a main role in Mas Marroch, is the fruit of a meditated process of investigation and elaboration, and uses flavours, aromas, temperatures and textures with the aim to transmit sensations and create concrete moods: the happiness of the citrus, the melancholy of the moist aromas, the euphoria of the balm ingredients, the tenderness of the dairy… 

And also now with the most fascinating ice-creams emerged from the Rocambolesc’s magic factory and our new chocolate factory Casa Cacao.

We are by your side.

The experience grants us with the power to advise you; having come a long way gives us the ability to do so; the knowledge obtained from the daily observation makes us able to help you achieve everything you need. This is why we dare to present your event, your party, your celebration just the way you imagined it. We are with you to make the ideal dream come true. 

"The banquets have helped El Celler de Can Roca be where it is now"

Encarna Tirado, responsible for the banquets space of El Celler.

Decisive. She has been part of the team of El Celler de Can Roca since its beginnings and currently she manages one of the planets of its universe: the Mas Marroch Space. She can’t stop herself from saying that the family spirit is what has brought the restaurant to the top.

Have the banquets been key to maintain the cuisine of El Celler?
Yes, they have been a great economic help. One thing makes the other. The banquets have helped El Celler de Can Roca be where it is now. Holding weddings and offering catering services have favoured the expenses made in the restaurant, where most of the times the menus don’t compensate with the cost of the plate, handmade and blown exclusively, for example. The income from the banquets are a source of financial support.

Diversifying the Roca brand has been key then. Is it a planned business or a spontaneous one?
Everything just sort of came out. We would have never thought about opening an ice-cream store like Rocambolesc. It has been convenient because everyone has gone their way and everyone has their own space. I am with the catering service, Anna, Joan’s wife, the new Casa Cacao hotel, and Ale, Jordi’s wife, works in the Rocambolesc.

You have never stopped being in the frontline.
For starters, the hospitality sector is very demanding and if the people who come to work can share this effort with you, they find it less tedious if you are also doing it, right? And it may work quite well because many workers have left and they always come back. It is a family.

And when you reach the top, what do you do?
Stay there and try to deal with it. It is difficult not to make mistakes. Everyone wants to talk, everyone wants to call, everyone wants a table… There is a moment when you can’t handle it anymore. I can’t take bookings anymore, that is why we have three people at the reception desk.

When you started, could you foresee that it would be so big?
We have always been eager. And most importantly the Roca parents, instead of thinking that it was the little boys’ whim, trusted and believed in their sons when they were a little more than twenty years old and decided to take the bull by the horns and carry on with the business.

When does your relationship with Can Roca starts?
I started in El Celler a year later after its opening, in 1987. By then I was working in Can Roca, the same restaurant where I used to go on Sundays with my family when I was young. We would have an aperitif and have the typical calamari. As a waitress I would help Josep and Joan when it was busy in the dining room, but at that time it wasn’t always busy. It was fun back then, there wasn't any fuss. It was difficult to get customers.

But Joan and Josep’s eagerness was contagious…
It is very nice because everyone in Taialà or Germans Sàbat has an anecdote in El Celler.

When did you start managing the catering service and the banquets?
We purchased La Torre, a 100 meters away from the first restaurant, with the purpose of moving El Celler there. But it took us more than 10 years to do so because it was an important expense. So in 1995 we decided to hold weddings there. Transporting that transgressor and already popular cuisine that those boys of Girona would make had a big impact. I felt very comfortable and the Roca gave me a lot of freedom, they let me do my thing.

I guess your wedding must have been very different from the current ones.
Completely! I simply gave the list of guests, now it is a full form. But I always tell the bride and the groom that there is something they can be sure of: if they come get us is because of the trust. And they must know we are the first who want their day to be perfect.

(Extract from the interview of Mariona Ferrer i Fornells to Encarna Tirado,  diari ara, May 27th 2013)

And the rest of the team: with them, everything is possible.

Montserrat Fontané and Josep Roca are the parents of Joan, Josep and Jordi Roca. The Roca Brothers' passion for cooking was initially kindled in Can Roca, the establishment their parents have managed in Taialà since 1967, in a neighbourhood lying on the outskirts of Girona.
It is there where they grew up, amid the hubbub of dishes, pots and pans and clients. The bar was their living room, their playground, where they did their homework, watched television... whence the aroma of the stews generously, simply and honestly prepared by their mother, wafted in.”

When Joan and Josep were children, weddings would also be held in Can Roca. Those were other times: weddings with cold cuts, rice or cannelloni, stewed veal with mushrooms and a wedding cake. In Can Roca, the parents served the parents’ weddings and now, in Mas Marroch, the sons hold the weddings of those children whose parents were married in Can Roca.

And if we talk about weddings we can also talk about baptisms, holy communions, anniversaries, birthdays, family gatherings or social parties.

Behind the three Roca brothers’ vocation and the profound respect they feel for the roots and tradition there is a cook who doesn’t have her name embroidered on the chef jacket and doesn’t have innovation or creativity as the mottos of her culinary philosophy: their mother, Montserrat Fontané. They practise such different cuisines that the techniques (or maybe it should be said the tricks) she uses at the time of making her cannelloni, her arròs a la cassola (rice) or her fried calamari rings would not be applied in El Celler. However, what has been passed on from mother to sons is the profession: cook with rigour, with generosity and with affection.

Created in 1986 by Joan and Josep Roca Fontané, El Celler de Can Roca is the heir of Can Roca, the traditional house of meals located in Taialà which their parents Josep and Montserrat still own and maintain since 1967. That humble bar from a humble neighbourhood took the strong roots which would give rise to a branch full of avant-guarde gastronomy and sophistication thanks to the effort, wit and the talent of the three brothers.

Now, and after the third brother, Jordi, joined in at the end of the 90s, the restaurant has gained great recognition worldwide. Little by little and with firm steps, El Celler de Can Roca has been awarded since then with recognition from guides, critics and other influencers. The first Michelin star arrived in 1995, the second in 2002 and in 2009 the third; in 2013 it reached the first place in the list The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, the Honoris Causa doctorate from the Universitat de Girona and received several National Prizes of Gastronomy. Jordi was named Best World’s Pastry Chef in 2014 and El Celler received prominent positions in guides and lists; several distinctions that confirm the constant and conscientious work. All these make it possible that that restaurant from a workers’ neighbourhood that was born modest and humble more than twenty-five years ago can enjoy the tranquility of doing things the way they like to.