Gemma Garcia

The Climb

The apprenticeship trail here is built from repetition, observation, and increasingly exacting rooms. At Escuela de Luis Irizar in San Sebastián (2009–2012), Gemma Garcia took on the foundations that shape a working kitchen: discipline, pace, and the habit of doing things the same way until they hold. The practicante posts at Urepel (until 2012), Fuego Negro (until 2012), and Zuberoa (until 2012) extended that training across different kitchens, each one adding a layer of control and readiness. Taken as a group, those years describe a cook being formed through steady exposure rather than quick ascent. The shift to Celler de Can Roca in Gerona (from 2012) marked a step into a larger frame, where earlier training met a more demanding tempo. For Gemma Garcia, that move carried the work from apprenticeship into a setting that required the same fundamentals at a higher level of precision. Since 2016 she has been chef of Mannix (since 2016), where the through-line from those early kitchens shows up as measured leadership: patient, exact, and built on accumulated practice rather than display.

Today

At Mannix, lechazo asado is the dish that carries the clearest line back to the place where Gemma Garcia was raised. The preparation reads as rooted rather than decorative, with memory doing part of the structural work. In that sense, the dish is not simply a reference point; it is a way of holding place, family, and technique in the same frame. That home register appears plainly in the way Garcia describes the kitchen, where food and recollection are tied to ordinary actions. “I will tell it from the long stories my grandmother tells me when we are in the kitchen, she sitting in the usual chair, peeling garlic and potatoes while I go back and forth.” The detail is in the repetition: chair, peeling, back and forth. It is the language of a kitchen where knowledge is passed through routine, and where memory lives in the work itself.

Signature

Croquetas are one of Gemma Garcia's signature dishes, and they suit the register of her cooking: familiar in form, exact in execution. The dish asks for timing, texture, and consistency, the kind of control that shows up only when repetition has become muscle memory. In Garcia’s hands, croquetas read less as a comfort gesture than as evidence of disciplined technique applied to a recognizable format.

In Their Words “I will tell it from the long stories my grandmother tells me when we are in the kitchen, she sitting in the usual chair, peeling garlic and potatoes while I go back and forth.”