An extreme choice or the secret to success? “With one star for 45 years, I still sleep under the restaurant.” Read the testimony of Pepe Solla, heir to a great Iberian brand.
“I talk more to my fishmonger than to my girlfriend.” With this joke, chef Pepe Solla summed up his entire philosophy in a recent interview with El País: for him, cooking is not about recipe books, but about daily dialogue with those who extract treasures from the sea. This direct line of communication, made up of confidences and phone calls between dawn and dusk, has given rise to the dishes that have made Casa Solla, in Poio (Pontevedra), the longest-running Michelin-starred restaurant in Galicia. A star earned by his parents in 1980 and never lost since.
The roots of his story lie in a family bar, opened by his grandparents right in front of the current restaurant. He sold wine, she prepared tortillas and simple dishes: it was the beginning of a tradition that took shape in 1961, thanks to Pepe's parents, with the opening of the restaurant. Today, the 59-year-old chef literally lives above the kitchens: as in the past, when the tavern was also his home, Solla sleeps under his restaurant. A detail that says a lot: his life and that of Casa Solla are inseparable. Paradoxically, Pepe was not born a chef. In the early years, he helped out in the dining room, serving customers as a waiter. Then his encounter with wine, just as the DO Rías Baixas was being created, opened up a new horizon for him. Together with Alfredo Álvarez, he even founded the first association of sommeliers in Galicia, AGASU. But revolution was just around the corner: fascinated by the ferment of the new Basque cuisine and eager to change things, he decided to get his hands dirty with real cooking. He started out in the kitchen “beginning with desserts, then savory dishes,” he says with a smile, recalling the mistrust of seasoned and often gruff chefs.
Meeting Arzak and, above all, Ferran Adrià at elBulli transformed him forever. “I lost all the recipes they gave us, but I didn't care: I learned to think,” he recalls. The real lesson for him was not mousses or spherifications, but the freedom to share knowledge and dare, even if it meant making mistakes. His first innovations were not met with applause. When, in the 1990s, he served the traditional lacón con grelos in a cocktail glass, he almost risked gastronomic excommunication. “At the time, it was heresy,” he admits with irony. Yet it was precisely from those provocations that a cuisine was born that today seems natural. The current menu includes tributes to his family, such as the salsa alla mugnaia that accompanied the famous sole of Casa Solla in his parents' day. If there is one constant in his cuisine, it is his alliance with the local artisanal fishermen. For over 15 years, Solla has been working side by side with them, studying practices that today seem visionary: from abandoning iceboxes to bleeding fish directly on the boats, a technique borrowed from Japan. “The sea is like a free countryside,” he explains. But just as livestock is not stressed before slaughter, fish must be treated with respect: otherwise, the flavor becomes metallic."
The chef's latest creation is a tavern inside Casa Solla, in the same space where his grandparents started out. Here, the atmosphere is different: eleven seats at the counter, an old fireplace converted into an oak wood brazier, simple dishes such as empanadas, meatballs, and marinated mackerel. But the magic lies in the details: the vinyl records that Solla has been collecting for years play one after the other, chosen together with the diners. No anonymous playlists, but records that play until the end, with Depedro or Iván Ferreiro providing the soundtrack to an intimate dinner. The tavern shares its suppliers with the gourmet restaurant, but it has an extra gear: the wine cellar. “I have the best wine list in Spain,” he says without false modesty. More than 2,000 labels, many of which are impossible to find on the market, rare vintages, and a selection of natural wines that is unmatched in Galicia. It's no surprise that here you can open bottles costing €200 with ease, without the weight of gastronomic protocol. The approach is deliberately unsettling: no coffee (“you've had 22 years to order it, now you don't”), and for water, just help yourself to a jug. Everything revolves around wine, so much so that the blackboard listing the dishes of the day begins with a programmatic phrase: “To accompany the wine, we have...”.
His tasting menus—starting at €153—feature dishes that tell the story of the sea, the garden, and the weather. Fossils of crustaceans, marinated tuna on cashew cream and green tomatillo (named “Bello, molto bello” or “Beautiful, very beautiful”), and other creations that combine respect for tradition with a desire to push boundaries. Thus, Casa Solla continues to be a living laboratory, where technical rigor is intertwined with an almost musical freedom. Because Solla, more than a chef, seems like an orchestra conductor: he listens to the fishermen, coordinates the timing of the dishes, lets the wines dictate the rhythm, and finally gives the customer a concert that is never the same twice.
