Madrid today is full of restaurants with a cuisine in which our country is a world reference. In the seventies of the last century, Madrid could be many things, but it was certainly not a symbol of almost anything worldwide. Then, a young entrepreneur who had already had the courage to bring , dared to take on a new challenge. That restless young woman was determined to turn Madrid into a center of haute cuisine gastronomy, in which Basque chefs had to play a starring role. Juan Mari Arzak, Karlos Arguiñano, Martín Berasategui, Ramón Roteta, Pedro Subijana and some more, found in Carmen Guasp the necessary stimulus to bring to Madrid the taste for a cuisine that, since ancient times, treasured values to contribute to the modernization of the capital of the kingdom. It was 1976 and in Madrid the I Gastronomy Round Table She summoned them under the inspiration of that young woman, who was aware of the role that the courage to open windows and doors should play in the new Spain and provide color and flavor to the capital of a country that aspired to much more than what it had experienced for almost forty years.
Shortly after, in 1979, she opened the legendary El Amparo restaurant, where the linen tablecloths, the sommelier, the menu full of haute cuisine suggestions and a management full of commitment to supreme quality, turned her company into a unique reference of those years. Together with the celebrated chef Ramón Ramírez, also in Madrid, because there the necessary alliance was fulfilled to provide the city with a cosmopolitanism from which it lacked. She had created Bogui a few years before, a place where Pascua Ortega squandered the imagination of an almost absent interior design, then in the gray tones of a dying dictatorship.
Now recounting the merits of that young pioneer fills us with deep emotion. Not even sadness, because she was a paragon of optimism and joy that should not be overshadowed. I believe that neither Madrid nor Spain have adequately recognized what it meant for the city to achieve those two Michelin stars at the end of the 1980s. Now that whole universe of stars is very common in our country, but in those years opening the way to a new way of understanding gastronomy was just her thing. A creator of modernity, a teacher of what would later become the women who forged the high-level gastronomic identity of this country.
Other projects continued later, but the essential thing was to lay the foundations of a Madrid in which enjoying a list of magnificent restaurants today is not complicated, because from the old Puigcerdá alley she created what no one imagined in those days of hope and renewal.
I imagine in the silence of these letters his clean smile, his always accurate words, his discreet elegance and his love for a well-finished work, and I can only think of the void he leaves us. It is not easy to find women with such complete discretion, with silences so full of projects, with a capacity for modernity so dissonant with the dark times of then and now. Her leadership was so simple and at the same time so perfect that talking with her about culture, contemporaneity, art and sensitivity was a delight for any sensitive spirit.
An imperishable memory deserves his eternal friendship with Pilar Citoler, the other face of the groundbreaking modernity of the sad Madrid of the late seventies, who turned that couple into a mirror in which any lover of color, light, the very essence of life could see themselves. Contemporaneity, Citoler and Guasp would always go hand in hand since then.
Now that you are gone, all the linen tablecloths cry for your absence, all the largest tableware remembers your care, all the restaurateurs of the infinite north cannot forget what you did, all the sommeliers who opened the unopened bottles of the luxury that had not yet arrived miss its flow, so they cry with me every tear from the undrinked glass.
Our Pilar will take care of every detail that you have left unfinished, because she knows that your legacy has made us custodians of a sense of elegance and good living that can hardly be found other than in your placid smile with which you said goodbye to the one who loved you most.
And finally, in this southern city that you loved almost unintentionally, we all mourn your early absence and will continue to idolize your taste for taste, your sense of elegant measure, your luxury without stridency, your smile without hubbub, your love without measure. We will always love you. Córdoba far away and alone, more alone without you.
