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Barcelona: When they were eight years old, Sergio and Javier Torres decided to become chefs and achieve great things in this field. More than forty years later, the twins from Barcelona have risen to this challenge with a three-star rating, the Michelin Guide’s highest score.
“The plan was perfect,” said Javier, 51, smiling in an interview with AFP.
In order to achieve success, the two brothers, whose choice of field of work surprised their family, decided to undergo training, each one individually, with the aim of collecting the largest amount of information possible.
“When we left Barcelona, the idea was that Sergio would take one path and I would take another, and then we would meet when we were ready,” Javier added.
During the training years, they moved between several Michelin-starred restaurants in Spain, Switzerland and France.
Before settling in Paris, where he worked at the Alain Ducasse restaurant, Sergio worked for two years at the Jardin des Sens restaurant in Montpellier (southern France) alongside two other three-star Michelin twins, Jacques and Laurent Pourcel.
Sergio continues, sitting near his brother in their restaurant, “The Torres Brothers’ Kitchen.”
Their restaurant, which opened in 2018, represents the culmination of the dream of two children from a popular neighborhood in Barcelona who loved cooking thanks to their grandmother, who, like many, came to Barcelona from southern Spain in search of a better future in Catalonia (northeast) after the civil war (1936-1939).
“Our grandmother took care of us, and since she spent her day in the kitchen, we grew up in a kitchen. Literally,” says Sergio.
The twins grew up in a warm atmosphere that they revived when they decided four years ago to open their own restaurant after they won two stars in the Michelin Guide. Their first start was in a project within a large hotel in Barcelona, ”Dos Cielos”.
The two brothers then visited more than two hundred sites before their choice fell on an old industrial warehouse that receives fifty people on each front it offers, so they sit around three tables extended in the center of the hall while the chefs are busy around them.
The cost of testing this unique meal is 255 euros, in which the visitor gets dishes from the tasting menu, in addition to 160 euros if he wants to eat wine with the dishes. This amount is considered too high for many in Spain, where the minimum wage is around 1,000 euros.
However, high-end restaurants, with their exorbitant costs, are not as profitable as they think, according to Sergio and Javier Torres.
“We did a lot of work in parallel with our own project to be able to finance it,” says Javier, such as working on television programs or preparing cookbooks, noting that the project represents “an investment of about three million euros that Sergio and I had to secure, in the absence of any other investor.”
It’s noon, and fifty employees working in the kitchen and hall are busy completing the last details before the customers arrive. Among these workers are many young men eager to succeed in a profession whose difficulties are often overlooked.
Sergio says, “There is an impression today that the chef is like a superstar” hosted by television stations, but the reality is that cooking is “a very difficult path with long working hours, and success in it is very difficult. An incredible percentage of perseverance must be shown.”
He concludes with a smile, “It is necessary to take risks, to give everything we have, otherwise we will not live our lives.”