Jordi Butron

Jordi Butron seems to be in this world to pursue a mission: to prove that a complete meal can be arranged featuring sweet notes. And I don’t mean five or six desserts with less sugar than usual, served in a more or less logical sequence, but authentic dishes and complete tasting menus, where there’s a very fine line between dessert and “savoury” proposals, where everything is soft and reassuring, never sickly and cloying. Where, above all, every passage has a precise logic, studied and calculated. Butron is a Catalan who reached the sweet menu step by step.

Perfect technique and a marked talent for teaching (it’s a pleasure to listen to him, a bit like those professors that make even the most complicated problems easy to understand), he’s now the owner of Espai Sucre, meaning Sweet Space or Sugar Space, the world’s first Restaurant de postres, restaurant and not patisserie. During his training he enjoyed experiences with Christophe Felder, chef pâtissier at the hotel Crillon in Paris, and with Michel Bras and Pierre Gagnaire. While in the Catalan capital, he grew with Jean Luc Figueras when the first dessert menus paired with wines began to take shape.

Everything we have admired in recent years, both in the pastry restaurant and in the patisserie school, is a direct consequence of everything he studied then, of what he thought and continues to think with a clear logic, even when he talks to an Italian audience in Castilian (Spanish doesn’t exist for the Catalans, it’s Castilian, full stop). The symbol of the Butron-world is the ant, chosen because it’s such a hard worker.