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From Sensory Capacities to Sensible
Skills: Experimenting with El Celler
de Can Roca
EXPERIMENTAL COOKING,KNOWN IN SPAIN under the head-
ing technoemotional cuisine, is ever more interested in all
things sensorial.
1
With the aim of crafting multisensory experi-
ences for diners, such interest has been very much shaped by the
encounter of gastronomy with science and industry. To a great
extent, the more analytical, technical, and conceptual high-end
cuisine is becoming, the more the need for it to be attuned to
the senses. Diverse gastronomic investigations and dining pro-
posals, ours included, are addressing this issue from different
angles. However, through the application of empirical findings
on sensory perception and engagements with design, the arts
and humanities, these proposals predominantly focus on how
to dazzle the senses of diners.
2
Many interesting dishes and
much cross-disciplinary knowledge have resulted from such
efforts, to the point that we now identify concern with the senso-
rial to be at the heart of current debates in gastronomy (This and
Gagnaire 2008; Spence and Piqueras-Fiszman 2014; Klosse
2014). But in the quest for understanding the effects that partic-
ular textures, aromas, tastes, sounds, and colors have on diners,
we have left unexplored and taken for granted the cultivation of
the senses of those who prepare and serve these diners. At El
Celler de Can Roca we took this less-trodden route and won-
dered how best to investigate and work upon our team’s sensory
capacities. This article is a product of such inquiry.
El Celler de Can Roca, located in a modest neighborhood
of Girona, Spain, is a three-star Michelin restaurant operating
since 1986, and devoted to the exploration of Catalan cuisine
and the produce of its territory. The restaurant is the product
of the efforts and talent of brothers Joan Roca, executive chef,
Josep Roca, head sommelier, and Jordi Roca, pastry chef. It is
further supported by a constant and growing team of cooks,
waiters, and other collaborators. As a result of its dialogue with
science, the restaurant is known for further developing one of
the most widely used cooking techniques in various restaurants
today: sous-vide cooking.
3
In addition, the restaurant has
conducted research on the use of distillations and aromas, the
application of steam, lyophilization, and fermentation, as well
as the design of innovative dish presentations. This small
experiment on sensory capacities is yet another effort at
understanding and improving what we do.
Our inquiry might sound strange and our results even more
so, given that we usually expect and take for granted delicate
palates and discerning noses from professional cooks and som-
meliers. But what happens when it is not only one person who
cooks for others, but a group of professionally trained people
caring for the making and service of a labor-intensive menu
thought out in extreme detail and with utmost sensibility?
Where does this sensibility reside? Is it a matter of possessing a
special capacity? And, if so, to whom can we attribute it? For
us, the issue first started as a matter of experimenting with how
we could best tap into the sensory capacities of our team in
order to identify our own strengths and weaknesses and guide
Abstract: This article describes and discusses an experiment we carried
out at El Celler de Can Roca, a vanguard restaurant in Girona, Spain.
In this experiment we tested the possibility of characterizing and mea-
suring our team’s sensory capacity, arguing that research on the senses
within experimental cooking should also include cultivation of sensible
knowing. Our findings confirmed that instead of thinking about
sensory capacities that reside in the individual alone, we should change
our model for one that speaks of sensible skills where the communal is
of crucial importance. Throughout our discussion we highlight aware-
ness, imagination, and empathy as three important sensible skills for
culinary practice, and make a final point about how such skills can
be cultivated and taught to a restaurant’s team.
Keywords: senses, skills, experimental cooking, education,
professional cooking
RESEARCH ESSAY |Ana María Ulloa |Josep Roca |Hèloïse Vilaseca
GASTRONOMICA:THE JOURNAL OF CRITICAL FOOD STUDIES,VOL. 17, NUMBER 2, PP. 26–38, ISSN 1529-3262, ELECTRONIC ISSN 1533-8622. © 2017 BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSIT Y OF CALIFORNIA.ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.PLEASE DIRECT ALL REQUESTS FOR
PERMISSION TO PHOTOCOPY OR REPRODUCE ARTICLE CONTENT THROUGH THE UNIVERSITY OF C ALIFORNIA PRESS’S REPRINTS AND PERMISSIONS WEB PAGE,HTTP://WWW.UCPRESS.EDU/JOURNALS.PHP?P=REPRINTS.DOI:HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.1525/GFC.2017.17.2 .26.
GASTRONOMICA
26
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the education that we seek to promote in the restaurant. But as
the results came out, our conversation developed into an unin-
tended conceptual discussion about our own terms of depar-
ture, a reflection we would like to present here as it unfolded.
The Experiment
In thinking about how to design an experiment to characterize
the team’s sensorial capacity we were inspired by different
approaches coming from sensory science, psychology, medi-
cine, and anthropology, in agreement with our own back-
grounds and El Celler de Can Roca’s interest in transversal
knowledge. Not being a strict scientific experiment, we delib-
erately mixed the objective with the subjective, the precise
with the elusive. For us, it was clear from the beginning that
to make visible the invisible we could not exclusively hold to
a quantitative approach, but that we needed to tap into discur-
sive and intangible elements too. In total we ran the experi-
ment on thirty-seven people, including the Roca brothers
and the restaurant’s permanent team (discounting trainees)
consisting of cooks, sommeliers, waiters, frequent collabora-
tors, and communication staff.
The test was conducted in a bright, neutral-odor room,
where we requested each participant to perform different tasks
related to the sense of smell and the activities of cooking, drink-
ing, and eating. First, they were asked to smell three aromas, try
to guess what they were, and then annotate associations sparked
by each of them (see figure 1). After a period of rest from smell-
ing, during which they answered basic questions about their
eating preferences, they took the BAST olfactory test, which
we will explain and expand on below. Following these smell-
oriented tasks, we asked each participant to verbally answer
particular questions aimed at the discursive articulation of famil-
iar and unfamiliar culinary experiences. In addition to describ-
ing well-known dishes from the restaurant, participants were
also asked to choose their favorite ingredients, recount a
memorable taste experience, speak about their personal experi-
ence working at the restaurant, and last but not least, give an
opinion about how a traditional Colombian soup (foreign to
them) would taste to them based on its recipe alone.
We decided to focus on the sense of smell, over the other
senses, because of its fundamental, yet not exclusive, role in the
appreciation of foods and drinks. While taste provides the build-
ing blocks of the eating experience as sweet, salty, sour, bitter,
umami, or a combination thereof, along with other potential
taste candidates like fat and calcium, and touch responds to
cooling, pungency, astringency, and carbonation, smell (both
orthonasal and retronasal) brings with it the unique fingerprint
FIGURE 1: Some members of El Celler de Can Roca taking the free-association smell test.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ANA MARIA ULLOA © 2015
GASTRONOMICA
27
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of each ingredient (Beauchamp & Bartoshuk 1997; Shepherd
2006; Stevenson 2009; Spence 2015).
4
For this reason there is
a growing interest in working with aromas in contemporary
cooking (Spence and Youssef 2015).
We also paid close attention to smell to test the assumption
that a good olfactory capacity and memory are essential
acquired skills for cooks, sommeliers, and gastronomes alike
(Parr et al. 2002; Wilson and Stevenson 2003; Parr et al.
2004). But from the beginning we were aware that putting all
the weight in having a “good nose”did not do justice to the
experience of people working at El Celler de Can Roca.
Focusing exclusively on smell would also contribute to the
common understanding of discrete senses with their own spe-
cialized organs working independently from one another,
which we refute. It was for this reason that next to the evalua-
tive, we tried a discursive approach to get them talking about
the object of their craft, and from there, extracted more clues
to interpret the data. Contrary to scientific custom, our experi-
ment was not hypothesis-driven.
There is no single way to evaluate the sense of smell.
Several olfactory tests have been designed with relative validity
according to the purpose of the study and the country of appli-
cation. In our case, we used a brief version of the BAST-25 test
(Barcelona Smell Test), an olfactory test first developed for
clinical use by one of our collaborators, Dr. Josep de Haro
(De Haro 1999; Cardesín et al. 2006). This test gives informa-
tion about basic smell perception, definition, and recognition
of aromas familiar to the Spanish population, and although
it originally belonged to a medical context, it was well suited
for our purpose. We used eleven compounds characteristic of
the smells of anise (anethole), coconut (nonalactone delta),
lemon (citral), vanilla (ethyl vanillin), smoke (cade oil), bitter
almond (benzaldehyde), gasoline (benzene), cheese (butyric
acid), onion (dipropyl disulfide), rose (phenylethyl alcohol),
and mustard. We chose this test not only because it takes into
account cultural context, but also because it gives rich infor-
mation about how each person smells. In addition, the test also
defies the idea that the senses work in isolation, underscoring
the relation between touch and olfaction, making a clear dis-
tinction between, on the one hand, aromas that have a strong
tactile component (having an effect on the trigeminal nerve),
such as mustard and vinegar, and on the other, aromas like
rose, lemon, or vanilla that do not.
Contrary to other smell tests based on smell recognition
alone, with this test we included qualitative elements of olfac-
tory experience through the following questions: Can you smell
it? Does it bother you? Is it strong? Is it fresh? Is it pleasant? Is it
familiar? The test is also directed at evaluating memory as a key
component of olfactory experience, an essential capacity for the
job of sommeliers, chefs, perfumers, and flavorists. A “good
nose”is a good memory too. For instance, recalling a specific
odor, and correctly identifying it, is easier for people who can
make an instantaneous association of that odor with a personal
experience. This is a strategy smell professionals tend to use.
In spite of our emphasis on the qualitative, some of the
participants felt anxious at the prospect of being tested and
numerically rated according to results from the smell test.
After all, the test reflected their olfactory capacity and a
number was assigned at the end. It was objective. How
many wrongs, how many rights? Was it really lemon or tan-
gerine, onion or garlic? No one working at the restaurant
would want to hear they were less accurate identifying
smells than one would expect from their profession. But as
we will see in the next section, such expectation has to be
carefully examined and reassessed.
Understanding the Results
Putting olfactory ability as one measure of sensory capacity
into a larger context yielded interesting results. Olfactory
expertise is usually documented empirically in terms of better
performance in sensitivity, discrimination, memory, and
identification (Cain 1979; Doty 1991; Royet et al. 2013). The
usual suspects for these studies are wine experts and, on
occasion, perfumers, but rarely flavorists or chefs. And results are
not always consistent or conclusive. There is no single test that
clearly reveals higher sensory capacities possessed by experts.
While better olfactory performance is expected as an outcome
of experience (whether acquired with formal training or not),
in some comparative studies there was no found difference
between experts and controls at odor detection (Bende and
Nordin 1997; Parr et al. 2002; Brand and Brisson 2012; Royet et
al. 2013) and only a moderate difference in smell naming
(Crojimans and Majid 2016). Olfactory sensitivity, technically
measured as the lowest concentration at which someone can
detect a smell, is not what sets experts apart (Gilbert 2008).
This does not jeopardize the idea that there are talented
smellers, but assures us that the talent lies elsewhere.
Experimentally, it seems that expertise comes forward more
tellingly in subtly discriminating among different smells and
being able to identify them (Lawless 1984; Peron and Allen
1988; Solomon 1990; Hughson and Boakes 2002; Zucco et al.
2011). While the average person is very bad at naming odors,
experts are usually confronted with the need to talk about
aromas and so they become more able in their characterization.
Practice, experience, and repeated exposure to smells beyond
increasing familiarity also provide a basis for thinking differently
about smells. So more than receptive and sensitive noses,
GASTRONOMICA
28
SUMMER 2017
experts develop the necessary cognitive skills to engage smells
pragmatically.
Our in-house adapted smell-test produced similar results.
Everyone could detect and characterize all smells, but when
it came to naming and identification there were particular
smells that proved to be more troubling for the group as a
whole: lemon, vanilla, and cheese (see figure 2). In a some-
what unfair and statistically nonsignificant comparison—given
that we used an abridged version of the test and tested substan-
tially fewer participants—with a control population that had
taken the test before for clinical studies, El Celler’s team per-
formed very similarly in the recognition task except for those
three odors where the average score was lower than the
controls. This result gave us something to think about.
Should we interpret these scores as indicative of a reduced
smelling ability? Should we be worried? Should the restaurant
ban the making of lemon cheesecake?
Before jumping into rushed conclusions, there are some
reservations we need to make. We should first note that in the
test we were dealing with single compounds and not odor mix-
tures, and while representative of the target odors, these
compounds are also found at different concentrations in other
things. Butyric acid, for instance, is found in butter and other
lactic-related products. The rich olfactory world we encounter
in everyday life is made of complex mixtures, not single
compounds. Moreover, particularly for sommeliers and cooks,
the more references attached to the compounds, the more
options to choose from and hence more difficult the task.
Otorhinolaryngologist Josep de Haro told us that novices, on
the contrary, can choose rapidly because they have less specific
references attached to a single smell. Ironically, having a
richer library of aromas does not necessarily play in favor of
olfactory performance as measured here.
Moreover, if we look at the results of our free-association
and identification exercise with the more complex smells of
mushroom, bergamot, and cocoa, it becomes manifest that
correct identifications against wrongs is not the only measure
of olfactory capacity. Judging from the associations alone, in
general people alluded to a similar olfactory constellation even
if tied to individual memories or failing to recognize the smell.
The mushroom smell that some people confused with
licorice, caramel, or soy was still consistently linked to things
like autumn, forest, earth, moss, intensity, and fermentation.
The cocoa smell was almost unanimously identified, yet with
different flavor profiles: bitter cocoa, caramel, praline, and
coffee. All associations had to do with sweetness, but they were
completely varied vis-à-vis positive memories of happiness,
childhood, passion, warmth, home, and others with negative
associations like stickiness, vice, thick, dark—clearly revealing
not only memories but also preferences.
The bergamot smell was more difficult to pin down specifi-
cally, yet people’s choices ran from citric to floral and spicy in
accord with the aroma of the fruit. The associations were also
very much in relation to the places where the aroma is found:
beauty products, perfume, tea, massage, El Celler; and was
associated with summer, freshness, volatility, freedom, happi-
ness, elegance, and relaxation. The fact that this free-association
exercise generated a varied scope of descriptors, yet still within
the bounds of certain experiential patterns, speaks of an
olfactory ability that is shared. Instead of univocal precision,
we found proximity and the creation of a constellation of refer-
ences that serve as guides for the intangible.
This shared aspect is precisely what we want to rescue from
the results of the overall experiment. Perfumers, enologists,
flavorists, sommeliers, cooks—and we would like to add—
waiters, are professionals whose sensory descriptions are the
outcome of continuous negotiations, practice, and social inter-
actions, contributing to a relative perceptual convergence
(Højlund 2014). Anthropologist Joël Candau (2003) explains
this phenomenon in terms of sharing a sensory orientation
FIGURE 2: Smell Recognition Task results.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ANA MARIA ULLOA © 2015
GASTRONOMICA
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SUMMER 2017
among those who seek to live together in an olfactory or flavor
community. As one team member explained in the course of
the experiment: “Our objective is to make a good dish and
share it with diners, and we can achieve this because we as a
team share an interest, a feeling. I’ve witnessed that when I
find value in an ingredient, a process, or something, my team-
mates also see it and share it. It is like traveling together. This
is very important because, think about it, when you travel
alone you can appreciate a beautiful landscape, but you need
somebody else to embed it with meaning.”Along the same
line, another member singled out as a memorable taste experi-
ence when she and Joan Roca once tried a Nordic ham made
out of a leg of lamb, first air-dried and then salted. “It had a
very pungent flavor,”she said, “and I think we both knew that
even if we found it too strong for us, if we ate it more
frequently and in a certain manner and proportion, it could
be a good bite, a delicacy.”We consider this feeling with an
essential component of the sensory experience.
As smell psychologist Avery Gilbert points out, greater
individual sensibility is not the indispensable trait of “olfactory
geniuses,”nor is it a given. He rather proposes three psycho-
logical traits that explain the expertise: awareness, imagination,
and empathy (Gilbert 2008: 128–32). By awareness he means
not only paying attention to smells, but also interest, fascina-
tion, and treating them as objects of curiosity. We encountered
awareness at various stages throughout the test: when partici-
pants alluded to the temporal and evanescent dimension of
smells, how as you smell the odor itself changes; when discuss-
ing tastes, smells, and textures in relation, i.e., their comple-
mentarity, contrast, and equilibrium; when thinking about
the history of taste and the sedimentation of flavors attached
to particular landscapes, as in the case of garum
5
for the
Mediterranean; when recognizing the importance of nourish-
ment in foods and their provenance; when arguing that a plate
inspires curiosity; when suspending judgment of a product
according to the mode of preparation; when learning about
different ways of cooking and eating and recognizing common
elements among them; and when being surprised by a product
like an orange, a tomato, or a sea urchin that in a particular
context reached full splendor.
Imagination, explains Gilbert, has to do with the actual
(although still scientifically controversial) ability of imagining
flavors, aromas, tastes, and about creating new ways for scent
and flavor to speak to mind and heart. Moreover, imagination
is inextricably tied with memory, the ability to conjure past
experiences and, at the same time, trigger associations that
transport the diner to uncharted sensory territories. This is
something that vanguard cooking is well aware of. At El
Celler de Can Roca, memory occupies a central place in the
construction of dishes and wine pairings, bringing emotions
that are tied to experiences that, while personal, are fed by a
communal sensibility and the memories of those who create
the dishes. The best example of this is Joan Roca’s oyster with
distilled soil—precisely one of the waiters’most memorable
eating experiences. Of this he said: “While I was trying the
soil, my mind immediately went down memory lane to the
time when I was a little child and fell to the ground. That was
my first taste of wet soil.”Collective memory is here a resource
for attachment as individual memory is a resource for creation.
As Spanish writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán writes,
gustatory memory is the most ephemeral but simultaneously
the most solid basis for gastronomy.
6
Needless to say, and notwithstanding the fact that it has
become an integral part of the philosophy of vanguard
cooking, the ability of imagination and its relationship with
memory is very hard to pin down. But we at least had to try.
Our attempt to capture how they could recreate a dish in their
heads came in the shape of an exercise in which participants
were asked to envision the flavor and general feel of a soup they
had never tasted before by reading the list of ingredients and
recipe. The potato-based soup, known to the experimenter but
not to the subjects, was described by many through allusion to
its density, consistency, and creaminess, as well as pointing at
the contrast and complementary between the ingredients
according to the way they were prepared and added.
7
Then
judgment followed suit and it was certainly not unanimous.
For some the soup was tasty, balanced, and comforting while for
others it was the complete opposite: horrible, unstructured, and
heavy. Regardless of preference, the majority of participants
could describe (and similarly at that) a new dish based on their
culinary knowledge and eating experience.
From ethnographic observation and experience, we also
gathered that imagination is foundin the everyday life of the res-
taurant when trying new products. Imagination, among many
other things, has to do with the spontaneous interaction of peo-
ple with worldly things. Here we think of imagination as the
ability to create new realities out of things that are given. We saw
imagination at work as they thought about the best combina-
tions of tastes, aromas, spices, and textures prior to the prepara-
tion of dishes. For example, when Joan and other team
members tried for the first time a new species of sea urchin with
an unusual taste provided by a local fisherman, they started gen-
erating immediate associations with the flavors of squid, and a
good match with those of coconut and anise (see figure 3).
This anticipation of the flavor of novel foods is clearly part
of an acquired cooking sensibility that comes from personal
experience and good gustatory memory, but is also a skill that
is developed and enhanced in conversation with others.
GASTRONOMICA
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SUMMER 2017
Imagination is not too far from empathy, the last psychologi-
cal trait of the “olfactory genius.”Gilbert (2008: 130) defines it as
“a feel for how other people experience smell and respond to
it.”We identify this definition to be at the core of developing
culinary sensibility. “This may well be the sixth sense for us
cooks,”chef Juan Mari Arzak told us, “to know the taste of the
people we serve”(personal communication, April 25, 2005).
Because food is eaten and appreciated by others, cooking
depends as much on the education of the consumer’s taste as
on the talent of good cooks. There is no sensory magic that can
sidestep this basic fact. Or in the words of Jean-François Revel
(1996: 37): “No great chef can lose contact with traditional
cooking if they want to achieve something extraordinary.”
Empathy was something that we were initially not consider-
ing. Yet, looking back, we noticed hints all over our data that
captured this idea well. Indeed, largely because the test did not
rely on a quantitative approach to sense perception alone,
there was room for conveying such sentiments, even if their
expression was quite subtle. One of the sommeliers told us:
“If I had not chosen a career like mine or come across a
job like this, I would spend my existence in the world very
differently. If I had been a computer science major, I would
have missed many things I think I know now about people,
ways of doing things, and culture.”This quote is precisely an
evocation of this feeling of empathy and sensible knowing
gained in everyday practice. There is no reference to technical
knowledge (cooking methods, ingredients, culinary techni-
ques) but to a type of anthropological knowledge, essential to
every gastronomic endeavor.
While objective knowledge about cooking, by means of
observation, measure, and recordkeeping, is certainly indis-
pensable for the cook, he or she must never lose sight of the
subjective experience of others while eating (Santamaria
2008; cf. Mann et al. 2011). But cooks in restaurants like El
Celler do not always directly speak to diners. Waiters and som-
meliers occupy that transitional space between the kitchen
and the dining room, and thus it is they who translate and
communicate. They are told to watch and listen carefully to
those little details that reveal the preferences, moods, and
dislikes of the consumer being served. In order to connect with
each diner, there must be this feeling of empathy. As one
waiter explained to us: “What I really like about what I do is
that I can still feel amazed when I look at surprised diners after
tasting something unexpected.”It is for this reason that at El
Celler de Can Roca sommeliers are not chosen according to
their olfactory or sensory capacities alone. A good sommelier,
we consider, is not the greatest smeller or the one who knows
best how to interpret a flavor. A good sommelier understands
FIGURE 3: Tasting a new species of sea urchin at the fisherman’s boat and in the kitchen.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ANA MARIA ULLOA © 2015
GASTRONOMICA
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more things, especially the diner in front of them. As Josep
Roca likes to say, it is matter of attitude not aptitude.
What Is Sensory Capacity Anyway?
We stumbled upon the concept of sensory capacity at first
without knowing its technical definition in psychology and
psychophysics. For us, the term capacity had the connotation
of something that, if measurable and made more tangible,
would include learned sensory abilities put into practice in a
restaurant setting. Our goal was to tease apart such abilities
as much as to test the idea of measuring them. Yet results from
our experiment led us to reconsider such conceptual basis and
make important distinctions.
Sensory capacities are often related with basic awareness or re-
ceptivity, susceptibility to the inputs of the outside world on sen-
sory organs. This was clearly an issue for physiology and
empirical psychology, technically conceived as a problem of dis-
crimination in each sensory channel, basically a matter of thresh-
olds (cf. Bartoshuk 1978, 2000). More capacity means responding
to the smallest value of a stimulus or discriminating between the
smallest differences between stimuli. Thresholds offer objective
measures because they are stated in terms of some physical mea-
sure, even though for smells the measure remains elusive.
Furthermore, when we speak in terms of capacities there is
an implicit interest in comparison and a perceived poor
human sense of smell (cf. Shepherd 2004; Bushdid et al. 2014
for evidence that “our sense of smell is better than we think”).
Numerous scientific studies have addressed these issues: Do
blind people have an enhanced sense of smell? (Murphy and
Cain 1986; Sorokowska 2016) Are dogs able to smell more than
humans? (Romanes 1887) Do indigenous people have more
acute senses? (Rivers 1900; Sorokowska et al. 2013) And of con-
sequence to our study, do wine experts smell and taste with
more sensitivity than novices? For centuries questions like these
have been in the background of several studies (for a recent
review see Majid et al. 2017). Because of the subjective nature
of perception, it is only in comparison that we can address how
sensitive we are and the things we miss. And yet, as the results of
our experiment clearly indicate, this paradigm of the sensory
fails to capture the specificity and complexity of sensory experi-
ence. But what exactly does this fixation on sensory capacity
prevent us from seeing?
For one thing, in smell, as in taste, there is a great deal of
individual variation found in terms of sensibility. For instance,
the perception of sweetness and bitterness (in their degree of
intensity) is not the same for everybody, and this is partly
explained by our genetic makeup (Menella et al. 2005;
Newcomb et al. 2012). The same holds for smell where there
is reported individual variation in the perception of odor
threshold, intensity, and character linked to genetic variations
(Keller et al. 2007; Mainland et al. 2014). As expressed by
scientists, there are many variables that affect perception, far
more than the stimuli to be measured and the receptor organ
being tested.
8
Our responsiveness to stimuli is constantly
changing. More than an inborn capacity that can be
augmented and sharpened through training, our study suggests
that sensibility is something that adjusts to the circumstances
and the solicitations and affordances of the environment, as
phenomenologists and psychologists such as J. J. Gibson (1966)
have been claiming for decades.
Moreover, reflecting back on the daily activities performed
at El Celler de Can Roca as well as on the interactions with
some of its members in an experiment-like setting, we noticed
that there is not much room for the communal in the concept
of sensory capacity. Even if we thought about it as the capacity
of a team, there is this widespread idea of singular and self-
contained bodies attached to the term capacity. Indeed, under
this paradigm the sensorial capacity of a team would merely
appear as the sum of individuals performing their tasks and en-
gaging their senses at their best; in short, a group of “good
noses”and “delicate palates.”But this was not the picture we
gathered from our experiment.
For us, the need for another approach to sensory abilities
became evident—simply put, our findings confirmed that
olfactory (or for that matter, flavor) experience did not reside
in the individual alone. The environment, the active engage-
ment of being with others, and together attending to the
dynamic and fragile properties of materials were of crucial
importance (Latour 2004; Mol 2008). Rather than sensory
capacities attached to the job of cooks, sommeliers, and
waiters, making them more sensitive to flavors, we found that
it is more about the development of sensible skills understood
as abilities of action and perception in an “environment
furnished by the work and presence of others”(Ingold 2000:
4). Such a move promotes a different conception of expertise
and culinary sensibility.
When thinking about sensory capacity there is the expecta-
tion that the cook has a greater sense of taste, as the sommelier
has a greater sense of smell, and that these capacities manifest
in task-oriented measures. But a broad concept of skill and
sensibility takes what is thought to reside in the individual
alone into the realm of the relational. In accordance with the
results of our experiment, we find useful the concept of skill as
elaborated by anthropologist Tim Ingold. Influenced by
Gibson’s ecological approach to perception, he defines a skill
as that which is developed through active exploration of the
possibilities afforded by the environment (Ingold 2000: 359).
GASTRONOMICA
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SUMMER 2017
This conception makes of skill more than the mastering of a
technique by an individual, as the common use of the word
suggests in the context of cooking. Skills are sustained by
active engagement with the diverse elements of an environ-
ment, and rather than being fixed, they are always in a process
of adaptation because of constantly shifting surrounding condi-
tions. So while skills can be judged in degrees of dexterity, it is
not hard to also recognize in them qualities of care, of being
sensitive and responsive to context as well as to the presence
of others. So what possibilities does a work environment like
El Celler de Can Roca afford and, more importantly, how can
this active engagement be fostered?
In the context of the restaurant, sensible skills are
everywhere to be found. They can be seen in the choice of
ingredients and materials, in individual and collective gestures
of precision with and without tools, in the rectification of
a sauce, in thinking about a new dish, at the moment of
collective plating, in the handling of a knife or a pair of twee-
zers, in giving a plate to a diner and in the service of a wine; in
short, in all those activities involved in the preparation and
serving of food and drinks that are undoubtedly sensual (see
figure 4). But as we empirically saw in our experiment, sensi-
ble skills do not stop there. This is precisely our point and why
we think the term capacity remains insufficient.
The act of sharing affords possibilities of sensation that can be
actively explored for the first time, sensations that, otherwise
would likely remain unnoticed. The feeling with that we rescued
from people’s responses, the opportunity of tasting together, of
imagining together, and of adapting one’s body to the movement
and taste of others, are all things that are intrinsic to the qualities
of awareness, empathy, and imagination that we previously
discussed. These are all sensible skills that have spontaneously
grown first and foremost in practice as the restaurant-as-
environment develops and embodies its own vision of what
gastronomy should be about: communication.
To say that sensible skills are distributedis not the same as to
say that everyone has the same skills. They cannot be equally
distributed because, let’s remember, they are the product of
different responses and forms of attachment between people
and things. A sensible skill is not defined from within, from the
interior. Sensibility is developed when it is put into use. Skills
are achievements that respond as much to the life of one’s body
and training, what things in themselves afford, as well as to the
purpose of collective history with its changing fashions, objects,
techniques, and tastes (Hennion 2007).
What El Celler de Can Roca offers is a common culinary
space that has in its roots a basic sharing practice attached to
the familial. El Celler is a restaurant that from the beginning
has grown as a product of more than one mind. It is a family-
run restaurant organically grown into experimental cuisine
where negotiation has been more the rule than the exception.
According to Josep Maria Fonalleras (2013), and many other
commentators of the restaurant’s character, “the fact of
(Joan, Josep, and Jordi) coming from the same place, of having
stepped the same territory, of having felt the same domestic
pans, of feeling inheritors of a same lineage, make up for an
added value that we could not find in another place.”There
is a common understanding operating in the kitchen and the
FIGURE 4: Kitchen staff during a service.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ANA MARIA ULLOA © 2015
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dining room that mobilizes the expertise of each with food,
desserts, and wines into a unified sense of care.
The unfolding of sensible skills is also reflected in the move
toward bringing closer the worlds of the kitchen and the
dining room, traditionally held apart. This movement is, in
and of itself, changing the way things are done within high-
end cuisine and responds to a more inclusive view of gastron-
omy that is not exhausted in the procurement of excellent
products with fitting techniques. The dining room is an exten-
sion of the work performed in the kitchen and there is room
for interpretation in both. Over the years, El Celler de Can
Roca has insisted in rethinking the relationship between
kitchen and dining room, and has made conscious efforts in
dismantling traditional hierarchies in and between both spaces
despite expected frictions (see figure 5).
Cooks are ever more interested in knowing what happens
in the dining room and waiters and sommeliers of what
happens in the kitchen. This new configuration of the team
tends to be more horizontal, as there is less concern about
specialization. In the kitchen the tasks are continuously
distributed to keep automatization at bay, and multiple hands
are involved in the making of one dish. In the dining room
sommeliers share opinions about which wine to choose when
possible. There are, of course, still different specialties and the
work and training is distributed accordingly, but there is a
constant effort at promoting a more complete vision of the
scope of the restaurant’s work and gastronomy itself among all
members.
This redistribution of knowledge creates a fertile ground on
which to share sensory experiences and spark new sensibilities.
But we are the first to recognize that building and strengthen-
ing such ground requires more attention and effort than
previously given. Expertise in cooking, wine pairing, and
hospitality undoubtedly comes with a technical know-how, but
the major development grows from the constant acquisition of
a rich perceptual repertoire that allows someone to respond to,
discriminate, and act upon subtle differences of both the
material that is worked on and the people who are served.
So, if we concede that we gain more from promoting collec-
tive sensible skills within the team than evaluating individuals
FIGURE 5: Waitress coming into the dining room.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ANA MARIA ULLOA © 2015
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by their sensory capacities, what type of education should the
restaurant encourage? If skills like taste, as sociologist
Antoine Hennion (2007: 103) reminds us, are “lived by each
but fashioned by all,”how can we best cultivate them?
Toward an Education of Sensible Skills
This takes us to our last point and conclusion. Restaurants
with large teams and a system of stagiaires have traditionally
served as training grounds for the palates of young cooks,
sommeliers, and waiters. This task has been understood differ-
ently according to the house and the times. At El Celler de
Can Roca there has been growing attention to the education
of the team. For as philosopher Daniel Innerarity (2009)
suggests: restaurants are educational institutions like a school
or a university; they favor those who dedicate themselves
professionally to food, opening up possibilities for perceiving
anew the edible and drinkable. This educational concern was
precisely at the background of our experiment and its results
gave us some clues about things we should and should not
be doing, taking into account our conceptual move from sen-
sory capacity to sensible skill.
It is important to point out that we do not have in mind the
educational model of the classroom or the laboratory for culti-
vating sensory skills. While we have opened up a working
space—called La Masia—apart from the main restaurant
reserved for talks, workshops, and other pedagogic experiences
for the team, we have come to recognize that most of the
learning takes place while performing the job and participating
in the daily life of the restaurant. Because we are defending
a sensible skill model, learning, out of necessity, must be
embedded in practice (see figure 6). This means learning
while doing, researching, and experimenting, rather than a
discrete training of the senses and a sensory education that aims
at their enhancement and power acquisition. While this spirit is
difficult to keep at the same time as running a fine dining
restaurant—where everything has to be very well planned, dishes
have to be consistent, and mistakes kept to a minimum—it is
of utmost importance to sponsor improvisation at the right
times, fostering involvement and teaching by way of example
on how to develop practical judgment. Skills, as we saw, are
adaptations, processes of coping and responding differentially to
what the environment offers. They are not an end result.
Even if we consider that formal training escapes the
restaurant’s aim, we believe it is worthwhile to briefly detail
three areas of action at the individual and collective levels
that can play an important role in the cultivation of sensible
skills. These areas are thought to promote the previously
discussed traits of awareness, imagination, and empathy.
The first starts with the development of personal flavor
libraries with the intention of sparking awareness and
imagination. More than the development of techniques,
which come with the job and are strengthened by repetition
and handiness, we should encourage each member to pay
careful attention to every flavor encountered and the
context of such encounters. We need to give people the
FIGURE 6: Plating the dish Caballa con Encurtidos (mackerel with pickles).
PHOTOGRAPH BY ANA MARIA ULLOA © 2015
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chance to try, compare, and discuss what is being done and
what is brought to the restaurant when possible. Training in
this regard is not something new, but rather something
built-in to restaurant culture and the craft of cooking
and serving wine. While it is a matter of individual work
and interest, it can yield better results if it is practically and
willfully addressed in the context of running a restaurant.
But how should we go about it? Should something such as
sensory analysis with explicit and normative references be
included in the life of the restaurant? While some people have
argued for such application (García-Segovia et al. 2012), here
we hint that the education for people working in restaurants
and hospitality businesses should not be the same as that
prescribed for wine, coffee, tea, beer, or chocolate connois-
seurs, or sensory scientists where more analytical skills are
needed to assess the quality of a product, detecting virtues and
flaws. In such professions the product (as expressed through its
organoleptic properties) is the protagonist, not so much what
surrounds it. But as we have established here through the
concept of skills, products do not stand in isolation.
What needs to be nurtured is the ability to recognize ever
more differences in things as in people in order to cope with
and act upon them. Precisely because such differences must
be controlled and rendered homogeneous for a fine-dining
restaurant to properly work, they must be recognized first. So
instead of teaching and mirroring sensory evaluations tools for
designing new dishes and assuring consistency, we have to
make sure that the team is able to jointly recognize when
something tastes “right”to our taste, what makes things taste
different, and when this is desired. With this comes the ability
for improvisation and the recognition of what makes some
things or situations special beyond their scarcity, market price,
or compliance with gastronomic norms and fashions.
The second area moves to the intersubjective and involves
the development of a common language in action. This too is
an essential component for promoting awareness and imagina-
tion. Because we have paid close attention to the aspect of
sharing, the use of a common lexicon is key. In contemporary
cooking much emphasis has been placed on the need for the
development of a science-oriented vocabulary that contributes
to describe material, ingredients, and concepts behind new
cooking processes heretofore unknown to cooks (Adrià et al.
2009; This 2002; Ugalde et al. 2009). These are important
contributions that have encouraged the use of more precise
terminology in cooking. But more than a professional lexicon,
we need to make sure that the shared language responds to
our particular day-to-day practice, a shared experience. To be
consistent with the model of sensible skills, concepts need to
emerge from the resolution of concrete problems, our
experiments with food and drink, as well as our interactions
with diners. More than working on lexicons, we have to assure
there is meaning behind our concepts in order to enlarge
discernment.
If, as many experiments suggest, expertise is to be found in
the realm of identification and nuanced description of tastes
and aromas, it is important to remember, as Chollet and
Valentin (2000) argue, that a term does not need to be precise
to be effective. Above all, it needs to convey a meaning, to be a
common reference. We have to emphasize the communica-
tive aspect of any sensory apprenticeship, because as we have
established here, skills that are traditionally held to belong to
the individual alone are instead distributed and emerge from
the relations we establish among us and with the objects and
recipients of our craft. As Emile Peynaud writes in The Taste
of Wine (1987: 8), “Rarely a higher sensitivity concerns all
tastes and at the same time all smells. The best results come
from an acquired sensibility, and consequently, a better capac-
ity to identify a sensation.”
The third and most challenging area in pedagogic terms is
that related to the cultivation of empathic skills—that feeling
our way into things, feeling with, and understanding the feeling
of others that we regard as central to gastronomic practice. For
this we set asideits ethical connotations and concentrate on the
meaning of empathy as a principle of communication and
shared emotion. Empathy, we gather, is an affective response
that has to do as much with perception as with knowing of
people. It is indispensable for predicting, explaining, and under-
standing others. But empathy also, and this is not always
acknowledged, plays a role in our aesthetic appreciation of
objects, food and drinks included. We need to provide the
setting, the materials, the instruments, and the space for our
team to “learn how to be affected”(Latour 2004), that is, to be
moved by the things we prepare and serve, and those we serve.
We saw this in the attachment some had developed with certain
iconic dishes or in the recognition of how special a mushroom
that tastes like melon is.
Although intangible, thinking about empathy in the context
of sensible skills is at the crux of what makes a restaurant stand
as a proposal of food culture understood and mobilized by
many. It is something that cannot be forced upon through
discourse; it must grow with time and from within. For this, it
is necessary to expose the team to different ways of doing things
and thinking about them. Today, El Celler de Can Roca is in a
privileged position to pursue and be committed to such an
endeavor, because of our access to culinary resources and
people that do not belong to our immediate landscape. Even
if our restaurant is rooted in Catalan cooking, we have con-
sciously made room for exposing ourselves to other culinary
GASTRONOMICA
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traditions and ways ofknowing, fromthe artistic to the scientific.
And this is something that we see affecting the team and their
vision of what can be accomplished through gastronomy.
At the end, this experiment left us thinking that if gastronomy
is indeed going through a sensible turn after having surpassed a
hasty technological phase, it should definitely understand not
only the way cooking methods play off the senses, but also how
to cultivate and share a sensible knowing among those who
cook, serve, and eat. We have to promote communication, not
avoid it through technical means. The training we give to our
team has to go beyond operational procedures. Now more than
ever, and knowing that as similar subjects we perceive different
things, we have to work in that feeling with we sometimes
achieve among ourselves and with our diners. Ultimately, this
is where sensible skills can be found, not in the lonely hands
and capacities of sensitive geniuses.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Dr. Josep de Haro for his assistance and
advice in the carrying out of this experiment. Our gratitude also
extends to all participants at El Celler de Can Roca for their
time and disposition. We thank Hugh Raffles, Santiago Rey,
Zandra Pedraza, Susana Vendrell, Nadia Berenstein, Christy
Spackman, Jacob Lahne, Ella Butler, and the anonymous
reviewers for their feedback on various drafts. Lastly, we are
grateful for Joe Lemelin’s and Gastronomica’s editorial
assistance.
NOTES
1. The term “technoemotional”was introduced by journalist Pau
Arenós in La cocina de los valientes (2011).
2. Multisensory dining experiences have mushroomed in recent
years. Heston Blumenthal’s 2007 Sound of the Sea was one of the first
proposals in collaboration with researcher Charles Spence from the
Crossmodal Research Laboratory at Oxford. From this laboratory
many other dining proposals and studies that emphasize the influence
of sound, vision, and touch on the dining experience have emerged.
Our own work with El Somni (The Dream), a culinary experiment
presented in the operatic mode, is also part of the effort of crafting
multisensory experiences integrating various artistic expressions. Also
in Spain, the work of Paco Roncero is following the path of
multisensory dinners with the aid of technology.
3. Souvide is a cooking method that uses much lower temperatures
and longer times than conventional cooking. Food is placed in a
vacuum-sealed pouch and then placed in a temperature-controlled
water bath or steam environment. Bruno Goussault, Georges Blanc,
and Georges Pralus were among the first chefs that adopted the
method for the restaurant kitchen. At El Celler the technique was first
used during service. See Roca and Brugués 2014.
4. Orthonasal olfaction is a term used in the scientific literature that
refers to the inhalation of aromas while sniffing. Retronasal olfaction
refers to the perception of aromas in the oral cavity while eating or
drinking. The dual nature of olfaction as sense modality (occurring
externally and internally) was first proposed by Paul Rozin (1982);
however, there is no empirical evidence that shows substantial
qualitative differences between orthonasal and retronasal olfactory
perception (Cowart and Rawson 2001).
5. Garum is a fermented fish sauce that served as a basis for many
ancient Greek and Roman dishes. At El Celler it became an
inspiration for the dish mackerel with pickles.
6. “Memoria del paladar”is the expression frequently used in Manuel
Vazquéz Montalbán’s literary and gastronomic work to refer to those
unforgettable flavors that always haunt us. See Vázquez Montalbán
2008.
7. The recipe used is from a Colombian traditional soup
characteristic of the capital called ajiaco. Regarding the recipe and its
history see Duque and Van Ausdal 2008.
8. Some of the most common variables tested in psychophysics to
examine taste and smell variation are age, gender, ethnicity, cultural
differences, emotion, and contexts effects. For olfaction see Wysocki
et al. 1991.
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