“Hospital food is delicious!”

Raimundo González will be fired this Wednesday, at 6 p.m., in a funeral mass at the Jesús Mortuary, where the family decided to watch him. He died at the Morales Meseguer hospital after several days admitted for respiratory complications. Raimundo, who was widowed two years ago, leaves five children and seven grandchildren. At his funeral chapel, the family remembered that one of Raimundo's favorite days was the day of the Bando de la Huerta. “He has come to die on a holiday for the people of Murcia,” said his daughter Eva, who lived with Raimundo for the last year and a half, since his mother, Encarna, died in 2022. «He was very proud of what he had achieved. She told us: 'Do you think that a young man from Llano de Brujas, who went barefoot selling wine, could become a Favorite Son of Murcia and an honorary doctor of the University?' When we said anything stupid to him he always responded: 'Be careful, you're talking to an honorable person, let's see what you say.' But he said it as a joke, because deep down he didn't care about all of that.

In the hospital, where he had to be admitted for pneumonia, his daughter Eva remembers that he ate very well. “The hospital food is great!” Raimundo told them, “because he understood that they worked with a budget and that they had done it with the best they could and had. In fact, he ate the Hero brand fruit compote with great pleasure, whose founder was a friend of my father, and every time he ate it he dedicated it to him. In recent times, when his stay at the hospital became inevitable, he even had the opportunity to recite to the health personnel fragments of Don Quixote and 'The Unfaithful Married', by García Lorca, the one that says “and that I took her to the river believing “She was a girl, but she had a husband…” Good mood until the end.

The president of the Autonomous Community, Fernando López Miras, spoke these farewell words yesterday at the festive day of the Bando de la Huerta: “He was a unique and unrepeatable chef, visionary and innovative, teacher of great Murcian and Spanish restaurateurs.” In a letter sent to his family, López Miras expressed his “heartfelt condolences for the death of our beloved and admired Raimundo, who contributed so much to making our rich and varied culinary tradition a hallmark of the Region of Murcia.” The mayor of Murcia, José Ballesta, evoked the eminent figure of this innovator of regional cuisine: «Raimundo dignified Murcian cuisine. He was a great patron of our culture, of our traditions, a visionary of who we are today. “Favorite son of Murcia, he raised the name of our city by receiving numerous national and international recognitions.”

Juan Mari Arzak, promoter of the culinary movement called New Basque Cuisine, upon learning of the death, was saddened: «I am very sad. He has been a great friend, a wonderful man and a magnificent professional. He has helped me a lot and it is a very painful loss for all of us who have known him.

Pablo González Conejero, Murcia chef with two Michelin stars (La Cabaña, El Palmar, Murcia), declared to LA VERDAD that “Don Raimundo is the most important thing that the Region of Murcia has had throughout its history in terms of gastronomy.” refers. He opened walls and borders, established a style, interpreted popular cuisine in the best way, and was undoubtedly a national icon. I was lucky enough to go outside the borders to try to learn something in the mid-90s, and wherever he went, when he said that he was from Murcia, Raimundo's name came up. It happened to me when I worked with Arzak, in Akelarre with Subijana… that gives you a dimension of what Raimundo was and what Raimundo achieved in the 70s. For chef Pablo González, «Raimundo had the ability to put Murcia on the map because people came from all over the place to eat at his Rincón de Pepe. Without a doubt, he is the most important and most influential person at a gastronomic level in the Region, and this defines him. A teacher, without a doubt, and an entire generation passed through that house and later opened restaurants throughout the Community. “The myth has gone away from us, one of those people who should not leave.”

Chef Juan Guillamón (1* Michelin, Almo, Murcia) told LA VERDAD yesterday that Raimundo González “represented Murcia very well, and always showed off the Region of Murcia. He has left us, in fact, on a day as representative for Murcia as that of the Bando de la Huerta. For Guillamón, there is no doubt that his contribution is “incalculable”: “He is the greatest representative of regional gastronomy for decades, he opened paths to understand regional cuisine using products from our land, and his eggplants come to mind.” the cream. All chefs in the Region of Murcia, in one way or another, owe him a lot.

The anecdote of the meeting between Raimundo and Ernest Hemingway in Murcia is not to be missed. «He was already a Nobel Prize winner and I went to talk to the authorities to tell them that he was coming, in case they wanted to greet him, since he was an eminence of literature. When I told it, they told me: 'We don't want to know anything about that red man!', so I went back to the restaurant and told Hemingway that the Civil Governor was very sorry but he couldn't come, but that they had invited him to the meal as show of respect (laughs)». He had a hard time paying it. “Clear! The worst thing is that word spread that the Nobel Prize winner had been invited by the Governor and they called me in for questioning. They wanted me to tell them who had paid for a meal for “that red man” in the name of the Civil Governor. “I put off saying that I didn't know very well what it was like.”

The secret to getting this far? LA VERDAD critic Sergio Gallego once asked him. «The secret is to be in love with cooking. The passion for cooking is essential to be a good cook. Afterwards, I believe that you have to work with the best product, of course, be attentive to what is happening in the sector without closing in on yourself and do what you believe in without thinking about what they will say. In addition, he hired young people who had not worked in other places so that they did not have vices acquired when working. “So I explained to them how I wanted to do things and they did them the way I liked.”

Already in his nineties, he declined to participate in the 2020 edition of 'MasterChef' that was recorded in Plaza de Belluga, but perhaps many viewers remember that it was in Isabel Gemio's program 'Sorpresa, surprise', on Antena 3, when this “a lover of the ancestral cuisine of each town” was surprised in the last restaurant he set up and the plaque was unveiled live in the square that today bears his name. Despite his death, his fried milk and the taste of his creamed eggplants are part of the taste memory of humanity.