Murcian chef Raimundo González Frutos dies at 98

The list of merits, recognitions and distinctions that Raimundo González Frutos accumulated is as long as his extensive career. Among them, the Gold Medal for Tourist Merit, National Gastronomy Award, Favorite Son of Murcia, member of the Chaine de Rotisseure and chosen by the National Academy of Gastronomy among the ten best restaurateurs in Spain stand out.

From Rincón de Pepe, a place owned by his uncles that began as a winery and transformed into the restaurant it is today. Raimundo González declared to LA VERDAD in 2015 that his daughter was born to an eleven-year-old boy. «My family had a food house called La Huertanica (1935-1938) and I helped by going to the garden by bicycle to exchange tobacco for eggs, chickens, rabbits or vegetables. It closed after three years and in '39 my uncle Pepe opened a winery, which was already called La rinconada de Pepe, because it was on the corner. I started with four old wine barrels that I used as tables and that I put in a corner of the warehouse to give some dry grass and a wine to the customers who came to buy in bulk. My uncle wasn't very happy about that, but since he charged a little more for the wine and I was very excited, he let me carry it.”

Raimundo told LA VERDAD a funny anecdote related to Ernest Hemingway and his visit to Murcia. «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 because I was in the kitchen.”

From there, González Frutos revolutionized the gastronomy not only of the Region of Murcia, but of the entire country. A work that Juan Mari Arzak himself recognized: “I cannot erase from my memory the selfless participation of Raimundo González Frutos in that groundbreaking culinary renovation of the seventies of the last century, which he also promoted in his land.”

One of the anecdotes that made him laugh the most was when they ordered a cauldron for 600 guests. «I have always liked challenges. The harder it was to do something, the more I liked doing that job. I visited a manufacturer in San Javier and asked him if he could make me sixty cauldrons before the date on which I had the commitment and he told me that there was no problem. I placed the sixty cauldrons in a line with their wooden tripod and made them. It was crazy, but I liked challenges. Shortly after, they offered me to make a cauldron for another five hundred and I accepted without thinking because I already knew how to do it and, furthermore, I had bought the cauldrons.

At the end he no longer remembered how long he had a Michelin star, “but it was more than ten years. They also named El Rincón de Pepe one of the ten best restaurants in Spain along with Arzak and ElBulli (the owners before Adrià).” 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.”

He, along with chefs of stature such as Arzak himself or Pedro Subijana, extended the changes expressed in Paul Bocuse's famous 'decalogue', such as simplifying recipes, eliminating heavy and fatty sauces, looking back at regional cuisines and, at the same time, be interested in cutting-edge technologies.

In fact, Subijana, awarded three Michelin stars, received from Raimundo González the First Gastronomic Merit Award presented by the newspaper LA VERDAD in 2019. Then, Subijana declared to Pachi Larrosa: “I don't understand how, having had a teacher like Raimundo, there has not been a movement of chefs in Murcia who have come together to, far from competition among themselves, have done something for Murcian gastronomy, for its land, for its people. «Unite, not have secrets between us, share everything… that was the secret by which that group of young people changed things. “One couldn't have done it alone,” he said when asked about the keys to that revolution.

Under his tutelage many of the chefs who stand out today in the kitchens of the Region of Murcia have been trained. Among them, Pablo González Conejero himself – whom his parents sent with Raimundo as an apprentice – and following those responsible for such emblematic establishments as Salzillo, El Churra or Alborada.

One of his last appearances was last November, when the Ramón Gaya museum presented the collection of 22 works donated by the chef, many of them unpublished, in an exhibition that could be visited until last March. And there was a friendship between both men, based on mutual respect and admiration, which began within the walls of the El Rincón de Pepe hotel and restaurant.