On the path of vocations, emotions almost always tip the balance. The headline that accompanies these lines is just the impact of the obvious. Because Manu Franco He defines himself, rather than as a journalist or chef, as an insatiable worker. Until ago … not so much, a little before the pandemic that put him in check like so many others, this new protagonist of the Michelin Guide Olympus after achieving the star for The House of Manolo Franco in his hometown, Valdemorillo (Madrid), devoted all his efforts to sports journalism following Formula 1 around the world.
Husband and partner of Carolina Martinez and father of two daughters, Gabriela and Martina Veniceone day, with his suitcases at the door, put an end to the up to 230 nights he then spent away from home covering the world’s great prizes. His daughter Martina asked him in 2018, hugging his leg. His colleagues, even today, highlight that he was the only Spaniard who attended everyone, without fail.
In June 2019, his restaurant’s first two customers, in the same space he grew up in as a child, sat down for dinner. He embarked on a new path, with vertigo, and collected the legacy of Manolo Housethe bar of his parents Manolo Franco and Pepa Peral, a reference for decades in this small town in the western mountains of Madrid that has put the best restaurants in Spain on the map in five years, with a personal kitchen and a good dose of feelings.
Room of the House of Manolo Franco, in Valdemorillo
Those given to him by his father who died in 2006, whom he honors with the name of the space – and with a very special rice pudding –, about the meaning of the work of a mountain man who began as a child taking care of cows, was a stonemason and waiter until founding with Pepa that bar that the town has in its memory along with the croquettes, the tortilla or the rabbit with garlic from her mother. Proud, today, she still stops by the restaurant to have her coffee.
She was his «teacher» in many ways. In the kitchen, but also in the hospitality that is breathed in the space of this gastronomic restaurant. The technique that he applies to his creations today was polished in a brief time at the school of Le Cordon Bleu de Madrid before jumping into the void, transforming that bar into a bright and warm room for just over twenty diners.
‘Open your eyes’: two menus loaded with symbolism
The tables are sufficiently spaced apart and through them runs a service very bare of artifices in which both Manu Franco personally and the room team try to bring closer that Valdemorillense environment that inspires the chef, an admirer of figures such as Quique Dacosta, his “favorite cook ».
Manu Franco resorts to the pantry that his surroundings provide him. In the image one of the passes with mushrooms collected in Valdemorillo from their last autumn menu
With all this he weaves the passages of two menus –’open your eyes‘ and ‘Open your eyes XL‘ that changes every season – in which aromatic herbs such as thyme, rosemary, cantueso or marjoram are very present. From the welcome, for example with a ‘hypocras‘, an infused wine that was made in the Middle Ages. It is the prologue to a sequence of a dreamlike day in the mountains these cold days, with a ‘breakfast’ before “going for a walk in the countryside” and things like a cappuccino of winter vegetables and Manchego cheese or the tribute to chocolate with her aunt Carmen’s churros, which she takes to the salty side with a lentil cream.
More winks to her mother follow in the ‘appetizer’ with Grandma Pepa’s tortilla and croquette. At ‘lunch’ and ‘snack’ there is game, mushrooms and local meats such as lamb, with which he makes rice with oak smoke, demi glace and a butter noisette air with a complex balance of fat. An expertise that also demonstrates in a cod in tempura with a nougat and almond pil pil –in the ‘dinner’ sequence–.
More environment in the desserts, with the Valmayor pine forest and, sometimes, with that aforementioned ‘healing’ rice pudding that Manolo Sr. made for the chef when he was sick. This is the gastronomy of emotions.
Address: La Fuente, 6. Valdemorillo (Madrid). Menus: 85 and 105 euros.
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