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It seems that the CEO of Facebook and one of the men responsible for the endless stream of social media food pictures we recieve daily in our news feeds, Mark Zuckerberg, is a serious fine dining lover.
During a recent trip to Barcelona for the Mobile World Congress, attended by some of the biggest names in the tech industry, including the vice president of Google Nikesh Arora, Zuckerberg held a very special dinner and enlisted the help of the world’s best restaurant El Celler De Can Roca to prepare the food.
Booked months in advance, the El Celler De Can Roca team moved their operation from Girona to a private home in the Gothic part of Barcelona where Zuckerberg was staying. The team moved plates, cutlery, glasses and ingredients for a private dinner for just 24 lucky guests and the affectionately nicknamed, by Josep Roca, 'Mark "sugar mountain" Zuckerberg'.
And, as if a private dinner cooked by some of the world’s best chefs wasn’t enough, Zuckerberg then headed to Girona the next day to enjoy a surprise Birthday celebration for his wife at the award winning restaurant.
Speaking to Fine Dining Lovers, Josep Roca said that watching the first meeting take place in silence was like the famous 1989 movie The Remains of the Day and that he was pleasantly surprised that, despite the importance of the meeting, the guests all paid close attention to the food. He added: "When he visited our kitchen and saw 40 cooks at work in our 300 square meter kitchen, his first reaction was, how did you manage the dinner in Barcelona? Knowing the complexity for us in going out of our home was an enormous challenge for our team.
"His wife confessed that Mark was a big fan of cooking, and asked several times about the dishes and about how to achieve certain flavours and textures...His visit to the restaurant was almost undetected and we kept it a very quiet atmosphere. Their table was the one that used mobile phones the least. While the rest of the tables around them where busy taking pictures of the dishes and running wild on Whatsapp, on Mark's table, there was an acoustic dinner."
We're not sure exactly what the Rocas served to the Facebook founder but it's reported by Lavanguardia that the menu was completely different to the previous days offering and that he and his wife were able to sample some of the brother’s extensive wine collection. Apparently, Zuckerberg was especially interested in the restaurant’s sourdough ice cream dessert, a dish used by the brothers in their new multi-sensory dining experience, El Somni.
Sourdough Dessert, picture by Bacon on the Beech.
El Celler De Can Roca was voted number one on The World’s 50 Best Restaurants List 2013, an event sponsored by S.Pellegrino and Acqua Panna.
