Earning an Earlham degree in chemistry may be at the heart of Chef Pachi Rodriguez’s nod from Michelin for his Barcelona restaurants. That and his humility, creativity and respect for food and patrons
Pachi Rodriguez ’06 has an unassuming air about him and is quick to acknowledge his humble roots. He’s not one to boast about being interviewed by Forbes 500 and CNN for his two restaurants – both based in Barcelona, Spain – or about being featured in the Michelin Guide Estonia 2024 (and again in 2025).
More important to him is connecting with restaurant visitors and being present for their dining experience.
Of course, the quality of the food is a point of importance as well.
Rodriguez prioritizes locally sourced ingredients such as maitake mushrooms native to the Monzoni mountain range in Italy. Rodriguez has the mushrooms, colloquially known as “hen of the woods,” plucked from the chestnut trees they grow on and delivered regularly from a local co-op run by people with learning disabilities. He then uses the mushrooms for a variety of dishes, such as the maitake mushroom with tabbouleh gel and cashew nut cream, and acorn-fed Iberian “pluma” (a special cut of pork loin) with white bean butter, maitake and demi-glace.
“I care about the soul of food,” the chef says.
A Culinary Journey
Post-Earlham, Rodriguez, a legacy alum and Venezuelan, hopped around from his native country to Europe. After graduating with the Class of 2006 and formally finishing his degree in 2008 after finishing up some lingering classes, he went back to Venezuela for an office job. Dissatisfied with that, he headed to France to spend time with his brother, who was there getting his Ph.D.
“The plan was originally to visit family,” says Rodriguez. “I ended up eating my way through Europe. From that trip, my love of food grew.”
The trip also grew the idea of heading into the culinary world.
“I moved to the U.S. and I had two options: either learn by going through the trenches, or the Earlham way, which is getting your hands dirty,” he says. “I don’t have the $40,000 or more to dish out for culinary school. So I started as a dishwasher then moved on to a line cook, then prep cook, sous chef, all the way up the line.”
Although the work was enjoyable and he wanted to continue it, he struggled to find the passion and creativity for food, ultimately dissatisfied with American attitudes and concepts about where food comes from and how people interact with it.
“Don’t get me wrong, I love supermarkets as much as the next person, but when you’re buying a bag of frozen vegetables, there’s no connection there,” he says. “The U.S. has done a lot of things right when it comes to food but when it comes to raw materials, they have it absolutely backwards. A carrot doesn’t even taste like a carrot anymore. Tomatoes taste like water.”
Disillusioned, he moved back to Venezuela, this time to marry his wife, Oriana “Ori” Zeripa Rios, and focus on family.
Then, a crisis hit.
Venezuela’s ongoing political climate forced Rodriguez and his wife to scrimp by making and selling soap for rural communities while applying for U.S. visas. When the visas were denied twice, Europe became their destination.
Armed with longstanding dreams, they packed their bags and moved to Barcelona, where Zeripa Rios could continue her research in neuroscience, and Rodriguez could continue his culinary work. Soon, he enrolled in the master’s program in gastronomy and culinary arts program at Escuela Universitaria de Hotelería y Turismo St. Pol de Mar. From there, he went on to open two restaurants: Albé, a Mediterranean restaurant that serves food with a Lebanese flair, and Âme, a French-influenced Mediterranean restaurant.
Three months after it opened, Âme’s menu was featured in the Michelin guide, and while Âme did not win a Michelin star, being featured in the guide was a major accomplishment.
Rodriguez takes all this in stride, but the chemistry major does credit his Earlham experiences for driving him to where he is today.
“The humbleness of Earlham was foundational for me,” he says. “My professors always drilled into me to ask why. So when I go to make a dish, I think to myself: OK, I know I want this flavor profile, and that texture, and these ingredients — how do I make that work? Why am I getting this result with these ingredients as opposed to what I do want? How do I make this dish great? That’s where the chemistry came in and anything else Earlham taught me.”
It’s the Scientific Method applied to food, he says, a way of marrying what is almost a religious experience for him with the scientific, and coming up with a creative approach. That’s the level of inquiry he learned at Earlham and also from his graduate program, which encouraged experimentation and trial and error in the kitchen.
“I fell in love with that part of it,” he says, referring to the experimentation that is inherent in chemistry and cooking. “Let’s say I want to make a tender duck. OK, how do I do that? You can either brine it or dry age it. What’s better for flavor? Dry aging. Before I do that, how long do I do that for? You start doing your research, you work backwards, you go back, back, back until you have the raw materials to start from. Then you start doing your trials on it.”
Buy Local, Be Curious
That method of working backwards to the source follows him to market, too. “I focus on colors, that’s one of the first things,” he says about the inspiration for his dishes. “I also focus on local ingredients, nature. Here at the market, there’s dirt on the produce. You can see where the growers and sellers harvested the plant. You can see the connection to mother nature.”
Oftentimes his dishes are inspired by ingredients he hasn’t worked with and also by ones he has. There’s a natural curiosity for him when it comes to food.
“I try to connect with past experiences with ingredients, play around with them a bit, and try to bring out flavors in new ways,” he says. “When a customer tries a dish, I want them to feel comforted or like they’re connecting with something, but they don’t know from where.”
After the market, he returns to the restaurant to do that experimentation and cook alongside his sous chef Juan Estaban Longo. At 25, Longo is young, forward thinking and inspired by the work and science he, Rodriguez and the other cooks do in Âme’s kitchen.
The restaurant’s beurre blanc sauce is an example of that. “That particular sauce is really difficult to have in service, it’s an emulsion that’s about 90 percent butter. Usually, if you have it on the stovetop, it will split,” Longo says. Every chef’s nightmare, right there. But Rodriguez threw some chemistry at it, to great success.
“Pachi developed a way of making this sauce so that it doesn’t split, and on the off chance it does, it’s very easy to just whisk it and bring it back,” says Longo. “If you know anything about being a chef, you know that that’s a huge deal.”
There’s really not one dish that stands out for Longo as a customer favorite. “Everyone always has a tough time deciding what’s best, they all say ‘oh this is so good!’ with everything. But the yellowtail and duck, when we have duck, are always popular, and now we have pluma, a special cut of pork that lends itself to being cooked at medium rare.”
The pluma is Iberian pork and is highly sought after; it has beautiful marbling on the meat and is cooked with a hot sear. Customers receive about 300g per serving and rave about it.
“It blows their minds, when people have it,” says Longo. “People aren’t used to having medium-rare pork. It’s pretty special. The marbling, the fat in between the meat, makes it melt in your mouth.”
The pork is typically served with a demiglaze, which takes a lot of work. “You take about seven or eight days making that sauce. You’ve got to bleed out the bones, roast them to make a broth, and after the broth is done you’ve got to reduce it,” Longo explains. It’s also served with a puree of mongete del ganxet, a bean native to Catalonia. Amidst all of this wonderful food is a throughline of respect and reverence for Longo, who says that if it weren’t for Pachi, he wouldn’t have found his passion.
“It’s very hard to find creativity in the restaurant industry, and Pachi is all about that,” he says. “Here, I feel like we’ve been able to develop certain recipes together and Pachi always values our input. That’s one of the reasons why I admire him and why I like working with him. The systems he puts together for service are incredibly smart and well thought out.”
Family, Friendliness and the Soul of Food
Family is important to Rodriguez, almost as much, if not more than, the soul of the food he works with. One of his favorite memories involving food is connected to his grandmother. In Venezuela she taught him the importance of having respect for your food, of using every bit of the vegetable or animal that you can. Behind that veneration and respect was a strong sense of survival instincts. “In Venezuela, a cook was a cook,” says Rodriguez. “It was something you did to feed your family. In Europe, it’s a profession, and something you work towards, it’s not just something you do to feed hungry mouths.” Rodriguez has certainly worked for what he has and is grateful for every person who walks through his doors.
“I try to aim for locals,” he says when asked who fine dining is for, although he rejects the term “fine dining,” preferring to consider what he does more experimental and experiential. “There’s a lot of tourism in Barcelona so restaurants have a tendency to up their prices because they know tourists are coming in with a lot of money. The problem there is that it becomes an unrealistic price range for the locals — so, I try to do what I can to offset those costs both for locals and in the work I do with my other chefs, since part of the food costs come out of our salary.”
Genuine, Unpretentious and Humble Through and Through
That humbleness, consideration and reverence reverberate all the way through the customer experience at Âme. Pictures depict a cozy, warm atmosphere, and customers report that the restaurant serves what would otherwise be grandiose French food — Pyrenean trout with trout roe, beurre blanc, and fig oil, and the Hamachi crudo with sauce vierge, are two examples of menu offerings — in a laidback, casual, some might even say romantic atmosphere. Couples can sit together over candlelight at two-seater tables. There are no waiters or host staff at Âme, everything is taken care of by Rodriguez and kitchen staff, allowing for that connection and care that are so crucial for the chef, and that, arguably, put them and Âme in the hearts and minds of the people behind Spain’s 2024 Michelin Guide.
That genuine air to everything he does caught Isabelle Kilger’s attention right away when she wrote about Âme for a recent Forbes article listing the Top 10 restaurants in Barcelona for the 2024 summer season.
“Pachi’s food is as genuine and unpretentious as the ever-cheerful man behind it,” she says. “You won’t find any over-the-top, try-hard presentations here — just great quality produce cooked to perfection and expertly balanced flavors. Forget foams and spherifications, this is real food prepared with skill, curiosity, and plenty of soul.”
Kilger visited Âme with her father, who is not a fan of tasting menus. “He loves Pachi’s food,” she says, “because it’s real honest food. The technique is there but he’s not trying to show off. It’s fine dining for people who are over fine dining.”
Care. Connection. Humbleness. Passion and love for what you do and sharing that with others. No pretention, just genuine connection and authenticity. Sounds about right for a recipe for success.
“At the end of the day, what I care about is human connection, whether that’s with the local growers and sellers of food or the people who come to dine in my restaurant,” says Rodriguez. “If I’ve achieved that, I’m happy.” ■