Jordi Roca

Plaça Catalunya, 23, 17002, Girona
972 905 905
info@casacacaogirona.com
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Turning Cacao into a Multisensory Experience

For Jordi Roca, chocolate is an ingredient to taste, but also one to explore through aroma, texture, memory and imagination. The Girona-born pastry chef has become internationally known for an unconventional approach to desserts that transforms familiar ingredients into unexpected sensory experiences.

As the youngest of brothers Joan, Josep and Jordi Roca, he leads the sweet side of El Celler de Can Roca in Girona. His work there established his reputation for playful experimentation, but his fascination with cacao eventually led him beyond restaurant desserts and directly into chocolate making.

Finding His Place in the Roca Kitchen

Roca’s development as a pastry chef was unconventional. His early pastry training was guided by Welsh pastry chef Damian Allsop, who helped introduce him to the techniques and possibilities of sweet cuisine.

From there, Roca developed a style built around curiosity. Landscapes, fragrances, emotions, memories and everyday experiences can all become starting points for desserts.

That approach eventually brought international recognition. In 2014, The World’s 50 Best Restaurants named him its World’s Best Pastry Chef. He later received the Pastry Award from The Best Chef Awards in both 2019 and 2023.

From Pastry Chef to Chocolate Maker

Chocolate had long appeared in Roca’s desserts, but his interest eventually became much deeper.

He began investigating cacao at its source, examining not simply how chocolate could be used in pastry but how cacao is grown, fermented, processed and transformed. That exploration ultimately resulted in Casa Cacao.

Opened in Girona in 2020, Casa Cacao brought chocolate production into the Roca family’s expanding culinary world. The project combines a bean-to-bar chocolate workshop with a shop and café, while a boutique hotel occupies the same building.

Returning to the Origins of Chocolate

Casa Cacao gives Roca an opportunity to work backwards from the finished chocolate bar to the cacao itself.

Rather than treating couverture as simply another pastry ingredient, the bean-to-bar approach places greater emphasis on origin and the characteristics of individual cacao beans. Roca’s work has included research into sustainable cacao and chocolate-production processes.

That interest also inspired the book Casa Cacao: The Return Trip to the Origin of Chocolate, created with journalist Ignacio Medina. The project documents a journey through cacao-growing regions while exploring the people, processes and cultures behind chocolate.

For a chef whose career has been built around sensory experiences, cacao offers extraordinary possibilities. Its origins, aromas and flavour variations become part of the story rather than disappearing behind the finished dessert.

Creativity Without Conventional Boundaries

Roca’s chocolate work belongs to a much larger creative world.

Alongside El Celler de Can Roca and Casa Cacao, his projects have included Rocambolesc, the ice cream concept created with his wife, Alejandra Rivas, and El Somni, the ambitious gastronomic opera developed with his brothers and artist Franc Aleu. In 2018, his work reached an even broader international audience when he appeared in an episode of Netflix’s Chef’s Table: Pastry.

Yet Casa Cacao represents an important development in his career. It connects the imaginative pastry chef directly with the agricultural ingredient at the beginning of the chocolate-making process.

Chocolate as a Journey

Jordi Roca‘s approach demonstrates how broad the definition of a contemporary chocolatier can be.

At El Celler de Can Roca, chocolate can become part of an elaborate multisensory dessert. At Casa Cacao, the focus shifts toward cacao origin and bean-to-bar production. Across both, curiosity remains the common element.

Rather than accepting chocolate simply as a finished ingredient, Roca continues to investigate where it comes from, how its character develops and what can happen when craftsmanship and imagination meet.