How was Maria Solivellas, according to her sister: “She is very talented, very intuitive and a little scattered”

PalmaAs a child, she was creative, bright, and very independent. She is the third of four siblings who were born and raised in Palma, behind the Born: “She had a very rich inner world. She spent many hours playing in the courtyard that is now Casal Solleric, imagining stories and building her own universes”. She is slightly scattered, but with a lot of “visionary capacity”. In fact, 25 years ago she decided to make a change in the family restaurant, create her own vegetable garden there and bet on local, zero-kilometer produce: “It seemed like an extravagance at the time, but when she had an idea in her head, she would go ahead with it without paying much attention to what others said”. This is how she launched Ca na Toneta, the iconic family restaurant in Caimari. Maria Solivellas (1970) is the chef who revolutionized it, but before putting on an apron, she did many other things, driven by an infinite curiosity. This is told to us by the actress Catalina Solivellas, her second sister – the eldest is Teresa, and the youngest, Pep.

She repeats that Maria, like her other sisters and brother, was bright: “I suppose we belong to a generation in which children had much more freedom and parents were not so overprotective. At school she was a bit scattered and, in general, a very restless girl”. The family spent weekends in Caimari, and Maria entertained herself by organizing all sorts of events: she would baptize dolls, prepare them for the first day of school… “Any excuse would do to put on a show!”.

Maria's creativity was evident in everyday things like making herself a sandwich. “When we were a little older and each arrived home for dinner at different times, we made our own sandwiches. I would put a piece of cheese on the slice of bread, and she always prepared very elaborate and delicious sandwiches. She turned anything into a small creation,” recalls Catalina.

Her mother always said something very characteristic of Maria: “Where she is, she is,” explains the actress, who elaborates: “Maria lives very intensely in the present from a very young age. She is not a planner; she has always been very guided by intuition and her great vision. She has never followed an overly planned path nor has she had a defined vocation from the beginning, and this has precisely given her a lot of freedom.” This is how she came to the world of cooking: in an unexpected, almost surprising way.

In fact, before dedicating herself to cooking, her natural inclination for staging whatever it was led her to the world of entertainment. She worked in production and press with La Cubana when she lived in Barcelona, and later moved to Madrid to dedicate herself to music production. Catalina says that throughout her life she “has received very important professional offers, but she has never been afraid to say no when she felt it wasn’t her path.” A determination that not everyone has.

Maria, according to Catalina, “is very talented, very intuitive, and also a bit scattered, but with an enormous capacity to run a business,” with a leadership that is not at all imposing or rigid. “We come from a matriarchy, from a family with many women, and this is also reflected in how she manages teams. In our family, there have never been large authoritarian structures or categorical ways of doing things either.”

The family was very surprised that she ended up taking charge of the restaurant and the kitchen. “She began to investigate obsessively, to learn and soak up knowledge,” she recalls, “and she put all the creative and imaginative world she had always had at the service of cooking, and this explains a good part of the revolution she has ended up making at Ca na Toneta.”