Dani García’s dishes made available to everyone through new project with Just Eat

A week before opening his restaurant in Madrid, the Marbella chef launched La Gran Familia Mediterránea delivery service in collaboration with the food delivery service.

Dani García now has his own food delivery service. He’d been thinking about it for two years and then the quarantine in March pushed him to take the idea up again.

La Gran Familia Mediterránea was launched last week in collaboration with Just Eat. First in Madrid and then over the next few weeks in Barcelona and his native Marbella.

The service will be based in kitchens (known as ‘dark kitchen’) strategically placed to reach the maximum number of people and areas (to begin with there will be three in Madrid, two in Barcelona and one in Marbella).

Once again García takes a leap forward into the unknown with this innovative, multi-brand home delivery service. His objectives are the same as when he hung up his Michelin starred chefs’ jacket: for his cuisine “to reach more people”.

He repeated this last week during the Twitter launch of this new project with the general director of Just Eat in Spain, Patrik Bergareche, just one week before expanding in Madrid with the opening of the Dani Brasserie at the Four Seasons Hotel.

“Certainly home delivery is a completely different game from serving food in a restaurant and for that reason we have kitchens dedicated to just this. I would love to be delivering a Lobito del Mar rice dish or apples stuffed with foie gras from my restaurante Leña, but that’s not feasible. We try to satisfy customers with common sense dishes and ones that travel easily,” explained Dani García, who guaranteed that on the menu will be one of his star dishes, BiBo brioche.

There will be others too, such as Russian salad with fried egg, smoked eels, croquettes and his renowned mac ‘n’ cheese, sushi and even the ‘happy hippo’ dessert. The idea is to satisfy the whole family with just one ‘click’, with an average price of around 20€.

Dishes and characters

The dishes under his brand will include different types of cuisine through characters: Bocatas García, Señor Brasas, Madame Wasabi, Molta Mamma, Pancho Suey, Tita Brava, Shanna and Mixter, who will supply the cocktails.

“The Gran Familia Mediterránea will have 140 dishes, many from Lobito, BiBo and Leña restaurants,” said García, as he showed some of the packaging for his new concept which aims to be fully functional in Madrid, Barcelona and Marbella in one month and with which he aspires to open around twenty kitchens.

“I really want to open in Malaga, Valencia and Seville too, but we have to move forward little by little,” he admitted.

Any ambitions? asked Patrik Bergareche. “How many countries is Just Eat in?” replied García. The answer: 22. “Well I want us to open in all of them,” said the chef, stating that he has many brands and projects he wants to develop.

It is nearly the first anniversary of Dani García’s departure from haute cuisine; it was in November last year that he left to do precisely this, to undertake new challenges and an ambitious international expansion plan. He has already started in Doha and the plan will take him to the United States and Miami at the end of the year.

Meanwhile he has been preparing to open his new restaurant in Madrid, Dani Brasserie, on the top floor of the Four Seasons Hotel. There he will combine haute cuisine dishes with others more ‘laidback’. The inauguration is today, Friday: another leap forward for the Marbella chef.

Source: SUR in English, September 2020.