Joe Duggan (Reporter)
CLASSES are resuming at world-famous cookery school La Consula after months of conflict and closure in January.
And there is finally security for workers who have gone months without payment.
Now incorporated into the Junta’s department for employment, they are set to get paid at the end of this month.
The conflicted school which has produced some of Spain’s best chefs such as Diego Gallegos and Dani Garcia, saw students notified by whatsapp not to return to class in January.
But there is renewed hope now that delighted employees have fixed work contracts from the Junta, who ‘didn’t expect it to happen so quickly’.
Meetings have already taken place to adapt the course which has seen disruption and strikes over the last year.
“We are extremely satisfied and happy,” cooking teacher Jose Antonio Jimenez said.
“We can finally sleep easy, this has given us the stability we desperately needed.”
They will pick up payslips at the end of February, but will not be reimbursed for the months missed.
I was fortunate to be able to visit La Cónsula in the early 1960s when my cousins Annie and Bill Davis lived there. I was impressed by their wonderful collection of old maps, and soon started one of my own. All the furniture had white canvas covers, which gave the place an austere air, which also influenced me in later houses I was involved in decorating or restoring. The sad thing was not to have met Don Ernesto, who as we know was a frequent guest, but who had died shortly before. Still, it was a magic place, and I was privileged to be a young person in Spain when (as Evelyn Waugh once wrote), the going was good.
_La Coruña, 2016