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Arroz y Cañas, a restaurant located in Guadalix de la Sierra, Madrid, is a normal restaurant that serves rice, tortillas, pinchos, octopus, steaks and other traditional dishes of Spanish gastronomy. However, inside the bowels of this restaurant is cooking something peculiar beyond the food: A Twitch channel with almost 170,000 followers that accumulates millions of views.
Inside the kitchen of this restaurant (which has different cameras distributed throughout the space), a day’s work in a family restaurant is broadcast on the Twitch platform. Everything is recorded, from how the dishes are prepared, to the conflicts between Tomás Candelas, the cook, and his family: Aaron Candelas, his son; Isabel González, his mother; and Ainara Peréz, Aaron’s girlfriend.
This family channel started in full confinement in 2020. “At the beginning it was super based on my father, me and cooking. But since Ainara, (Aaron’s girlfriend) joins, we started exploring the family theme. Arroz y Desgracias started as a kitchen and today it’s a reality show about a family. We are the most unstructured family possible, but we are also a normal family”, says Aaron Candelas in an interview for the newspaper EL PAÍS.
The mastermind behind this project is Aaron himself, who knows well the charisma, the attractive personality of his father and the good combination of that within a restaurant environment. For their part, Aarón and Ainara have their own Twitch channels, but focused on their video games, same that have been positively affected thanks to the restaurant.
“Live ‘professional’ cooking… Fucking chaos”, that’s the bio of their social networks. In addition to Twitch, they have TikTok Instagram, Twitter. Here they record family conflicts, laughter and Tomás’ strong personality, which have landed him in some trouble with customers. “People want to see chaos, they want to see the world burning. Now if my father burns something and throws a paella on the floor, boom: a thousand viewers up,” Aaron points out in the interview with EL PAÍS.
Arroz y Desgracias, which receives bookings to eat from different parts of Spain, is a channel belonging to the ‘IRL category’ (in real life) that has managed to become one of the channels nominated for the Esland Awards, one of the main awards for the Spanish-speaking streaming community, which will be held this Sunday in Mexico City.
