On Assignment for the FT: Inside Mallorca's Celler Renaissance

Published in FT Weekend, April 2026 · Photography by Ana Lui

There are assignments that feel like work, and then there are the ones that feel like a gift. Photographing the story of Celler Tonet in Inca for the Financial Times was firmly the latter.

The brief was to document the opening of a newly reimagined celler - one of Mallorca’s most storied and quietly disappearing restaurant traditions. These barrel-lined, stone-floored taverns have been the backbone of the island’s culinary identity for centuries, and yet one by one, they’ve been closing.

When restaurateur Maria Solivellas - the woman behind the beloved Ca na Toneta in Caimari - stepped in to breathe new life into the old Ca’n Marron space, the island’s food world took notice. So did the FT.

I’ve lived and worked in Mallorca long enough to know that Inca rarely makes it onto the visitor’s radar.
Most people drive straight through on their way somewhere else. But on a bright spring morning, walking through its winding medieval streets with Maria as my guide, I was reminded why I never tire of this island. Baroque parish churches, Renaissance mansions, a covered market still busy with locals and threading through it all, the faint smell of old wood and wine.

The celler itself stopped me in my tracks the moment I walked in.
Maria and her team had stripped the place back to its bones: off with the thick brown varnish on the furniture, out with the accumulated decorative clutter of decades. What remained was something luminous and honest.
As a photographer, moments like this are everything. You’re not constructing a scene - you’re simply finding the light that was already there.

The food, when it arrived, was a revelation. Maria’s cooking at Celler Tonet doesn’t pretend the last 50 years didn’t happen - but it never forgets what came before. Mallorcan purple carrots with fennel. Line-caught squid with sobrassada. Raoles of chard and spinach, wobbly and delicate where tradition made them stodgy. Each dish was an act of remembering, not just preserving.

I photographed Maria in the kitchen, the sommelier at her wine taps (yes, bag-in-box - but sourced from the island’s finest small bodegas, so hear her out), the ceramics by Joan Pere Catala Roig, the ensaimada served with vanilla ice cream and almonds. Every corner of that room had a story.

This is one of the things I love most about editorial travel photography.
It takes you deeper into places you thought you already knew. Mallorca is my home, but it keeps revealing itself.

The full story by Paul Richardson is published in FT Weekend (April 10, 2026). I’m enormously proud to have my photography accompany it. You can read it here.

If you’re working on an editorial travel or interiors project and are looking for a photographer based in the Balearics, I’d love to hear from you. Get in touch at ana@analuiphotography.com