At the Madrid Open tennis tournament last month, Ernesto Soriano, a bald veteran with a wild gray beard, a tattooed torso and a belly protruding under his match-day whites, mesmerized salivating fans with precise forehand slices.
“These tennis players don’t have the arm you’ve got,” said Jacinto Medina, holding two glasses of red wine in one hand as he reached for a plate of cured ham perfectly cut by Mr. Soriano. The executive was among hundreds of V.I.P.s on a long line in a dining area behind the center court stadium, where Mr. Soriano’s ham-carving station was the star attraction.
“Yeah,” Mr. Soriano, 53, responded with a smile as his knife flashed through a leg of cured ham from the 2020 vintage. “My serve is probably stronger.”
Mr. Soriano is the top-ranked cutter for Joselito, one of Spain’s oldest and arguably most prestigious producers of jamón ibérico — cured ham rendered from a special breed of acorn-fed black pigs. For him, the Madrid Open marked a major career moment and a challenge. The company’s previous top cutter had failed to recover from a ham-related elbow injury after last year’s open, and Mr. Soriano had slid into the top spot.
In addition to his high-pressure aperitivo hour carving obligations, he had to manage a large team tasked with cutting and plating more than a dozen ham legs, each weighing nearly 20 pounds, to help feed thousands of guests through hectic afternoon and night shifts.
“All the responsibility is mine,” he said, adding that he would also have to work the dining rooms to explain the pig’s upbringing and the ham’s tasting notes to the assembled high rollers. “The nerves are already starting.”
The history of jamón is entwined with the history of the Spanish peninsula. Food historians say it has been thus since the ancients began salt-curing pork thousands of years ago. “It can improve any dish,” said María José Sevilla, a Spanish gastronomy expert and jamón enthusiast.
They also point to how ham was used during the Reconquest, the medieval military campaigns to capture the peninsula’s Muslim-ruled territories, and then during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition, when Catholic leaders sought to punish, among other victims, people who had publicly converted to Christianity but privately remained loyal to their original faith. In some cases, historians say, ham was used to identify Muslims and Jews whose religions forbid digging on swine.
“Christianity was associated with eating pork,” Ms. Sevilla said. Even last month a Spanish soccer team official chased the club’s Muslim players around the field with a leg of jamón. The official apologized amid a backlash, and Ms. Sevilla insisted that ham’s days as a Christianity litmus test were long over.
As jamón has become perhaps even more critical to Spain’s sense of itself, and its export economy, top carvers like Mr. Soriano have grown in prominence. In recent years, a jamón-cutting station has become a fixture at high society events. Nowadays, a wedding is judged, Mr. Soriano said only half-jokingly, less by the sanctity of the union than on the state of the ham.
“They don’t pay as much attention to the bride and groom,” Mr. Soriano noted, adding that the number of weddings he and his team worked had exploded in recent years. That morning, a Joselito sales manager said, the company had closed a deal for six hams to be carved at a single baby’s christening.
In 2024, Mr. Soriano was selected to carve an 18-year-old Joselito ham, priced at more than $70,000, for an event at the Prado museum. In 2025, at the Casa Batlló in Barcelona, Mr. Soriano wept as he sliced through a 20-year-old vintage bursting with umami flavor that his company said was worth roughly $94,000, he recalled.
“I got emotional,” he said.
Mr. Soriano, an easygoing guy who often stressed the need for teamwork, projects humility. He said what drives his success is passion for pork, rather than personal ambition.
Jamón “is the star,” he said. He shrugged with indifference at the mention of the world jamón-carving championship, which this year was won by a heartthrob with gelled hair who, in contrast with Mr. Soriano, moves dramatically around the jamón as if it were his flamenco partner.
Mr. Soriano preferred to talk about how a carver should elicit flavor from a leg, drawing out differences in texture and complexity from the fat.
He began learning the way of the ham knife nearly 40 years ago as a 15-year-old high school dropout at a deli in his family’s working-class area of Madrid. For the first month or so, he had to machine cut mortadella. “They don’t let you touch a ham,” he said. But the boss saw that the young apprentice, as Mr. Soriano put it, “was dying to carve.” Then skinny, Mr. Soriano struggled to cut the heavy ham as he held it against his chest, as tradition dictated. “It used to hurt,” he said.
He moved on to other delis and supermarkets, studying what went into a great ham. He trained under a master who deboned hams in little more than a minute with crescent knives so close to his own belly that Mr. Soriano thought the maestro would disembowel himself.
Along the way, he met his wife, who was a supermarket cashier, had a son and a daughter and invested in better knives. When he landed a gig cutting at a swank event in downtown Madrid, he was nearly turned away. “He looked like a Hell’s Angel,” said Jorge Dávila, who ran the event and helped connect Mr. Soriano to Joselito.
Over the next 11 years, Mr. Soriano rose up the Joselito ranks. His boss, José Gómez, whose family has owned Joselito for six generations, said that in addition to knowing his way around a ham, Mr. Soriano “knew how to behave” with exclusive clients.
Mr. Gómez wore a cap to the open that read “Jamón” and a red lapel pin displaying a pig’s nose. He, like Mr. Soriano, spoke of ham with reverence. He explained that, “like water,” cured ham could be consumed “in every moment of the day” and that the company had set up a lab to better understand the conditions for making prime ham. They had compiled the information into a database called Pig Data. “The name,” he said, “was mine.”
As Jannik Sinner, the world’s top tennis player, got ready to take center court, Mr. Soriano also suited up. Wearing red Joselito-sponsored shoes reserved for the company’s top talent, the carver went to rally his troops.
“A ham gets finished, we clean another!” he said, preparing the group for a day of nonstop hustle. “Let’s do this!”
Soon after, he joined his team in a corner of a vast kitchen. As he unloaded heavy hams out of cardboard boxes, he listed the toll that carving had taken.
“Three hernias,” he said. “I have a bad elbow, a bad shoulder, my back.” But his form had improved with age, he said, something he tried to impart to the protégés around him. “Don’t force your posture,” he said, checking his watch and fastening the black hoof of a pork leg into the vice of a ham stand. “Get comfortable,” he said.
He unrolled his knife bag and revealed a torturer’s smorgasbord of blades, some worn to a needle after 15 years of slicing and sharpening.
“These right now,” he said, “are for war.”
He began removing the dark rind of the ham as if stripping bark from a tree, and then slid a blade through a glistening layer of fat as if it were warm butter. He then went to put on his ironed white chef’s jacket. Shortly before 1 p.m., he stood in ready position before the Joselito stand, waiting for the doors to open. When they did, hundreds of pass-holders burst in, seemingly all hungry for ham.
For the next hour, he sliced furiously.
“I try not to lift my head so I don’t see the line,” he said.
When only bones rested on the table, he offered an apologetic shrug to a latecomer. Mr. Soriano rolled up his knives and walked back to the lockers to put on a suit jacket to schmooze the high rollers in the dining rooms. He didn’t seem thrilled about it.
“I’m more into carving,” he said.
Carlos Barragán contributed reporting.
