Bogotá Madrid Fusión gives voice to a generation of chefs who proudly recover ancestral ingredients and techniques
When the most decorated chef in Colombia, instead of taking the stage of a congress to talk about her achievements, directs the focus towards an indigenous cook, something is moving in the haute cuisine scene. Leonor Espinosa set an example by handing over the leading role in Bogotá Madrid Fusión to Dominga Estrada, “a wise grower, cook and ruler” of the Zenú community, but she is by no means the only one who looks to the ancestral wisdom of pre-Hispanic peoples to nurture your gastronomic proposal. People like Marsia Taha, John Zárate, Jeferson García, Carmen Ángel, Jaime Torregrosa, Juan Ruano, Catalina Vélez or Álvaro Clavijo, to name just a few, demonstrate with their testimonies that the future of haute cuisine in the Southern Cone lies in celebrating the heritage of their ancestors.
The presentation by Leo Espinosa and his daughter, partner and sommelier, Laura Hernández, was one of the most anticipated in this third edition of the gastronomic summit that has brought together twenty international chefs in Bogotá and rising values of Colombian cuisine among on Friday and Saturday. Through a ‘performance’ that mixed traditional music, poetry, cooking and anthropology, the country’s biggest culinary star -best cook in the world in 2022, Basque Culinary World Prize in 2017, for more than a decade among the best restaurants on the planet according to 50Best…- brought indigenous ingredients and techniques that had been cornered by the dominant culture to a global audience, to give them the place they deserve in the Colombian gastronomic imaginary.
His way of approaching gastronomic creativity has created a school, according to the numerous examples shown by Latin American chefs throughout the congress. Today who more who less makes inspirational trips, tries to establish contact with indigenous communities, investigates the properties of the native pantry and dives into ancestral recipes to build their own haute cuisine proposals.
“In search of inspiration”
The Bolivian Marshia Taha serves alligator meat, chuño cider or sausages made from native tubers in Gustu, her restaurant in La Paz, the result of her forays around the country supported by biologists, ethnobotanists or anthropologists The Mexican Santiago Lastra told how, before After designing the proposal by Londoner Kol, he embarked on a journey through his homeland: “35 days, 10 states and dozens of meetings with indigenous communities or visits to markets in search of inspiration.” Carmen Ángel, from the XO restaurant, in Medellín, bases her creative process on absorbing the wisdom of native farmers and fishermen to later translate it into one of the different business projects that she leads together with Rob Pevitts.
The examples are so abundant that there is not space to list them all. Catalina Vélez, chef, teacher, and television star, promotes the use of native seeds for value to local farmers. Jaime Torregrosa, from the Colombian Humo Negro, applies oriental, Nordic or European techniques learned abroad to native products such as pirarucú, chontaduro, chipi chipi, carantanta or mambe. Just like Jefferson García, whose Oda restaurant is an idem “to products, traditions and regions of Colombia” designed from intense field work. Quitu Culinary Identity, Juan Sebastián Pérez’s restaurant in the Ecuadorian capital, is not called that by chance.
Whether this phenomenon responds to a wave of identity pride that will mark the definitive takeoff of Latin American haute cuisine or remains a mere exercise in cultural appropriation is a debate that the profession should address in the coming years. At the moment what seems clear is that the foreign has ceased to be the model to follow. As the Galician Javier Olleros recommended: “We cooks have to forget about the glamor that surrounds this trade and look at what we have inside.”
Both Olleros and Ricard Camarena, who served as mutual assistants in their respective presentations, have shown that putting themselves at the service of the territory and not the other way around is much more nutritious. The chef from El Culler de Pau presented a battery of proposals that appear simple but very deep, based on products as humble as onion, pepper or turnip greens. Camarena, for his part, improvised his from what he had found these days in the Paloquemao market, the great pantry of the Colombian capital, which has lived with enthusiasm the landing of chefs such as Rasmus Munk, Andreas Krolik, Victoria Blamey or Fatmata Binta in what is called to be the great gastronomic summit of Latin America.
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