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María Álvarez is the co-founder, along with Isaac Martínez, of the publisher Novo, the very first publishing house dedicated to gastronomy in Mexico. Maria and Isaac started Novo in 2023 because they saw a lack in the types of books being published about Mexican cuisine, both in Mexico and abroad. The wanted to be a publisher that is more collaborative with other disciplines, more like a milpa. Rather than just a monoculture of corn, they wanted a multicropped garden of designers, photographers and other professionals to help support the vision of the author. In this interview she explains how she moved from the world of art publishing into culinary publishing and is helping shape a community around these niche books about food in Mexico, as well as through their podcast series, Radio Milpa.
Novo now has published two books. The first is Cocina de Oaxaca, by Alejandro Ruiz, published last year. Ruiz is the chef of Casa Oaxaca, who is one of the godfathers of modern Oaxacan cooking and has helped teach in a generation of cooks at his restaurant Casa Oaxaca. They also just released Estado de Hongos, a book about mushrooms in central Mexico by the Mexican Japanese forager by Nanae Watabe. She supplies mushrooms to lots of the best restaurants in the DF and is at the intersection of all things mushrooms in Mexico and the book reflects that. This October, they will be publishing La República Democrática del Cerdo, by Pedro Reyes, who you might know from the Taco Chronicles on Netflix. You can order them online or find them in bookstores in Mexico, as well as buy some of the books on Amazon in the U.S. or at incredible culinary bookstores like Kitchen Arts & Letters in New York and Now Serving in Los Angeles.
This world of publishing culinary books in Latin America is really beginning to open up and I couldn’t be happier. I think a healthy publishing environment is one where a lot of different voices and aesthetics are being developed and not just that of a few large international publishers. In the interview we discuss how important the very language being used in a culinary book can be.
Read more at New Worlder. -
A lot of chefs say they want to preserve landscapes, but Rodrigo Pacheco of Bocavaldivia in Puerto Cayo on the coast of Ecuador at is actually doing it. He is literally acquiring land and re-wilding it, in the hopes of turning it into the world’s largest biodiverse edible forest.
I first met the guy about 10 years ago at a conference in Quito. At the time, all the contemporary Ecuadorian chefs were trying to get international attention and get on lists and get famous. Then there was Rodrigo, who could care less about those things. It was still early on this project on a remote beach, but he was already talking about connecting with nature and utilizing biodiversity. He seemed totally out of place. It was still early in the life of Bocavaldivia. The 100 hectares of land he bought, a former pepper farm, was heavily degraded. Much of the surrounding tropical dry forest was cut down. There was little wildlife there. But in a decade, he has turned it into a thriving landscape, which, through the accrual of new land, now reaches up to the cloud forest. I was there earlier in the year and I saw it with my own eyes. He now uses more than 150 different edible plants from this landscape throughout the year on his menu.
While the heart of Bocavaldivia is a restaurant, where he and his team cook from a rustic wood fired kitchen adapted from native ones, and serve tasting menus alongside nice wines, to call it just a restaurant would be lacking. The experience there involves a journey. Many hours before eating you start to experience the landscape. You traverse them by fishing in the sea and tasting termites off a stick and hiking through the trees. You connect with it before you sit down and eat. And when you do sit down, there isn’t some long, drawn out explanation of what you are eating, because you’ve lived it.
Lots of other projects that spin out from Bocavaldivia. He has a restaurant in Quito called Foresta. He was on the Netflix cooking show The Final Table. He has created a mini-documentary series with indigenous leaders. He is a Goodwill Ambassador in Ecuador at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. He started a foundation. He says because he lives in the middle of nowhere that he has a lot of extra time on his hands that most other chefs don’t. It’s funny how the less busy you are sometimes the more you can get done. I’m still trying to figure out how that works. -
Saknas det avsnitt?
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Lisa Abend is a Copenhagen, Denmark based writer that covers food, travel and all sorts of other topics for publications like Time Magazine, The New York Times and Fool, among others. She is the head of communications for the Copenhagen based non-profit Mad and the author of the 2011 book The Sorcerer's Apprentices: A Season in the Kitchen at Ferran Adrià's elBulli, where she spent a season at the restaurant documenting its team of stagieres and what else goes on behind the kitchen walls. She is one of the most respected voices in the world of gastronomy and it was a real pleasure to be able to speak with her.
Recently, Lisa launched the Substack newsletter The Unplugged Traveler where she posts about going to destinations in Europe that she has never been before and, totally without any research prior to the trip, experiences them completely offline. That means no looking at her phone or the internet for recommendations or planning. For the most recent post her brother said she should go to Zadar, so she booked a flight there and went without even knowing what country it was in. It’s unlike any travel writing being done anywhere else and there isn’t a better moment for it. Travel, has lost much of its meaning since the advent of the smart phone. Everything is booked in advance. We seem to know everything about a destination before we get there and go armed with lists of recommendations on where to eat and drink and what to do and see. There is no room for surprise or discomfort of any sort. The same stories are being written repeatedly, which is leading to overwhelming swells of tourists in certain cities. We are seeing a backlash to that. Aside of limiting tourists from a destination, what can you do? One thing is to get back to the essence of travel and go to places where you can experience something new, some place where you can have your own experience. I didn’t ask her this but I hope she turns this project into a book one day.
Lisa lived in Spain when El Bulli was still around, then moved to Copenhagen and got to see Noma’s rise. For a little while, she had another newsletter with some other Copenhagen based writers called Bord, which told in depth stories about the restaurant industry in that city, such as kitchen abuses and stagiares. Anyway, she has watched as those two restaurants, one right after the other, propelled by the oversized influence of The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, have changed the conversation around fine dining and cuisine as a whole. We discuss if that will happen again. What will the next big thing be? Maybe it isn’t a fine dining restaurant. Maybe it’s not even a restaurant.
Read more and find a transcript at New Worlder. -
Gabriela Perdomo is the owner of the tortillería and restaurant El Comalote in Antigua, Guatemala. More than just a place to buy tortillas and eat delicious things with corn masa, the almost entirely female run El Comalote is a project that is helping resurrect the links between criollo corn and consumers in urban parts of Guatemala. Like in Mexico, as well as other neighboring countries, the majority of tortillas consumed are from industrial corn. Gaby explains how the technique of making tortillas by hand remains dominant in the country, the choice of corn has changed drastically. There has been a shift away from the more difficult to grow native varieties towards the varieties that all look the same, grow extremely fast and produce massive quantities. However, these are less nutritious and often need pesticides and other chemicals to survive.
Since El Comalote opened in 2021, they have helped open the eyes of urban consumers and chefs in the country to the flavor of heirloom corn. I’ve been there a couple of times now and tasting these thick, brightly colored tortillas – red, green, orange, blue, black – shows how perfect of a food a great tortilla can be. You really don’t need much else. They also make other masa derived foods like tamales, cambrayes, chicha, chuchitos. and more. What’s important from this interview is to understand how Gaby has been able to do this. More than just getting the very best corn and paying them the highest price, she has listened to the indigenous farmers and their communities that she works with to try to understand their needs and concerns.
Read more at New Worlder. -
Richard McColl is a British Canadian journalist, podcaster and hotel owner based in Bogotá and Mompós, Colombia. I’ve known Richard for at least a decade. I first knew of him from his work as a fellow foreign correspondent covering subjects all around Latin America, writing for international publications. In 2013, we met in person when I was writing for a story about Mompós for The New York Times. It’s one of my favorite stories I ever written for The Times because Mompós is such a special place. It’s this stunning 500-year-old colonial city on an island in the Magdalena River that was once a major port but was then mostly forgotten as that part of the river stilted up and war cut it off from society. It’s a strange, kind of mystical place with so much history and so many stories and quirky characters. It’s a place that was a big inspiration for Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel Prize winning author and you can feel the imagery from his books everywhere there. Richard’s wife has family there and he was enchanted by it and ended up buying two of these colonial houses, which he turned into small hotels, La Casa Amarilla and San Rafael. We talk a lot about Mompós and its ghosts and how it’s much easier to reach than when I went there and had to take a 10-hour ride in a truck from Cartagena.
While I was in Mompós he asked me if I wanted to be on a podcast he just launched, called Colombia Calling, where he interviews all kinds of subjects about Colombia, in English. This was in 2013, and it was probably one of the original podcasts anywhere in Latin America, and honestly, I hadn’t even listened to a podcast at that time. It’s still going and has now recorded more than 500 episodes. Juli was on a recent episode and they talk a lot about Colombian food and it’s a great listen.
Richard also runs the Latin News Podcast and he recently started a small publishing company. They are books in English, about Colombia, and includes titles such as Better than Cocaine: Learning to grow coffee, and live, in Colombia, by the writer Barry Max Wills, and Richard has two books forthcoming, a general guide to politics, history and culture called Colombia at a Crossroads, and The Mompós Project, about his life in that incredible place and the stories he has gathered and witnessed. Anyway, it was great to catch up with Richard after all these years. -
Pablo Díaz is the chef and owner of the restaurants Mercado 24 and Dora La Tostadora in Guatemala City, Guatemala. His restaurants have never been about tasting menus or getting rankings but serving good food using the best ingredients at fairly reasonable prices. He has been one of the driving forces in Guatemala’s modern culinary movement, helping small farmers and artisan fishermen connect with restaurants in the city in a fair way, while also changing the perception of diners of the quality of local ingredients.
I first met Pablo in 2018 in Guate. It was my first time back in the country in years and it was just a quick stopover for a few days and it opened my eyes to how much was going on there at every level, from street food and markets to fine dining restaurants. I went with Diego Telles of the wonderful fine dining restaurant Flor de Lis on an intense whirlwind tour around the city and there was one very unlikely restaurant that stood out called Dora La Tostadora. It was a tostada shop, set in an old shoe store. I ended up writing about it for The New York Times and it was maybe one of my favorite restaurant stories I ever wrote there.
There were just a couple of sidewalk seats and a sort of thrown together interior. “Inside the former shoe store are just a few wooden tables and a two-stool counter that’s lined with a dozen or so bottles of different hot sauces,” I wrote. “The décor has a haphazard, thrown-together feel: Christmas lights, a poster of the ruins of Tikal on the wall, a cartoon cutout of Dora the Explorer, the tiny restaurant’s namesake.”
The restaurant began as a pop-up months before while his market driven restaurant Mercado 24 was in the process of moving locations and his staff still needed a job. I absolutely love tostadas, maybe even more than tacos, and these were some of the best I ever had. They had the absolutely right combination and proportions of proteins like fish and beef tongue with different herbs, oils and spices on a crispy tortilla. They moved to a larger location, and more recently into an even larger location, but it began with such a simple idea that makes so much sense, as does Mercado 24. Pablo’s restaurants are creative and cool, but they aren’t flashy. There are no tasting menus and he’s not doing what he does for international appeal. He has been doing it for his community and after 10 years you can see the impact it has had.
READ MORE AT NEW WORLDER. -
Matthias Ingelmann is the bar manager of Kol Mezcaleria and Kol Restaurant in London England. Matthias is German born and has worked in a lot of great bars around Europe, but once he started drinking mezcal he went down the rabbit hole with agave spirits, as many of us do. He has now built one of the UK's largest mezcal collections at Kol Mezcaleria and is continually expanding that collection as Kol expands. They just announced another restaurant with a cocktail heavy menu, called Fonda, which will open later in the year.
Like at Kol the restaurant, there is a strict policy of only importing a few basic ingredients like corn, chocolate and dried chiles. So there are no limes to use in cocktails. No grapefruit juice for palomas. He talks about how he started importing verjus, unfermented grape juice, as one of the ingredients to provide the acidity in some drinks. And how he uses seasonal herbs like pineapple weed to bring tropical flavors into the bar. We also talk about Kol’s partnership with the Sin Gusano project in Mexico, which is allowing them to work directly with several small producers for their own line of 6 different agave spirits from different parts of Mexico, to be used in the bar and sold at the bar nut not commercially.
There is a lot going on with mezcal as it becomes more mainstream that you, the consumer, should be aware about. Commercial brands are coming in and locking small distillers into contracts, they are monocropping espadin all over Oaxaca and they are putting pressure to try to produce more and more mezcal in unsustainable ways. It’s not at tequila levels yet. There are no Kardashians selling mezcal. At the rate mezcal is increasing in popularity we are not that far off. That’s why it’s extremely important if you are a bartender to buy mezcal from sources that champion small producers and educate your clientele.
Read more at New Worlder. -
Nando Chang was born in Chiclayo, Peru and is the chef of Itamae AO, a Nikkei restaurant in Miami, Florida. It is the reincarnation of Itamae, the beloved Nikkei restaurant that began as a family food hall stall and later restaurant in Miami’s Design District. Nando’s sister, Valerie Chang, who I interviewed on this podcast more than a year ago, opened Maty’s, a Peruvian restaurant in Midtown Miami in 2023, and it has gone on to be nominated for pretty much every major media award for U.S. restaurants since then. The plan from the beginning, however, was to install a more intimate version of Itamae in an adjacent space.
The new Itamae, Itamae AO, is tasting menu only. Nando talks about why he won’t call it an omakase, his thoughts about fish butchery, and how he got into fish aging, but also how he understands its limitations. We also discuss Nando’s rap career, which included an album called Ceviche, with a track titled Sushi Chef, and how it’s still very much a part of his life. He talks about how he was influenced by other chefs cooking Nikkei food, such as Llama Inn and Llama San’s Erik Ramirez in New York, and getting to know Maido’s Mitsuharu Tsumura in Lima and how it helped him confirm many of his views about Nikkei food and where it is going.
I have probably said this before but there’s often this idea of Nikkei food when it gets exported abroad that it is just ceviche and sushi on a menu together. That’s a very limited view of this style of cooking, which, to me, is much more about freedom than limitations. The Chang family, who are Chinese-Peruvian by the way, have understood this very well since they started opening restaurants in Miami. Nando talks a lot about not just doing what everyone else is doing, but doing things that make sense to him. I think it’s a good example to follow for other Peruvian chefs, or any chef trying to find their voice in the kitchen.
READ MORE AT NEW WORLDER. -
Today we are speaking with Mariana Poo, the commercial director of Traspatio Maya and its counterpart Taller Maya, and Luciely Cahum Mejía, a beekeeper, vegetable producer and promoter from the Mayan community of Granada, Maxcanú, who also works with Traspatio Maya.
Traspatio Maya, which is part of the larger Haciendas del Mundo Maya Foundation, is an organization based in Mexico’s Yucatán that works with 32 rural indigenous communities and is dedicated to supporting the production of sustainable culinary products harvested in artisanal ways under fair conditions while rescuing ancestral Mayan techniques and improving global production practices. It’s an incredible group that has really changed the gastronomic conversation in the Yucatán and you can see how these women are now driving the conversation around food in the region.I first heard of Traspatio Maya while I was in Merida last year. There was a panel that Mariana was a part of during the regional food festival Sabores de Yucatan, which was partnering with the Best Chef Awards. Everyone else on the panel was a chef, fairly famous ones, that were talking about their stories of working with rural and indigenous producers. At one point, Ferran Adrià, the famous chef of El Bulli and one of the most influential culinary figures in the world without question, who happened to be in the audience, asked to speak and was given the microphone. For the next 20 minutes he rambled on about technology and the future of the global food supply, mostly dismissing the work everyone on the stage was doing. The chefs on the stage just nodded, not wanting to debate this iconic figure, but Mariana pushed back. I was moved by it. In my mind it was like the statue of the Fearless Girl standing in front of the statue of the Charging Bull on Wall Street (note: I’m just referring to this instance. I’ve met Ferran Adrià prior to this and he seems like a decent guy). She stood up for herself and the women she works with, and she did it with love and respect. It was such a perfect example how to move a conversation forward. It’s something I need to remind myself sometimes. You’ll hear Mariana’s response to what she was thinking during this, and also why what she was saying was important.
Mariana also tells us about how important working with the restaurant community has been. She explains how Noma Mexico, Noma’s 2017 pop-up in Tulum, allowed them to broaden their focus and how sending surplus produce to restaurants has been an important source of revenue.This is the first bilingual podcast we have had. Traspatio Maya always tries to include the women they work with in everything they do. I saw Luciely on stage with Jordi Roca at the Best Chef Awards, which you will hear about. In the interview you will hear some Spanish, though it is followed by an English translation so please be patient.
Read more at New Worlder. -
Juan Luis Martínez is the chef of the restaurant Mérito in Lima, Peru. Juan Luis was born in Venezuela but has been living abroad and working in restaurants in Spain and Peru for many years. He opened Mérito in 2018 after working at Central for several years. It’s this narrow, two-level space in the Barranco neighborhood, with lots of minimalist wood and adobe walls. You see the kitchen right upon entering and there are a few seats there, plus more upstairs. The food is colorful, creative and really, really delicious. Is it Venezuelan? Is it Peruvian? It’s kind of both but also neither at the same time. It’s a restaurant cannot easily be boxed in, and I think that’s the beauty of it. More recently he opened DeMo, a café and bakery, which recently moved into a larger location a few blocks from Mérito, which has an attached pizzeria called Indio. And late last year he opened another restaurant, called Clon, which is an even more relaxed version of Mérito.
I was recently a voter in Food & Wine’s Global Tastemakers awards and when the results were in I was a bit surprised that of all of the restaurants in the world, Mérito in Lima was the one more of these voters ate better at in the last year than any other. For these awards, Mérito was named the best restaurant in the world. I was surprised, to be honest. Not because they didn’t deserve it, but because the restaurant is so unpretentious. I think some people had the impression I had something to do with Mérito getting that ranking because I wrote an accompanying story about it for Food & Wine, but other than being a voter I really didn’t. I don’t have that kind of pull. Thanks for thinking I do though. Juan Luis, and his wife Michelle, who is a designer and whose work has left its own stamp on the restaurants as well, have managed to get a lot of attention, both locally and internationally, for these restaurants. 50 Best. Best Chef Awards. Whatever it is they are probably on it. Yet, they have done it by almost doing the total opposite of what most other restaurants that have received similar amounts of attention have done. They aren’t loud or flashy. The investments in the restaurants have never been lavish or in high profile locations. They aren’t on social media non-stop or flying around to conferences every week. They have just focused on creating good, creative food, in comfortable spaces at reasonable prices with great service. And everyone loves them. I send people there all the time and I cannot say I’ve ever heard someone disliking their experience at Mérito. They just happened to have created a really great restaurant. It’s really that straightforward.
So, what is Mérito? Is it a prototype of Venezuelan food fusing with Peruvian food? There are a lot of overlap of ingredients in the two countries, at least overlap in kinds of ingredients if not the exact ingredients, especially in the Amazon and parts of the Andes. Plus, Lima has a history of absorbing whatever culture comes into town. There are more than a million Venezuelans that have moved to the city over the past decade, a phenomenon that’s happening throughout the region because of the instability in Venezuela. There’s no doubt that Venezuelan diaspora is having a major impact on food in the region, and that’s a story I have been watching closely for years. I’m not entirely sure where Mérito fits into all of that. I think it’s just one kitchen’s evolving understanding of flavor, memory, place and art. It’s not forced or trying to define itself. It just is. And it’s wonderful.
Find out more at New Worlder. -
Pietra Possamai is the winemaker at Bodega Murga in the Pisco Valley of Peru. Born in Brazil, she has led the winemaking operations at Bodega Murga, which also distills pisco, since the beginning, in 2019. Her 32 different labels of natural wines using only six of the eight grapes that are used in pisco production. These criolla varieties are mostly unexplored in winemaking, so the possible combinations of what they can be coerced from them is full of potential. Pietra experiments with skin contact, early harvests, co-fermentations, and aging in amphora. She makes Pét-nat, blends and single varietal wines using these grapes. The results have been pretty incredible. She is making wines that could only be made in Peru. They are appearing at all of the best restaurants in Lima and a few of her wines, like the orange Sophia L’Orange, are appearing on some wine lists in the U.S., Europe and Dubai. She is helping change the wine culture in Lima, which had been quite stale in my opinion.
I wrote a story a year ago about Peru’s wine awakening. It’s quite exciting for me to watch. Even though Peru has the deepest history of viticulture in the Americas, the wine has only become something to write about in the last five years or so. Pepe Moquillaza kind of kicked off the movement, making natural wines from Quebranta and Albilla grapes, and now all sorts of wines are coming out of the woodwork, and most are utilizing criolla grapes. I went to visit Murga’s vineyards last year and they are quite special. In the interview we talk a little about the Joyas de Murga vineyard, it’s short trek from the bodega, but it’s completely encircled by towering sand dunes. It got its nickname from the hoyas of the Canary Islands, vines circled by stone walls. If you have a chance, check Pietra’s wines from Bodega Murga, and just Peruvian wine in general. It’s entered into a new era and it can finally co-exist alongside Peruvian food, which, let’s face it, is a high bar.
Read more at New Worlder. -
Niklas Ekstedt is the owner of the Michelin starred restaurant Ekstedt in Stockholm, Sweden. It’s a restaurant that was designed around live fire cooking, but it started doing this when it opened in late 2011, well before this was a trend. He had spent years working in modern kitchens, everything from Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago to El Bulli in Spain, and he opened a very successful restaurant focused on molecular food when he was just 21. When New Nordic cuisine started to take off and he began to think about how he could be a part of it in a way that made sense to him, he started to think about Nordic techniques. The older ones. He started to research 18th century cookbooks to understand the way Swedes used to eat. It was closer to the way he grew up in the northern part of Sweden, where foraging was a way of life and his parents would buy meat from Sami herders. I was at Ekstedt more than a decade ago and what I assumed would be something of a gimmick – a modern restaurant with just a wood stove, fire pit and wood fired oven that was without gas or electricity in the kitchen – was anything but. The food was smart and honest, the pure expression of the ingredients. It was one of the highlights of a trip that included meals at Relae and Fäviken.
Ekstedt has been open for 13 years now, so any novelty of this restaurant has worn off. Many others have followed in its path. Niklas has even opened another version of the restaurant in London too.I think there is something important in thinking about the way we used to eat, wherever we are in the world. The last couple of centuries have truly disconnected us from where our food comes from and how we eat it, and we are paying the price. Our food is less nutritious, it often lacks flavor and its pumped full of all kinds of chemicals that are tearing our bodies and environments apart. We all need to peel back those layers and see what was going on a couple of centuries ago. I don’t mean to limit that to restaurant settings, but in our homes as well. We also talk a bit about how the restaurant industry is changing. Pre-pandemic, chefs used to take themselves very seriously. Kitchens were more like war zones than places of work. Not to say all is fine, but I think there is a sense that things are moving in a more positive direction.
Read more at New Worlder. -
Andrea Moscoso-Weise, the restaurant manager and beverage director of the restaurant Gustu in La Paz, Bolivia. Born in the highland town of Cochabamba, Moscoso was trained as a sociologist, and during the pandemic created a digital platform there called De Raíz, which connected artisan producers of vegetables, wine, beer and other foods with the public. Later, after a meal at Gustu, having never worked in a restaurant before, she dropped what she was doing and decided to move to La Paz for an internship at the restaurant. When her internship was up and she was about to return to Cochabamba, she was offered a job at the restaurant and she has been there ever since.
In our discussion, we talk a lot about wine. Bolivia has a burgeoning wine scene. You may have heard our interview with Jardin Oculto’s Nayan Gowda, but Bolivia has some incredible wines, especially the ones coming from old vines and criolla varieties. The sommeliers of Gustu have been one of my primary means of being introduced to new Bolivian wines since the restaurant opened. First it was Jonas Andersen, who now actually runs a wine shop called Folkways beside the train station in Croton Falls north of New York City and its wonderful. I went there the other day actually and it’s by far my favorite area wine shop, plus they do nationwide deliveries if you need a a good natural wine purveyor. Then there was Bertil Tøttenborg, who now lives in Brazil. And now Andrea is there and it’s a really exciting moment, so there was lots to talk about her.
We also talk about this pull this particular restaurant has on people. I’ve been going there since Gustu has opened and I have felt it every time I have been there. It has a way of taking someone in and bringing out the best in them. If you ask anyone that has ever worked there will probably tell you that. We spoke with chef Marsia Taha about it in an earlier interview. The restaurant has such a purity in what they are trying to do, in a way that is hopeful and real. And what they do is far more than just a restaurant, but have inspired culinary and human development in Bolivia in everything the long arms of gastronomy touches, and that’s a lot of places.
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Jaime Duque (no relation to co-host Juliana Duque by the way) is the founder of Catación Pública, a brand of specialty coffeeshops, roasters and educational centers in Bogota and Quindio, Colombia. Throughout his career, Jaime has worked every part in the value chain of Colombian coffee. He started his work in the fields, as an agricultural engineer, working with farmers to fine tune their process to attain higher levels of quality. He has worked to encourage more specialty growers and for more coffee to be roasted and consumed inside the country. He has become leading coffee educator in Colombia and Catación Pública offers a wide variety of workshops and certifications that are sought out by those in the coffee industry throughout the region.
In the interview, we discuss how, even as the rest of the world had been exposed for half a century to the general quality and story of Colombian coffee through the emblematic and imaginary future of Juan Valdez, it has only been until recently that you have been able to actually drink good coffee in Colombia. When I first went to the country, in 2005, most of what you find was tinto, these little cups of coffee loaded with sugar to offset the low quality. All the good stuff was exported. Tinto is still around, but there has been a gradual transition towards a more dynamic coffee culture in the country. Today you see specialty coffeeshops like Catación Pública all over Colombia. There are world class baristas and roasters, and the growers can actually see how their coffee is being consumed, which gives them additional insight into how they should grow it. We also talk about why he thinks fermentation processes like carbonic maceration will remain niche, while cold brew still has enormous growth potential.
Find out more at New Worlder. -
Cyrus Tabrizi is the founder of Caspian Monarque, a producer and distributor of fine Iranian caviar. I first met Cyrus last year when we happened to be seated together at a dinner in Udine, Italy during an event called Ein Prosit. After spending a few minutes with him, I began to realize how little I actually understand about caviar and where it comes from. I know it’s considered a luxury product. That caviar is usually expensive. That Russians are known to eat a lot of it. That suddenly millennials are putting it on fried chicken and tater tots. But if you asked me what distinguishes good caviar from great caviar, I couldn’t tell you.The world of caviar has changed dramatically since 2008 when a global ban on caviar from wild sturgeon was enacted by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species after sturgeon were being severely overfished. Now, nearly all of the world’s caviar comes from farmed sturgeon. There are 26 different types of sturgeon and each kind produces unique tasting roe, but the conditions in which each are being raised can vary drastically. The most coveted caviar comes from the Beluga, followed by the Ossetra, sturgeons, which are originally from the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Farmed caviar, however, is coming from anywhere now. There are hundreds of farms all over the world. There’s lots of caviar being farm raised in the United States. It’s being raised in Uruguay. A ton of it is being raised in China. Much of it is not Ossetra and Beluga, but from other species. There is also fish roe from other kinds of fish, such lumpfish, flying fish or even salmon, that are called caviar, though technically they do not fit the definition.
I tried Cyrus’ caviar in Italy and it is indeed the great stuff. That much I know. He explains why Caspian Monarque stands out, in his words. They are a sustainably minded sturgeon farm in the Caspian Sea, the origin of the finest grades of caviar. As they are being farmed within the Caspian Sea, the natural environment they are from, eating the same food they eat in the wild, they can get the highest quality caviar. However, I cannot even get his caviar, Iranian caviar, in the United States because of a ban on Iranian products in the U.S. He explains why that is and how Iranian caviar industry has a history of legal issues despite being historically sustainable and well managed. That’s why he started the business. He was a lawyer and he liked the challenge.The caviar industry is one ripe with fraud. There are scandalous producers and misleading labels, though there are ways to know if you are getting caviar from a good source. On Caspian Monarque’s website they actually have a way to check the origin of a tin of caviar by the CITES number on the label, and it’s not just for their caviar, but any legally traded variety. For the most part, it’s up to the consumer to know the difference and understand what they are buying. We talk about how blockchain might be used in the future to help make caviar even more transparent. Who knew there was so much to know about caviar?
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Andrea Petrini, or Andy as I know him was born in Italy but has lived for many years in Lyon, France. He is a writer, author and founder of Gelinaz!, an always evolving culinary performance concept that aims to push the boundaries of culinary art.
I was first exposed to Gelinaz! in 2013, during one of the initial events in Lima, Peru. It was a 22-course, 8-hour dinner beside a Pre-Columbian pyramid with some of the world’s best known chefs where all of them made some variation of octopus and potatoes. It was wild and debaucherous, to say the least. I wrote about the experience for the website Roads & Kingdoms, and the story quickly went viral. After that I had the opportunity on many occasions to get to know Andy. I was involved in various Gelinaz! performances during the Gelinaz! Shuffle, where I helped chefs like Ana Roš and Niko Romito behind the scenes when they had to cook meals at Boragó in Chile and Central in Peru, respectively. I was also a part of several other Gelinaz! events in New York and elsewhere in one form or another. I’ve had the opportunity to travel and dine with Andy on many occasions. A couple of years ago I was on a television show with the chef Victoria Blamey that Andy was hosting about Emilia Romagna for Discovery Plus in Italy, where I got to experience his driving skills and lived to tell about it.
Andy is one of my all-time favorite people and I think he wildly misunderstood sometimes. What he stands for has always been, at least in my eyes, is pushing gastronomy to break free of its shackles. To take chefs out of their comfort zone and do something creative. To strive for art and love and soul. It doesn’t always work out that way, as you will hear him explain, but I’m grateful there is someone out there like him that keeps pushing, because its needed more now than ever. For the past year he has been working to help restaurants collaborate with different musicians, to rethink the relationship between food and music. Different events will be occurring throughout the year, so follow Gelinaz! on Instagram to find out more.
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Melissa Guerra is an author and food writer that lives on a working cattle ranch the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas near the Mexican border. She is someone I have wanted to have on since this podcast started, but the timing never quite aligned. I have known Melissa for more than a decade and she has been doing incredible work writing about the foodways of southern Texas. She used to have a PBS show called the Texas Provincial Kitchen, received a James Beard nomination for her book Wild Horse Desert: Norteño Cuisine of South Texas and also wrote a series about her life on the border for New Worlder in 2017. Today she has a blog called Kitchen Wrangler where she writes recipes inspired by her surrounding landscape, as well as a YouTube channel.
Melissa’s family has been living in the region since the 1700s, long before Texas was a part of the United States. She sees the food of Texas and the U.S,. rather than divided by a political border, but united by ancient trade routes and modern culture. During the interview we talk about the influence of mesquite in the region’s food, how watering holes were the foundation for human habitation there, what real Tex-Mex cooking is and the migrant crisis and how the people in the borderlands view it, rather than through vapid political gestures by politicians.
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Introducing the Colombia-born author, writer & editor as our new co-host.
Today’s episode is an introduction to Juliana Duque as the New Worlder podcast’s new co-host. Juliana, or Juli as I tend to call her, was born in Colombia and now lives in Los Angeles. She is the author of the book Sabor de Casa and is a writer, editor, consultant, producer and many other things. She has a Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology from Cornell University and for many years has been very involved in various development projects that relate to Colombian and Latin American gastronomy.
Juliana is someone that understands the magnitude and vastness of cuisine in Latin America, but also that gastronomy in the region is still very much developing. When I say developing I don’t mean commercially or that there are more fine dining restaurants yet to come, I mean the infrastructure to connect rural producers with consumers, to maintain foodways, preserve agricultural and cultural diversity and give people access to nutritious food that doesn’t destroy landscapes and give them terrible diseases.
When I started this podcast a couple of years ago, I really had no idea what I was doing. I still don’t to some extent. It was still the middle of the pandemic and I just started to have conversations with people and record them. I have learned a lot from the people I have had on. A lot of interesting things have been said that I think you won’t hear anywhere else. Maybe you are thinking this podcast is already perfect. That I’m perfect. That’s obviously not true and I’m actually quite bad in general at conversation, as you may have noticed. I think I’m a very good listener and creating an atmosphere that lets the guest’s guard down and allows them to open up, however, I often struggle with asking the right questions. Juli and I have very different backgrounds. Her work is generally more analytical, while mine is more about storytelling, so for this podcast I think we complement each other well. It's a new year, so this is as good a time as any to take this show in a new direction. I hope you enjoy what is yet to come.
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Sebastian La Rocca, who is the Argentina-born chef at the restaurant FYR in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio. It’s a Latin American live fire restaurant that opened inside of a new Hilton Columbus Downtown Hotel right on High Street in the middle of the city in late 2022. I have known Sebastian for years from his work in Costa Rica, where he ran the restaurant at the El Mangroove Hotel in Guanacaste, and then opened up an open fire restaurant called Botanika outside of San José, which was one of New Worlder’s Best New Restaurants when it opened. When he told me he was moving to Columbus I was completely surprised, but I immediately thought that it was one of the smartest decisions any chef I’ve ever met has made. I can tell just from my interactions with him over the past year that he is happier. He went to cook in a city that appreciates what he can do and not to win awards and recognition, though he is getting it anyway. It was a decision to move his family there so they could live a happier life. So many young chefs tell me they want to open in New York or somewhere because it is their dream. Really, that’s your dream as a cook? Shouldn’t it be to make good food that people enjoy and provides you a comfortable life? That can be New York or San Francisco or London or Tokyo, but it doesn’t have to be. You can cook from anywhere. There are cities like Columbus everywhere. Why not open in Trujillo, Peru instead of Lima? Or Manaus instead of Sao Paulo? Every cook I know that’s moved outside the centralized media market, outside of the industry bubble and found their place has been a thousand times happier and they are cooking better food for it. Fyr, Sebastian’s restaurant, has been getting great reviews in local media and he has been bringing a lot of prominent Latin American chefs to Ohio to cook at the restaurant, such as Costa Rica’s Pablo Bonilla and Panama’s Mario Castrellón. It’s kind of weird. These are guys I know from Latin America an have written about a lot that are suddenly in Columbus. It’s kind of two worlds colliding for me.
I grew up here and went to college here. It’s basically all I knew until I was in my 20s. I’ve talked a lot on this podcast about growing up completely disconnected from where the food I ate was coming from. On the episode with Farmer Lee Jones, who runs Chef’s Garden in northern Ohio, I talk about how there weren’t any farms around. There were just corn and soy fields you drove past on the highway. And all of the restaurants were chains and concepts. I started writing about food in Ohio when I was 19, I think, and it wasn’t really until then that I started questioning things. A culinary movement was just beginning there then, with Jeni’s, now a well-known ice cream purveyor, opening in the North Market. There were a handful of fine dining restaurants that were being vocal about supporting local farms, and after I left it just kept kind of evolving. There are really great restaurants there now, both at the high and low end. My old neighborhood is full of Nepalese, Mexican and Salvadoran restaurants, and there has been a lot influence from North Africa and Southeast Asia elsewhere in the city. There are still too many concept restaurants for my taste, but there are more restaurants that are created organically and have creative food with good ingredients and nice drinks to balance it out. It’s a very different place from where I grew up and it’s because of people like Sebastian moving there and bringing new ideas.
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Mariano Carranza is a Lima, Peru born Emmy award nominated documentary filmmaker that lives in Brooklyn, New York. You may have seen some of his work, such as the Miami episode of the Netflix series Street Food, which he directed, or some of the mini-docs he made for Vice and CNN’s Great Big Story. His latest film is called Pachacútec, The Improbable School, which recently had its premier at the San Sebastián International Film Festival’s Culinary Zinema section, organized with the Basque Culinary Center. The film is about three students that trained at Fundación Pachacútec, a culinary school in the desert hills of Ventanilla outside of Lima, Peru and where their lives have led since enrolling. The school was built with the help of chef Gastón Acurio and is said to get 350 applications every six months, though can only admit 25 people per semester. Over the last 20 years it has had more than 400 graduates and many of those graduates have gone on to accomplish incredible things. It’s a great culinary film that hopefully everyone will get to watch very soon. Find out more about Mariano’s work at his website.
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