The event aspires to become the most important in Latin American gastronomy. The activities are carried out in a hybrid way.
The second edition of Bogotá Madrid Fusion, the event that aspires to become the most important in Latin American gastronomy, began with proposals and presentations that seek to share experiences to reinvent the kitchen and the sector after the economic onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the activities -virtual and face-to-face- renowned chefs will participate like the Peruvian Gastón Acurio, owner of the Astrid y Gastón de Lima restaurant; the Spaniards Ángel León, from the Aponiente restaurant in Cádiz, and Eneko Atxa del Azurmendi in Larrabetzu; the Colombian Álvaro Clavijo from El Chato in Bogotá, or the owner of the best restaurant in Africa of 2018, Najat Kaanache.
“The hospitality industry and the world of gastronomy has been one of those that has suffered the most during the pandemic and the closures,” said the vice president of Madrid Fusión, Benjamín Lana.
For this reason, combined with a master class for cooking students and chefs, on the two days of the meeting, November 25 and 26, they will talk about products, elaborations and techniques, but also about the opportunities that are presented and about reinventing themselves.
More accessible menus and ‘online’ classes
In Gastón Acurio’s restaurant, they began serving hamburgers and ribs at home to survive the pandemic, while Kaanache put two kitchens on the terrace of his restaurant in Fez and began broadcasting cooking classes.
“Being a cook is like that, you have to reinvent yourself, to think that you cannot be a robot every day ”, says the Spanish woman, of Moroccan origin.
She had to close a year and eight months, not only the Nur restaurant, the best in Africa according to the 2018 World Luxury Awards, but the other six she had in Fez.
That prompted her to “Sell our wisdom in another way”, broadcasting over the internet “in the middle of nowhere” to all parts of the world.
Acurio, for his part, had just hired chef Jorge Muñoz to take over the kitchens of his restaurant, consolidated for an international audience as very exclusive, and they were going to start a very ambitious project, but the pandemic arrived.
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“We had focused on fulfilling that function of competing with the great restaurants of the world and that reading led us without realizing it to create a space focused on an international public to the detriment of the national public, which was moving away from the possibility of accessing these restaurants and we did not realize that “, assured the chef in a conference.
“We would never have imagined that a restaurant like ours would one day sell delivery or sell hamburgers! ”yet they did. And when they were able to open again, they decided they would not go back to before because they also needed the national public.
Acurio says they went from having tasting menus of $ 200 to about $ 25. “Curiously, the restaurant was full from day one,” he revealed.
In addition, the Bogotá Madrid Fusión aims to give relevance to foods that are not usually used in the kitchen despite the fact that they are indigenous and to local products, as well as to rescue ancestral procedures. (I)
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