Hong Kong (AFP) – Arepas, tacos, ceviche and chimichurri. From the center of Hong Kong, Ricardo Chaneton offers in his Mono restaurant a trip to the varied and colorful Latin American cuisine that has earned him the first Michelin star for a Venezuelan chef.
It is a long journey for that “bad eater” boy who fell in love with cooking when he started working in a pizzeria and trained in Spain and France before succeeding 16,000 kilometers from his native Caracas.
He assumes it with pride and “a very nice weight of responsibility on his shoulders.” “On that side of the world everyone is watching us. The fact of being the first Venezuelan to have a Michelin star makes people look at you”assures the 34-year-old chef in an interview with AFP.
“But I have to tell you not to worry, because we are representing our continent and our country in the best way we can, which is by cooking it, sharing it with a lot of nostalgia and a lot of memory,” he adds.
This exercise in nostalgia manifests itself just by entering the intimate premises, with just 30 covers, flavored with palo santo before each service.
From the open kitchen, the sweet accents of Spanish from a large part of the team escape, mixing with the music from the vinyl collection that the chef, a skilled interpreter of the Venezuelan cuatro, received as a gift from his father before opening Mono.
The bar and shelves are decorated with typical products from Latin America such as nopal, yucca, corn or cocoa brought from Ecuador, which they themselves ferment to make chocolate.
And on one wall there is a collage by an artist friend of his that represents Caracas and the El Ávila hill with cut-out bolívar bills.
“We don’t want to make a 100% traditional cuisine, but our perception and our way of interpreting nostalgia and taste memories and our families”, says Chaneton.
Latin with a French touch
Opened in December 2019, Mono had already earned regional recognition. In 2021 it entered the magazine’s 50 Best Asia list Restaurant, the first Latin American venue to achieve this on this continent. And in the 2022 edition, published this week, it climbed from position 44 to 32.
And that at the beginning, Chaneton doubted if a Latin restaurant would fit in the Far East and cataloged his Mono as “contemporary French”, the gastronomic culture with which he fell in love with the Argentine chef Mauro Colagreco in his prestigious Mirazur, in the south of France.
But “within the first month of opening, people were already calling us Latin American, which is what we wanted.”
“That French element will always be there, but I was born in Venezuela, of a Colombian grandmother and an Argentine grandfather, and that’s where I put my sauce.”
In his dishes he mixes Racan pigeon from France with chimichurri and jicama, lobster from Brittany with four different elaborations of corn or morels and foie-gras with a 21-ingredient mole.
Nor does he forget the flavors of the Latin American streets, reinterpreting arepas, tacos or hallacas, which are served especially at Christmas as a mark of Venezuelan tradition.
“The most beautiful thing about the Mono is that it is a window in Asia to the refined Latin American gastronomy”, he affirms. “If I had won that star doing French cuisine, I wouldn’t have had the same weight.”
Go back to Venezuela?
Restrictions in Hong Kong due to a deadly wave of coronavirus have somewhat dampened his party. The same day in January that she learned about his star by phone, the local government imposed the closure of the interior of restaurants from 6:00 p.m.
Now the cases are going down and, in principle, on April 21 it will be able to offer dinners again. “We had that sweet and sour on the same day,” admits Chaneton, who doesn’t see “The time to return to having a service at night with a Michelin star.”
Nor does he see the time to return to Venezuela, the country he left 14 years ago with a suitcase in hand to do a three-month internship at the restaurant of Spanish chef Quique Dacosta, who was fighting for his third star.
The three months turned into a year and the return plane ticket was a train ticket to the French Riviera, to the Mirazur de Colagreco, recognized in 2019 as the best restaurant in the world but which, for Ricardo, will always be “his home”. ”.
“14 years ago I left Venezuela, it’s been 12 (that) I haven’t been. I have quite a few people who have written to me to go cook, to rediscover my country, I really want to go back. Now, to stay, I don’t know (…) But never say never.” (I)
Source: Eluniverso
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