From covering the FARC war in Colombia to serving coffee from the South American country in a restaurant in Penedés. Sometimes it seems that the 21st century leaves no room for the romantic lives of adventure movies, but there are people who can sometimes boast of having lived three lives in one. This is the case of Andrés Torres, the owner of Casa Nova, the Penedés restaurant that has just won the Nobel Prize for gastronomy.
There are places that have many headlines. Let’s go by parts. We are talking about Casa Nova today because of this Nobel, which is the official name of the Basque Culinary World Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in the world of gastronomy, which rewards the commitment to sustainability of chefs or restaurants, and this year it has been awarded to this five-table restaurant in the province of Barcelona that hides a story that goes around the world.
The chef who swapped war for cooking
The second great headline of Casa Nova is that its chef and owner, Andrés Torres, who runs the restaurant with his wife Sandra Pérez, was a war correspondent before he was a chef, many years ago in conflicts such as the one in Lebanon or the war with the FARC in Colombia, which put him in contact with distant cultures and harsh realities that lead us to the third headline.
After working as a correspondent, Torres, “the chef who was a war correspondent”, left to found the NGO Global Humanitaria, an NGO that works in fifteen countries and in conflict zones such as Gaza. A few weeks ago his NGO flew over the occupied Palestinian territory to drop supplies to the population. And so he became “the chef who was a war correspondent and who leads an NGO working in the Israeli-Palestinian war”.
The five-table restaurant that has won the Nobel Prize for gastronomy.
While leading the NGO, Torres, in love with cooking, ended up creating Casa Nova in the Penedés, the land where this journalist from Hospitalet used to go to eat calçots with his family when he was a child. There he found an old chicken farm with 10,000 square meters where he could put into practice all the knowledge about food sustainability that he had been learning from his previous experiences in indigenous communities in the various countries where he worked as a correspondent or with his NGO.
Thus, the 10,000 square meter farm became a restaurant of only five tables with a giant environment dedicated to sustainability. From hens to raise eggs to natural dehydrators, insect hotels, compost, Guatemalan chocolate making or a coffee roastery. Even the salt comes from the Mediterranean, 15 minutes away by car, whose water is dehydrated to obtain the seasoning.
All this at the service of a gastronomic restaurant where Torres, a self-taught cook, serves two menus (95€ and 130€) of dishes where these products become haute cuisine, also reflecting the techniques or knowledge of these same indigenous communities of the world. Torres gives as an example his potato dish, a cave food in the Quechua and Andean culture. A simple potato is coated in egg white and baked with spices to be served in a homemade smoked butter. Simplicity and product.
And with this proposal, Casa Nova has just won, a couple of days ago, the Basque Culinary World Prize, the Nobel of gastronomy, making Andrés Torres “the chef who was a war correspondent and who leads an NGO that works in the war in Israel and Palestine and who owns a five-table restaurant that has won the Nobel of gastronomy”. A rounded proposal just 40 minutes from Barcelona that is not only the gastronomic reflection of a territory like Penedés, but of the whole life of Andrés Torres, which is one of those that no longer exist.