It's my second time in Cape Town, and I must have said I have a nice restaurant here.
I ate Mali food, beautiful curries, nice Portuguese cuisine, but one of the most
important souvenirs for a traveler, it's flavors. Everything that we find
inspires us. We never know until that last moment the exact recipe that we are
gonna make. In Cook-It-Raw it is an inside, so you must be inspired by one
ingredient, but it's just one single dish that each chef prepares. In the
restaurant business it's another thing. We prepare tasty menu, so creativity for me
is not do something that nobody has did before, it's do something that you know
in a surprisingly way. Old ideas can be much more clever, intelligent, and modern
than new ideas. Creative for a chef is not do something that nobody did before,
it's do something surprising, and surprisingly it's do something that you
know and you don't know that you know. I think creativity is organic,
spontaneous, lots of intuition, based in our background, in our experience before.
If I tell you, soy sauce, ginger, seaweed, your mind goes to Japan. If I said tomato,
basil, mozzarella, your mind goes to Italy. It's possible to resume one
entire culture in three flavors. I made this in Amazonas.
Local herbs, manioc, water, lemon juice. It's enough, it's Amazonas. One of the
most famous word in the world, it's Coca-Cola. As famous as Coca-Cola, maybe it's Amazonas.
Everybody has an image, nobody knows the flavor. But Amazonas bad things happen in
their deforestation, they burn our forest. So I try to bring this idea from this
dish.
I really believe that being a chef, cooking every day can be an amazing
support for environmental conservation. The human relation with food must be
reviewed. One of the main problems that we have nowadays is feed seven
billions. Nowadays we produce food for 20 billions already. How two opposite
opinions can be right in the same moment? It's so simple. Waste. We throw away
lots of good food. Buy one entire fish and use whole entire fish, including the
skin and the scales. It's much more than be sustainable, it's be respectful.
Of course the best part of the fish is the meat. But with the bones and with the
skin we can make a beautiful stock and very lots of gelatin on it. So this
balance between use all the whole complete animal and use all this part
and give new sensations and layers of flavor of the same way. This is so
simple, so beautiful and very respectful with the nature. Our relation with food
must be reviewed. Use one entire animal. It's something that we must learn. People
used to buy lots of good food and make one single dish. It's time to review. It's
time to think about our relation with ingredients. This dish is
ants with pineapple. Raw, frozen, and frozen. Lightly frozen pineapple. I didn't
make anything. I just put both together. This is respect. We must review our
our relation with food. It is an individual and cotidian and a small
attitude that can change and help lots of people.
you
