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Spanish chef Ángel León visited Mexico to join his Mexican colleague Jorge Vallejo to create a four-handed menu to celebrate the eleventh anniversary of Vallejo’s restaurant Quintonil, which is ranked ninth in The World’s 50 Best Restaurant. This gastronomic day starring these two prestigious chefs was a tribute to nature, especially to water. We tell you all the details of the menu that they prepared and we explain their gastronomic proposal.
During the event, Jorge Vallejo emphasised that as it is a tribute to water as the main element, he could not have a better collaborator than Ángel León, known as the ‘chef of the sea’. The Spanish chef has made Aponiente the most sustainable restaurant in the world, according to The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, as well as being a benchmark in terms of innovation and research into the most unusual flavours of the sea, thanks to ingredients such as phytoplankton, marine honey or sea chestnuts, as Vallejo himself explained.
A seafood menu with the best of each chef
Thus, the culinary proposal designed by Ángel León and his crew included some of the dishes on the menu of Aponiente (Puerto de Santa María, Cádiz), including the jamón del mal, squid cheese, fig pickle, pure plankton or striped sea bass with bilbaína and salicornia. Nor could they miss the leg of mule from the Bay of San Ignacio and one of their star dishes, the Tarte Tatin marina.
As for Jorge Vallejo’s contribution to this seafood menu, the Mexican presented recipes such as octopus in pickled potatoes and turnips, fish chicharrón, salicornia guacamole, or grilled screw snail, pork beans and Crème Fraîche, melipona honey, passion fruit, caviar.
Of course, on the liquid side, they included quality wines such as Rodríguez de Vera, Manzanilla Pasada (Sanlúcar de Barrameda), Jerez Txomin Etxaniz, Txakoli (Basque Country, Spain, 2021), F. E. Trimbach, Clos Ste Hune (Alsace, France), 2017 Ximénez-Spínola, Pedro Ximénez (Jerez, Spain, 2019), Monte Xanic, Gran Ricardo (Valle de Guadalupe, Mexico, 2021) and R. López de Heredia, Viña Tondonia, Reserva (Rioja, Spain, 2009).
Ángel León and his innovative work
The Spanish chef also took advantage of his visit to Mexico to meet a group of women from the Comcaac village in the Mexican state of Sonora. Together with his Aponiente R&D team, led by biologist Juan Martin, they wanted to know more about these women who collect sea sostera plants and seeds in the same way as they did more than 11,000 years ago. It is a unique case in the world, as it is the only marine angiosperm that has been used as food. In spring, this Mexican locality collects the ripe fruits of the marine plant, which are similar to rice grains.
Something that for these women is a tradition, for the Aponiente team has been the learning of an ancestral knowledge that pursues the same objective: to feed ourselves better in the future with a diet based on the larder that the sea holds. During Ángel León’s visit, he was also accompanied by Jorge Vallejo himself and chef Dan Barber, from the Blue Hill restaurant in the United States.