Rodrigo De la Calle

At the age of thirty, he directs his restaurants and learns the difficulties of a chef and entrepreneur in a time of crisis. With a brilliant curriculum (Quique Dacosta, Mugaritz, Martín Berasategui), he arrived in Elche, where the most Northern palms in the world grow. Here he discovered the fascinating vegetal universe thanks to botanist Santiago Orts. He started to study the culinary possibilities of dozens of products, often unknown to chefs: finger lime, Budda’s hand, carissa, yellow anemone. Gastro-botanic was born from this passion, claiming a right to the use of less known or rare vegetal species, whose gastronomic virtues are yet unexplored, in high cuisine.

In 2008 Rodrigo de la Calle moved to Aranjuez and he soon inoculated the virus of gastro-botanic into some local farmers. Since then he works side by side with them, to obtain better asparagus, strawberries or cabbages in one of the most ancient orchards in Europe, namely that in Picotajo. De la Calle’s cuisine is, at the same time, tasty and elegant. His technical precision allows him to create polyphonic dishes through which transit unexpected yet finely placed ingredients, the heritage of Berasategui, a master of Baroque cuisine. Stubborn and perfectionist, Rodrigo firstly goes in search of balance. From the detail to the general, like in a football team.

In his compositions, vegetables represent the central axis, something which causes a constant research effort. Then there is rice, which represents the second axis of dishes in which popular technique is transformed into high cuisine, so that grains, without apparent struggle, arrive at the table with the right stoutness and at the right point of cooking for the Spanish taste. They are full of flavours and seasoned with unusual garnish such as yellow anemone, seaweed or sea anemone, to which lobsters, mushrooms or partridges juxtapose, all this with the blessing of salmorreta, a preparation made with ñora pepper.