Leonor Espinosa: the art of turning biodiversity into world-class cuisine

The only Colombian woman to have held the title of World's Best Female Chef enrolled twice at the School of Fine Arts and never studied gastronomy. So it's no surprise that her cuisine is so close to contemporary art, a culinary performance with installation-like features. Going for the first time to Leo, the restaurant that this redhead from Sucre founded in Bogotá 20 years ago, is a moving experience. An eight- or twelve-course tasting menu, which changes three times a year, may feature arawanas, pianguas, mojojoyes, seje, and cacay, among many other “promising biological species for cooking,” as she calls them, as well as quail, buffalo, and guinea pig. It is difficult to predict that a proposal called “Ciclo-Biomas-Restaurar” (Cycle-Biomes-Restore), which talks about ethnobotany and uses so many ingredients unknown in cities, would be so satisfying to the taste buds and the intellect. "What I do is curate, seeking to capture the beauty of Colombian ecosystems through cuisine. It's not just about telling the story of the ingredients, used in a sustainable way, but about revealing the natural and cultural fabric from which they come. And it's very visual: my artist's eye turns beauty into a reflection on the need to love and care for what we recognize as beautiful," explains Leonor Espinosa (Cartago, Valle, 62). None of her Colombian colleagues have a track record like hers. In addition to being named the world's number one chef between 2022 and 2023, according to The World's 50 Best Restaurants, in March she received an award from the Terrae International Congress of Rural Gastronomy in Gran Canaria (Spain) for raising awareness of indigenous and Afro communities. Last year, she became the second woman to receive a Sferic Award, which recognizes scientific innovation in cooking, and in the latest edition of The Best Chef, she once again received three knives, the highest rating. Such distinctions contrast with her late and almost fortuitous arrival in the world of cooking. After a bohemian adolescence, during which she recreated the center of Cartagena in her sketchbook and immersed herself in the popular culture of fried foods, sweets, guarapo, boxing, baseball, and champeta dance halls and therapy, she tried her hand at industrial engineering and studied economics. She became pregnant and married at the age of 22, separated, left her daughter in the care of her grandparents, and moved to Bogotá. She wanted to take on the world. Tired of the lack of variety in the restaurants of La Candelaria, where she lived, she dusted off the culinary memories she had collected as a child in Sucre, alongside her grandmother, and began to cook. It was the era of Nuevo Latino and the rise of Asian flavors. She invited friends over to prepare recipes and began to notice that people liked her cooking. While reading, experimenting, and refining his technique through trial and error, sometimes under the tutelage of Cartagena chef Estrella de los Ríos, he became obsessed with Thai cuisine. “It was a process of intuitive discovery rather than formal learning,” he recalls. "I didn't study cooking. I came to it after being a visual artist and economist, as an almost organic consequence of my way of thinking about the world. What motivated me was the possibility of creating something of my own. For me, cooking is a language and a way of thinking, because I didn't come to it looking for recipes, but for meaning." He made his debut in the restaurant business at the age of 35, in Barranquilla, where he set up a Thai food restaurant. Faced with his family's rejection, he broke down. She then sold simple dishes at a roadside restaurant in Baranoa, until she got tired of the owners not paying her. She lived for a time in Sabanilla, a fishing village, and decided to return to Cartagena. In La Heroica, she ran the kitchen at Quinta Galería, an exhibition hall with a restaurant, and returned to the Fine Arts. She was almost 40 years old. At that time, she took the video performance Intríngulis to the National Artists' Salon, in which she entered a porn cinema disguised as a man. Her daughter was about to finish school. It was “time to choose between art and cooking,” as she recalls in her book Lo que cuenta el caldero (What the Cauldron Tells). Convinced that as a chef she would be more likely to earn enough money to pay for Laura's college education, she decided to “make it an art form.” Back in the capital, she took a job as head chef at Claroscuro. She then helped create the menu at Matiz, which made her famous on the Bogotá scene. She was offered a partnership, but she had other plans. In June 2005, she opened Leo Cocina y Cava in an alley between the bullring and the National Museum, outside the trendy areas. She rigorously prepared traditional dishes, such as posta negra and Kola Román ice cream, and enriched them with a very aesthetic presentation and impeccable service. In the midst of the Colombian culinary revolution promoted by experts such as the late gastronome Lácydes Moreno and Scottish critic Kendon MacDonald, Espinosa understood that offering a world-class experience required in-depth knowledge of national products and how communities prepare them. And that meant traveling a lot. With colleagues from Cali, such as Catalina Vélez and Carlos Yanguas, he delved into Pacific cuisine. His first journey was to Chocó, with the then first lady, Lina Moreno, who became his patron. Именно она пригласила ее приготовить ужин для тогдашних принца и принцессы Астурийских, Фелипе и Летиции, которые попробовали карпаччо из улиток с маслом инчи (амазонский арахис) и вареную курицу с кокосовым молоком, а также другие деликатесы. В этих путешествиях она сформировала свой гастрономический дискурс, а ее знания сложились в целостную концепцию. «Из визуального искусства я научилась наблюдать, компоновать, ценить ремесло и детали. Экономика дала мне структуру для понимания систем, которые поддерживают культуру питания, а также социальную динамику, производство и территорию, стоящую за каждым ингредиентом», — размышляет она. Во время путешествия по Амазонке она пришла к открытию: биоразнообразие станет основой ее работы. В ее ресторане, переехавшем в 2021 году в Чапинеро-Альто и переименованном просто в Leo, инновации больше не будут заключаться в переосмыслении традиционных блюд, а в создании маленьких произведений искусства, заставляющих задуматься о природном и культурном богатстве Колумбии. Это будет касаться и напитков, в области которых его дочь продолжила начатую им революцию, создав вермуты, ферментированные напитки, гидролаты и медовуху местного производства. Что касается территорий, то инновации, примененные к биоразнообразию, должны были привести к развитию. С этой целью в 2008 году он создал Фонд Лео Эспиноса (Funleo) в Баия Купика, первом месте назначения его «географических погружений». С помощью этой платформы он заключил сотни торговых соглашений между мелкими производителями и ресторанами Боготы, организовал более 140 творческих семинаров, направленных на улучшение питания уязвимых сообществ, и продвигал гастрономическое наследие страны. В 2017 году Funleo удостоился престижной награды Basque Culinary World Prize, учрежденной для поваров, которые делают свое ремесло двигателем преобразований. Жюри, возглавляемое знаменитым Джоном Рокой, заявило, что оно стремится «наградить тех, кто работает над сближением сельской местности и города через гастрономию, демонстрируя возможности, которые возникают, когда повара признают важность биоразнообразия и наследия местных сообществ». «Международное признание укрепилось в тот момент, когда мир начал обращать внимание на Латинскую Америку в поисках аутентичности. И к тому моменту у нас уже был сформированный голос», — говорит Эспиноса. «Я создал нарратив, основанный на биокультуре, понимая ингредиент как носитель смысла, а территорию — как живой организм, который можно интерпретировать. Чтобы открыть этот путь, пришлось пойти на риск и разорвать с клише. Но было также очень приятно видеть, как этот взгляд нашел отклик как внутри страны, так и за ее пределами, как новый способ понять, кто мы есть».