Looking at Nature with Appetite

Hi, I have a problem for everybody that my English is a tragedy for everybody. I'm gonna tell you some nice things now. There's a couple centuries old mill and luckily it was filled with some crazy people that restored it and turned it into Aponiente, which is a restaurant that's focused on the ocean. I really don't like to say that I'm a cook. I'm more like an ocean psychopath. When I was a kid, I used to fish with my dad, all of this many, many fish. But then when we would go to the restaurant, I would ask myself, where are all the fish? There's only like this, this couple of different species on the plates. Yeah, we're in a world that has fish 90 thousand, 90 billion tons, metric tons of fish. That was in the ocean, but this year, we broke a record and now we did 96 billion metric tons inland, not in the ocean. Such a surreal world. Making fish into flour, give that to the chicken. Then with the leftover of the chicken, making some food for the fish. And then we have fish that is chicken and chicken that is fish. We're winning here. So I decided to open in Cádiz a restaurant where I would be able to serve all these different fish that no one actually really wanted to serve. I think our salvation was to be able to take all those fish that people really didn't want to eat and turn them into something that was similar to what people really wanted to eat inland. So we had this idea of making charcuterie and different sausages with fish. And thankfully, then people wouldn't start questioning what kind of fish is it. Is it cheap? Is it expensive? It didn't matter. It was just something cool. So we said like, I mean, everyone really likes pork. Let's make things that look a little bit like pork and let's look for something that looks a little bit like pork in the ocean. It feels like you're eating a newborn piglet. And that's when we started using this Moray eel to make this kind of cochinillo style dish. You would close your eyes. You would think you're eating cochinillo. And then with the skins, we were doing kind of like callos, some dish that you normally would do with veal. So it was so successful that we said like, fuck all this shit. Let's put all these animals in the ocean and the ocean in the land. And so we started cooking things that would appeal to people and then we tried to take all of this awful and inerts from the fish. We're now in a world where like people are not ready to see the whole fish. They want to just see the fillet, no gills, nothing of that. The other day I went to my son's school and I put a fish on the table and the children all just like, yelling as if they're like looking at Lucifer, you know. There's a fish called frog, you know. It's a fish that not even the seagulls will eat. But, you know, everyone knew what surimi was, but no one would think what kind of fish was in surimi. So this fish that not even the seagulls eat, we just put it with some beetroot, look like surimi, and people would be really, really happy. So after just doing so many years of trying to just serve fish that people didn't want to eat, then I think we started to look at the ocean. I mean, I didn't go to school. I just maybe finished high school and didn't go into any formal school. But starting to look at the ocean, a bit like a marine biologist, starting to look at books, starting to read all these strange words like plankton. I don't really know if you know, but we're here because of plankton. Plankton produces 60% of the oxygen on earth. So it's like extremely important. And what we did is like starting to grow, create like a farm of plankton, which for me has the purest flavor of the ocean. When we discovered plankton, we thought plankton was green. But after thinking it was just green, we discovered that we have a whole pantry in the ocean just with plankton. Right now we have maybe eight different varieties, one that tastes like saffron, one that tastes like shrimp, one that tastes like the purest flavor of the ocean mixed with some greens. So we discovered a huge array of different flavors. Aponiente is built in a town that used to be a salt producing town. There used to be many of them but now there's only two salt producing estuaries. When I talked about the salt in my town, people would get a little bit bored in these conferences. So we came up with this technique that is actually really flashy. I don't really care too much about it but like at least it gave me a space to be able to talk about the salt of my town. And then we started looking at the ocean trying to think what if we just get rid of a tradition and all the things that are in our head about like how we process different foods. We realized that the way we look at the ocean is with hunger. That we should look at every single one of the elements of the ocean with a focus of hunger. In this search with hunger, I made one of the biggest discoveries of my life. A plant that is actually a grain. A grain that looks a little bit like rice but it grows in the ocean. This grain represented a new dream. I am actually so blessed to live in my town, to have a restaurant that can serve some people. I am a billionaire in that sense. But this new discovery represented a dream for the future. To have the first grain with Omega-3 in it. We've been learning that maybe we live in a world where it doesn't really matter that a crazy guy will discover a grain in the ocean even if it only takes the movement of the salt water for it to grow. It's actually mind-blowing that at this point we are still doing this alone. No one has decided to help us. There's no government. There's no companies. There's no NGOs. We have realized over time that what we're doing is something that part of the world is scared to be in front of. And so we continued our search for different proteins also in the ocean and different grains. And we discovered this wonder. It's kind of like a soybean that grows near the water that needs the force of the ocean to grow but also needs the bees to pollinate it. The truth is I don't dare to say that I ferment when I come to Copenhagen because it's a little bit scary. But then we started fermenting this soy and the results were absolutely great. It was just interesting to see that. You know, normally you also use soy products to pair with seafood. And we're in a world that cuts trees and forests to plant soy when you can actually grow soy in the ocean and already get the qualities of the ocean with it. This is the old mill and these were the first drawings of the mill before we came into it. So the truth is Aponiente is beautiful but the most beautiful part of Aponiente is outside. Aponiente is located in this beautiful estuary that has the ocean water coming in. This estuary, we have gained the permit of these two hectares of land, or of estuary, to finally work it and grow everything live —molluscs, shellfish, and fish So that we are able to serve produce that is actually coming out of the water as a symbol of love for our guests. This is Aponiente 2026. This is where people are going to eat everything coming straight out of the water. And this is a video I want to share with you. You'll excuse me because I recorded it myself with the drone so I just want to tell you about my space. That's all going to be fish. There's going to be salt water coming in to create the ponds. There's going to be a whole estuary of sea rice and soy. This is a project and a dream of my life, to be able to finally share my nature with my guests, so you're all invited whenever you want to come. Thank you. Thank you so much.