Owning It | Rosio Sanchez

hello everyone hope you're having just as great a day as I am I'm very excited to be here to introduce you to the next speaker today it's to me a superwoman a superwoman just like Camila who we saw earlier this morning like Jessica who cooked lunch for us like Trish where you trace back there Tris I don't know if you can see me but thank you so much thank you so so much and please everyone [Applause] [Music] just do what Trish says just listen and we instantly have a better world I feel but also it jfet this morning who is started just fueling me with positive energy and just all of these people are a part of us I think it's very important to say with their with Matt and what Matt is about that it's not just someone doing something for others we are all mad everyone in here is a part of this and I think we need to take advantage of the things that we learn over these days and also use the power that it gives us to be a part of this community but your next speaker is former colleague very dear friend someone that I admire and respect probably way more than she would realize please welcome Rocio Sanchez hello okay well thank you first of all I really do want to thank the mad team in all the previous symposiums I've always been the one with the mad t-shirt running around like crazy not sleeping anything so being here on stage is something that I don't take for granted very proud very happy to be up here and share a little bit about what I've learned and how I sorry I got the wrong notes here and how I've managed to find a purpose and identity in my life and work my name is rocío Sanchez and I'm a chef here in Copenhagen I make Mexican food and it's pretty good yes in Denmark so three years ago I opened my first a kiddy on 2015 and the year after that I opened the second and early this year we opened a restaurant called Sanchez before that I worked at Noma for five years first as a head pastry chef and the last few years as a head of research one of the head of research chefs in the Test Kitchen so I have a lot of experience kind of working on the menu both for here in Denmark and in all the pop-up restaurants that we did mainly Japan and Mexico I was born in Chicago my parents met there after they emigrated from Mexico so from when a hotel in San Luis Potosi so I grew up in a Mexican family in a neighborhood called La Villita oh it's also known as little village so it's primarily Mexican immigrant neighborhood really a working-class neighborhood and that's me in a September 15th parade with a Mexican flag so yep I started cooking professionally in Chicago when I was 19 and then I quickly set my eyes to work in New York City I thought that I really should take this very seriously and I really wanted to do it I needed to go work among the best and at that time technique meant everything to me so I really sought out to work with the best and for me that was with Wylie Dufresne and Alex Stupak spent a long time there because the food that they were making was really the most interesting to me so throughout all my life I've always kind of gravitated towards challenges and kind of allowed my interest to dictate where I lived so I've been in Copenhagen now almost 10 years that's louder on my head chef she gave me a nice shot of mezcal backstage so thank you for this the truth is yeah louder the truth is I could have stayed at Noma forever I find it so inspiring I think there's always that push to do something more and challenge yourself but as with any aspiring chef you always get the question of what you should do with your life and you start asking yourself what you should do with your life but when I try to imagine the kind of food that I would be cooking I was a little confused as a teenager even as a little girl I always thought I would want to own something I always really wanted to have some sort of small shop or something I thought about but I never could really think of what that was in my early 20s I always talked about opening a mascara but that's as far as I got I worked so hard for so long trying to cook other people's food and working my butt off to execute their vision while at the same time trying to add my little tiny bit of personality into it so now I needed to hone in and focus all that energy on myself and what matters to me the problem is I wasn't sure what that meant I mean a few years ago if you would have asked me where I'm from I maybe would have get a little defensive or what do you need to know or ignore you a bit but not because you know that Renee used to call it New York attitude but but I just didn't know how to talk about myself and I didn't know what I should say about myself so as far as I was concerned I had that same old boring immigrant story you know grew up in Chicago from immigrant parents considered Mexican by the American and the American or the Mexican because it consider me American so I moved to Europe because I really wanted to get away from it all and I wanted to kind of start from scratch because I truly thrive in that fear that you get when you go into a new kitchen or when you go into new city and you feel this huge potential and I quickly found that at Noma all the burst of flavors everything that I've never tasted before the culture the work the way of working everything was new to me and it was exactly what I was looking for and this is when you were introducing wood sorrow to the world so that was fun so when I first began working on the tech ideas my creative vision was far from complete I was I was really attracted to the idea of showing my respect and appreciation for Mexican flavors growing up as a child of immigrants there is a little bit of cloud of shame that the food that we're doing is not worth paying real money for so I dreamed of making a little bit of a difference maybe in Europe because I did see it kind of a few decades behind the states and I dreamed of making a nice masa from corn from Mexico and make making some nice salsa on top with it but I still couldn't put into words why I was doing it I couldn't answer the simple question of where's home I felt at home in Mexico every time I was in Mexico my soul is fulfilled and I feel happy but my family all my immediate families in Chicago my my brother but physically I've been in Copenhagen for 10 years almost so I worked frantically my whole life and I buried those questions very deep and once we open the tack ideas I worked at that same frantic pace and last year with epic ideas up and running that's a the beach I entered into a creative partnership with Noma in Tulum and we spent a year third of the year researching in the Yucatan it was an amazing eye-opening experience and when I got back I decided that I really needed to remove all of this clutter from my head I had all these people in my ear telling me who I am and what I should be doing and up until that point I tried to listen to it all and try to find the path that satisfied the most people so when I got back I decided to start meditating to find a calmness within myself to close my eyes and find solitude and to ask myself these difficult questions without panicking to find a clarity about who I was and where I was going did I ever feel silly when I was meditating sometimes but it was only because I wasn't used to taking that time for myself or asking for that privacy I hear a little murmurs from the chefs at work if I'm gonna go off but it doesn't matter because as far as I'm concerned it's some people need caffeine some people need exercise to get through the day and I think taking care of your head is no different thank you I have a little story if you ever practice meditating you're told that you shouldn't allow yourself to be interrupted and I made a mistake the first time sitting in my apartment and my phone wasn't off and someone called me and I quickly answered it and as soon as I answered it a pain shot right to my head and I fell back on my back with my phone in my cheek the conversation super fuzzy and I was trying to kind of fade away the pain and I don't do it ever since I don't allow myself to get distracted because taking care of ourselves it's not something that we're taught to do as cooks but it's a really important lesson this symposium is all about gaps and I think this is a gap that a lot of cooks can relate to for most of our careers were taught to pursue perfection and find inspiration with somebody else's vision in mind we're taught that great cooks are dedicated people that are willing to execute what they're asked to do yes chef and that's true to a certain points but we're also told that the best chefs are the chefs that cook the food that's the most personal and it takes an incredible amount of courage and self-acceptance to break away from what you've been taught your whole life and to find something that's really new and personal that means that for most of us there's a huge gap between what we do as cooks and who we are as people I've spent the last couple of years trying to close that gap my hope is that everyone in this industry can figure out a way to make their lives a little more complete to close a gap between what they do for a living and who what they really care about in life and I'm not here to tell you you know how to get from point A to point B or how to be creative or what to do in your career or how to run your business but I want to tell you what I've learned and that is to take care of yourself to let yourself be a part of the process if I had to compare it I'd say it's like being in beta mode even though the results may be scary you have to trust that no matter how many times you fail you'll be able to get back up maybe you'll open up a restaurant and it closes and maybe you open up five and you close them all or maybe you open up at Acadia and it closes the truth is if it's worth it's worth it if it's it's getting closer to finding what's important to you there's not going to be one moment of clarity where you'll know exactly what you should do it's not going to fall in your lap I can think of so many well-respected chefs chefs people that we admire who are in this room and they're still trying to figure it out they're still trying to figure out how to define themselves how to define their food still searching for that way for me I've traveled the world trying to figure it out and I've been away from home for almost a decade but it wasn't until I actually shut down and closed my eyes and asked myself these questions that I can really find any answers 10 years ago or 20 years ago if you would have asked that Chicana girl from the south side of Chicago if she ever would have had the confidence to open a Mexican inspired restaurant in Europe I think the answer would have been very different today not only am I sure about the food that we're cooking but I believe in its value to the city I now call home it takes work meditating and stopping to concentrate on tough questions working to put into words what you who you are and what it represents these are the aspects of cooking you don't really think about but it's very very apparent in the food that you serve for me it's worked out that my identity comes from my heritage my family's from Mexico and now I'm trying to focus in on those flavors but with my experiences of them but that's not the case for everyone your identity can come from anywhere my points is that it won't come naturally I've only been working on this for maybe a year meditation has really improved my form of communication we've still got a lot of work to do but we're definitely trying to fly in the plane as it's been built and I can't stress how important it is to accept and take care of yourself it's important for your development your team and your business this process has helped me push toward what matters to me which is my staff whom I consider family this city and my community around the world I feel there's a purpose to what we're making now today at the restaurant I think that people can really feel the pride and emotion in our food and it's not authentic Mexican food it's not Nordic or fusion if we still use that word it's food that reflects the experiences of my team and I Mexico's culinary culture is incredible there's a great taco culture in Chicago where I'm from there's an amazing one in LA that we all know of and now funny enough a little teeny tiny one in Copenhagen and it's pretty [ __ ] crazy what can happen when people can just accept themselves and say it's going to be different and it's going to be fine so allow yourself to be in the beta mode put in the work to find yourself and own it [Applause]