Gastón Acurio, Andorra Taste Award

It was for this, and much more besides, that he took today's Andorra Taste Award.

Alongside Andorra's minister of Tourism and Telecommunications, Jordi Torres, and the deputy president of the Escaldes-Engordany "comú", Rosa Gili, the head of Vocento's Gastronomy division, Benjamín Lana, handed over the award from the second International High-Mountain Gastronomy Congress, presented last year to renowned French chef Michel Bras. “I found out who Gastón Acurio was more than a decade ago during a trip to Lima, watching the faces of local "papa" potato producers coming down from the Andes, and the fishermen at Villa María market proudly selling their best produce to someone who was changing their lives", recalled Benjamín Lana, in praise of the transformative vision that has always been a feature of the man earning the tribute.

Gastón Acurio has indeed put Peru on the worldwide gastronomy stage, and he has done so most of all out of his love for cookery, which has been with him since he was a child. “I always felt it was a fascinating world; cooking means sharing, giving out joy. A restaurant is not just a business - it's a place where we have the ability to make people happy, providing experiences they can remember", he declared. 

But he is also a great enthusiast of his own country and the products it offers, its popular cookery and small-scale restauranteurs, whom he urges not to lose sight of their identity, and to elevate their feelings of a community. “We were always proud of our cooking in Peru, but they made us believe that food imported from Europe or the US was better, and forced us to export our raw materials to be processed there", he complains. And then, along with other pioneer promotion associates, he launched any initiatives he could to "build a collective sentiment based on the idea that our cuisine is the heritage of everyone that can delight the world, turn it into a universal product and the generator of opportunities and wealth", he explains. 

Finally, Gastón also confesses his love for his profession, and feels "confused by the idea that, in this new information society, people prefer to eat, but they don't want to cook. I realise it may be a post-pandemic reaction, but we must adapt to the new reality and find a way of persuading young people that cooking isn't a waste of time and that it actually means gaining time, because they will find that it's a most pleasurable activity, an essential experience producing sensations, emotions and memories", he concluded.