What’s next for the hospitality world? A selection of the world’s top culinary figures – including Rasmus Kofoed, Laura Hernández-Espinosa and Jordi Roca – will share their ideas and innovation to energise gastronomy at #50BestTalks: Refresh! on Monday 19th June. Meet the speakers and find out how you can tune in to the event taking place in Valencia as part of The World’s 50 Best Restaurants 2023, sponsored by S.Pellegrino & Acqua Panna
In a year hailed by many as the true post-pandemic rebirth, 50 Best’s long-standing thought-leadership forum #50BestTalks tackles the theme Refresh! With the industry’s proverbial windows fully reopened, a breath of fresh air courses through the gastronomic scene. Restaurants are dusting off their concepts, reassessing their past and contributing novel ideas to an industry in constant revolution. The time is ripe to look into the mirror with honesty and find new ways forward.
On Monday 19th June, some of the world’s leading minds in hospitality will meet at Valencia’s Zeus Base One, on the city’s Mediterranean harbour, to exchange their refreshing ideas. The gastronomic industry’s greatest strength has long been its ability to provide food that isn’t only delicious, but also that speaks of the times – and now it is setting its sights on a new culinary era.
Before you tune in to the livestream of #50BestTalks: Refresh! on June 19 at 12:00 Central European Time and join in the conversation with the hashtag #50BestTalks, meet the speakers who will be taking the stage…
Rasmus Kofoed
One half of the duo behind Copenhagen’s Geranium, the current World’s Best Restaurant that will be inducted into the Best of the Best hall of fame in June, Rasmus Kofoed is a reference for cooks all over the world. The Dane is famously the only chef to have won bronze, silver and gold medals at the Bocuse d’Or cooking competition, proving that his commitment to the craft is second to none. Inspired by a childhood spent immersed in nature, at Geranium Kofoed takes diners on a culinary discovery of his homeland seasoned with constant innovation; only last year, he decided to take meat off the menu, focusing solely on local seafood and vegetables from organic and biodynamic farms in Denmark and Scandinavia.
Laura Hernández-Espinosa
The daughter of 2022 World’s Best Female Chef Leonor Espinosa, Laura Hernández-Espinosa is an essential part of what makes Bogotá restaurant Leo one of the most admired in Latin America. As well as being the restaurant’s sommelier, since 2021 Hernández-Espinosa is also leading her own, more casual venue on top of the flagship in the form of bar-restaurant La Sala de Laura. Working hand-in-hand with Colombian indigenous communities and producers, she has developed a line of seven distillates representing the country’s diversity – called Territorio – which are gaining global popularity. Hernández-Espinosa also heads up FunLeo alongside her mother, a non-profit organisation that protects and promotes ancestral food cultures in Colombia, as well as their ingredients and recipes.
Jordi Roca & Alejandra Rivas
The youngest of Spain’s most celebrated culinary siblings – the Roca brothers of El Celler de Can Roca fame – Jordi Roca leads the award-winning restaurant’s pastry offer as well as several other sweet projects, such as Casa Cacao – a chocolate atelier and boutique hotel in Girona – and Rocambolesc, a series of high-end ice cream shops spanning Girona, Barcelona and Madrid, which he manages alongside his wife and fellow pastry chef, Alejandra Rivas. Roca’s legendary desserts showcase his unbridled creativity, irreverence and fascination with the pastry world, which were explored in Netflix’s 2018 Chef’s Table episode dedicated to him. Roca earned the title of The World’s Best Pastry Chef in 2014, while El Celler de Can Roca was named No.1 in The World’s 50 Best Restaurants twice, in 2013 and 2015.
Nora Fitzgerald Belahcen
Nora Fitzgerald Belahcen is the founder of Amal, a Marrakech-based social enterprise that empowers disadvantaged women through the medium of hospitality. Fitzgerald Belahcen, who has American heritage but was born and raised in Morocco, opened the first Amal Centre in 2013 to train Arab women facing hardship in culinary skills. Today the project has turned into a successful restaurant and catering business, with 30 students graduating every eight months. Fitzgerald Belahcen also created the Sign Language Café, located within a Marrakech language school, which employs and gives visibility to deaf women while serving over 4,000 students.
Ángel León
Chef Ángel León is the creator of Aponiente, the restaurant on Spain’s Bay of Cádiz that earned the Flor de Caña Sustainable Restaurant Award in 2022. After studying gastronomy in Spain and France, he discovered his calling while working on fishing trawlers in his hometown, where he saw that 30 to 40 per cent of the catch was thrown away each day. At Aponiente, he turns the products discarded by commercial fishing boats into gastronomic pieces of art, from marine charcuterie to seafood cheese. A keen researcher as well as a talented chef, León is a firm believer that the answer to global food shortages could be growing in the sea while the world is looking elsewhere. He is constantly on the hunt to ‘look at nature with hunger’ in order to find new solutions to age-old problems.
Follow the livestream of #50BestTalks: Refresh! on Monday 19th June from 12:00 on the 50 Best Restaurants TV YouTube channel.
The 21st edition of The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, sponsored by S.Pellegrino & Acqua Panna, will be announced on 20th June 2023 in Valencia. Tune in to the livestream of the awards ceremony on YouTube or Facebook from 20:40 local time. To stay up to date with the latest news and announcements ahead of the ceremony, browse the website, join the community on Instagram, find us on Facebook, visit us on Twitter and subscribe to our YouTube channel.
