Acclaimed Colombian chef with a passion for social change

From the jungles to the deserts, Leonor Espinosa, the newly crowned best chef alive, draws inspiration from Colombia’s vast biodiversity, painful history and often-neglected traditional communities.

As well as being a chef, she is also an activist who has traveled to all corners of her homeland to study indigenous cuisine and give a voice to people who feel abandoned in areas ravaged by poverty and decades of violence.

“My cooking tastes of exiled cultures, of forgotten regions, it tastes of ancestral techniques, of smoke… of pain,” the 59-year-old told AFP in Bogota after being voted the world’s top chef 2022 by the jury selects the 50 best restaurants in the world.

“It also tastes like joy, like plantains, like cassava, like earth like rain, like a desert ecosystem. There’s a lot of poetry in my cooking.”

In naming Espinosa as the winner, the jury of the top 50 described her as a “multi-talented Colombian chef who combines art, politics and gastronomy”.

At her Leo restaurant in central Bogota, she added: “She has forged a unique, intellectual and profound cooking style that sets her apart from her contemporaries, while at the same time trying to use gastronomy as a tool for socio-economic development. “

Born in Cartago in the southwest of the country, Espinosa grew up in Cartagena on the Caribbean coast and taught himself to cook.

She studied economics and art and worked in advertising before taking the leap into the kitchen at the age of 35.

In 2017 she was named the best chef in Latin America.

To give her restaurant its signature local and farmer-inspired menu, she criss-crossed Colombia to document its culinary history.

She has incorporated many traditional ingredients into her repertoire – everything from exotic fruits and tubers from the Andes to ants and larvae, traditions from the bush served to five-star palates in the city.

Espinosa’s exploration and upgrading agenda has often taken them to parts of the country badly damaged by Colombia’s nearly 60-year civil war.

Much of this work is done through her Funleo Foundation, established in 2008 and awarded the Basque Culinary World Prize nine years later for promoting the gastronomic traditions of Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities.

“The award shines a light on those communities that have struggled for years to be recognized for their inherent value and contribution to national cultural identity,” Espinosa said at the time.

“It’s a way to mitigate the silence caused by armed conflict, injustice and exclusion.”

Sporting her nose rings and coy smile, Espinosa told AFP that any cook worth her salt is also an anthropologist, political scientist and artist.

If the chef is a woman, they must also be thick-skinned and persistent.

While women have traditionally been in charge of food in Colombia, the world of haute cuisine has always been male-dominated, Espinosa said of the hurdles she faced.

But she wasn’t easily fooled.

“It was clear to me from a young age that I will not be what other people want me to be,” she told AFP.

“I am who I am… I’m rebellious, irreverent, curious.”