Alberto Montes Pereira, second chef at the Atrio Restaurant in Cáceres, yesterday won the international professional gastronomy competition "Best Bluefin Tuna Chef", which rewards and recognizes the chefs who best prepare this fish.
The award, given by the Balfegó company, was presented last night - after the competition held in the morning at the Le Cordon Bleu cooking school - during the gala held at La Estación Gran Teatro CaixaBank Príncipe Pío in Madrid.
A celebration in which Montes received the prize - endowed with a blanket of special Japanese knives for cutting fish, 6,000 euros in cash and a trip to Japan for two people - for presenting two dishes of "impeccable technique" and that should be "national heritage", according to the jury's assessment.
Specifically, Montes' first dish was a "tuna sequence: Spain and Japan", with which he has merged these two countries; and the second was a "pithivier" (puff pastry) of tuna "micuit" and its bone juice.
The jury of this VI edition has been chaired by the chef Martín Berasategui, who has been accompanied by other chefs such as Diego Guerrero, Benito Bardal or Fina Puigdevall. And they were in charge of deciding the rest of the winners of this contest, which were Aitor López, from the Citrus Restaurant in the Tarragona town of Alcanar, (second position) and Jaume Marambio, from the Alapar Restaurant in Barcelona (third place). In this case, the chef who came in second place received a prize of 3,000 euros, and the third place received 1,000 euros.
Rafael Gomes, from the Escama restaurant in Oporto (Portugal), Alessandro Tormolino, from Sensi in Amalfi (Italy), Enrico Hirschfeld, from the Schillingshof restaurant in Bon (Germany), Daniel Álvarez Quintans, from the Audrey's Restaurant in Calpe (Alicante) and Adán Cordero Lorenzo, sous chef at the Hotel Santo Mauro Restaurant in Madrid.
The selection of these eight candidates has been made among the more than 200 active professional chefs from the four countries registered in the competition. They all work in restaurants located in Portuguese, German, Italian or Spanish territory, and presented their own original recipe with bluefin tuna as a mandatory ingredient.
The originality, presentation and cooking techniques used in their recipes have been the guideline followed by the juries in charge of evaluating the applications.
