"I am from Cuenca and I come from a family with a long tradition." The Ortegas, says the cook Pía Salazar, were always linked to the production of straw hats, which Grandfather Homero would begin to export to the whole world. She, co-owner with chef Alejandro Chamorro of the Nuema restaurant in Quito (Ecuador), was named the best dessert chef in Latin America last year.
He assures that he never dreamed, not even remotely, that one day he would see himself on stage. “When the Latin American gala of 50 Best Restaurants was held in Mérida, I got angry with the cameraman who had been following me since I arrived and I begged him to stop focusing on me because the room was full of renowned chefs and I was nobody. I was so desperate that I locked myself in the bathroom for a while.”
Salazar is enthusiastic about the colors of the ingredients and tries to blur the barriers between the salty and sweet universes. The day he combined radishes and artichokes, he assures him, he began to forget prejudices. “I think that one kitchen has to have a bit of the other and both have to work together, as we try to do in Nuema. "I tell Alejo (Alejandro): 'If you start the menu off right, I'll finish it off right.'"
She loves the vegetable pantry and feels the desire to express her emotions through sweet dishes, which are sometimes inspired by her own memories. Like the one on her grandparents' hacienda where her mother, who had married a man from Quito (they moved to the capital when she was five years old), sent her every summer.
Many of her creations are inspired by those times, when she went to the market holding her grandmother's hand or the sweet snacks she learned to prepare watching those older women who gathered for Carnival and peeled apricots or figs. “With my grandmothers I discovered the passion for cooking. I was so scattered in the studios that I only waited for the weekend to arrive to prepare chocolate cakes.
He likes to honor his loved ones, as he did with the bold and delicious dessert of coconut, yeast and black garlic. He left an order for an important gastronomic event that came to him when he was going through a bad time because his father had just passed away. He thought to honor him through a sweet creation. "It was the only way to be able to create something, because it was fatal." Someone told him that it was a horrible combination and insisted that he change his mind. She had decided to make it with the fruit that he was excited about, with the yeast that represented his groundbreaking spirit and the garlic as a symbol of his strong presence. “It was my tribute and I told myself that I would strive to perfect it, but that I would not change it.”
He had it ready for the appointed date, just five days after the subtle fluttering of a large-winged butterfly announced that his father had just passed away, before the call from the hospital rang, in the midst of a pandemic. “When Enrique Olvera tried that preparation, he wanted to see me and told me that a dessert had never moved him so much. That day I promised myself to believe in what I did, and I am more and more convinced that security is in your heart”.
One way or another, perhaps he already knew, even if he was not aware of it. He explains that his father was a doctor and sometimes people came home with serious problems who had to be attended to urgently. And that one day the man called her brother, much older than her, to give him a hand holding the instruments while he whispered and the boy fainted. “Then she saw me there, so small, watching intently, and she asked me to help her. I did it without blinking." Encouraged by that vocational character that she always instilled in her that "you have to complicate your life and challenge yourself, because what is easy is too easy", she began Medicine. But she didn't make it past the first grade. “I am very sensitive and the morgue was my limit: I could not understand how the human being can be well and at one point…”.
Life and death so close, as she herself has felt them. She suffered an accident when she was very young when she fell from a raised floor and no one explained how she managed to get out of it. And in 2005 a terrible car accident would drive her through the windshield headfirst. Pía Salazar underwent multiple interventions and one of her eyes was affected by degenerative glaucoma and she had a retinal detachment. "Now each eye is a different color, like some husky's." At first she covered it, but again her father convinced her that her eyelid could fall. “And above all he taught me that the difference is beautiful, as in huskies; that the body changes and the soul remains and that we are loved for how we are, not for the appearance”. She says that she learned to love and accept herself and that she taught her children not to give in to the cruelty of other children. "They say they are proud of me."
Pía Salazar had already shown her courage by not giving up a vocation that she did not like at home. "When I decided to trade medicine for cooking and study with the savings from the money my grandparents sent me, they took it as a drama." The same thing happened with the very early arrival of the first child, unexpected. But they soon saw that Pía had unwavering courage and tenacity and that it was impossible not to support her.
Excellent teachers crossed his path: Gastón Acurio and Astrid Gutsche. “I worked for them for years, and I learned to be proud of my own country's pantry.” There, in that universe Astrid
Pía Salazar, the decisions that come from the bowels and that spirituality that guides her. Like when she knew it was time to fly and open her own business with Alejo to support the family. She says that when they opened the first Nuema on Calle República del Salvador in Quito, nobody knew them. “We wanted to make a bistro with desserts, but it turned out so nice that we immediately saw that we had a restaurant”. She is enthusiastic about interior design and needs to intervene in those spaces that she, she assures, "must explain the human being that inhabits it from the moment you walk through the door." She does it with the complicity of Alejo, whom she defines as an artist and someone who takes care of every detail.
The third Nuema, which was released recently, occupies a beautiful house in the capital that they rented at her own insistence. Although the owner resisted at first, "I knew it was her place and that it would be good for us and for her, because we would beautify the farm." A tree presides over the place. "Because it identifies us, because it is us, with our branches and our roots attached to the earth, and with our ancestors."
This pastry chef explains that appearing on the list of The World's 50 Best Restaurant or its sweet cuisine award allows them to pave the way for other fellow entrepreneurs whom they support from their new leadership. And that if one day they were the first to serve a tasting menu in Ecuador (that was in the second Nuema, in a hotel located in the beautiful historic center of the city) it is not because they wanted to be the most modern. “It was because we had no money, we had moved from the first Nuema because no one came, only the family, who told us to dedicate ourselves to something else because we couldn't have more losses. Until one day a client came in who offered us to move to that hotel without charging us the rent for the first few months”.
That, he assures, was not an option, but the last card they had left: "Either it worked or we had to dedicate ourselves to something else." And despite the fact that at first the clients resisted that dictatorship of the tasting menus, it would end up being a success. Until the place was too small for them and, once again, she knew that the time had come to look for that house in which to put down roots that they already feel is theirs.
The involvement of the two sons in the restaurant is impressive. There was a time when Martín, the eldest, was more in the day to day, but now he lives in the United States where he studies Sound, without losing detail of what happens in Quito. The thing about Manuel (Núria's twin) is quite a phenomenon that surprises those who visit them, as happened with the group of Latin American cooks who were recently invited to cook at their house and who saw the boy working as one of the team (he was there , among others, the Colombian Leo Espinosa, the first to speak about them to her haute cuisine colleagues).
At the age of twelve, Manuel yearns to get out of class to put on his white jacket and apron. “It seems that he has studied cooking, he has an impressive facility and an impressive perseverance. When something doesn't work out for him, he repeats and repeats until he learns. And sometimes he gives instructions to trained cooks who have been working for years, naturally. He carries it in his soul and is attentive to everything that moves in haute cuisine. He tells us that he will work hard to get two Michelin stars for Nuema”. When her mother took the stage to receive this award for the best sweet cuisine in Latin America, Martín and his brothers, on the other end of the phone, were crying with happiness and pride.
