Juan DaniloZegarra Presser

My story

I learned to cook before I learned to write. I grew up beside my grandmother, and her kitchen was my first school: there I understood that a dish can say what words do not yet know how to say. Brillat-Savarin wrote it two centuries ago: “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.” I lived it before I ever read it.

I believe everything begins with a seed. Without pollination there is no fruit, without fruit there is no cooking, and without cooking there is no memory. That is why I work every product from its origin: the land where it was born, the hands that grew it and the story it carries. As the food historian Massimo Montanari teaches, food is culture when it is produced, when it is prepared and when it is eaten.

In Germany I opened a Peruvian Nikkei restaurant with Amazonian accents. Gault & Millau recognised my cooking in Berlin with 13 points, and I worked alongside embassies and consulates to bring Peruvian gastronomy to new audiences. In 2016 I removed dairy, refined sugar and gluten from my menus: I understood that pleasure and wellbeing are not opposites, they are the same craft done well.

That search took me to Fortaleza, Brazil, to train with Dr. Décio Cézar da Silva, a researcher in functional and therapeutic foods at the Universidade Federal do Ceará (PADETEC), holder of a doctorate in human aging (gerontology, the science of aging well), and my mentor to this day. From him I learned that what we eat can shape the way we age. With him I understood that we do not eat with the palate alone: we eat with the nervous system. Aroma and flavour travel as signals to the regions of the brain where emotion and memory live; that is why a dish can return us to childhood in a second. I learned to work with food in its full constellation, its origin, its nutrients, its aroma, its texture and its story, so that eating does not merely nourish: it moves us.

As Global International Business Development Manager at Verstegen Spices & Sauces in Rotterdam, I carried that philosophy into more than twenty markets, leading culinary innovation and concept development for one of Europe's great spice houses. Spices are my specialty: I know what an aroma can do for a dish, for a brand and for a memory.

Today I place that experience at the service of governments, hospitality groups and international brands. I write books, I have founded platforms that unite chefs and nations, and I remain true to the same conviction: gastronomy is the universal language I learned before any other.