ANGIE PAOLA ALEMN CARDONA

BASIC 2.

MY NEWS

Najat Kaanache: The girl who dreamed of the smell of

vanilla

Something has this woman, from whose cinnamon lips the words flutter, hurried,
from one side to another, like butterflies. Born and raised in San Sebastian, in the
Basque Country in Spain, where she "eats the best food in the world", through her
veins runs, brava, that Moroccan blood of which she is so proud. Something has a
month ago a jury, including Juan Mari Arzak, one of the great Basque cuisine, gave
him the first place of the 2015 National Pork Board Critics' Choice Award.
Kaanache entered Miami through the big door and with his right foot. He was
at Goya's Swine& Wine , which from the gardens of The Biltmore Hotel in Coral
Gables, dismissed the 14th edition of the South Beach Wine & Food Festival . S e
measured with 21 other chefs and won.

She won and she is a woman. She won and is a woman and her restaurant has not
yet opened. He won and he does. He does not say it, but he knows he can touch
the stars with his hands. But if she is a star herself.
The Moroccan girl
Being only teenagers, his parents arrived from Morocco to Spain in 1975, after the
fall of the regime of Francisco Franco. His father, barefoot, ate the shells of
oranges when there was hunger and nothing to eat.

Little Najat grew from the Pyrenees to the Atlas Mountains, where each summer
her family harvested the wheat for the whole year and the olives were pressed with
the oil, something that "is not learned in any school".

Each autumn they returned to Spain with a sack of 100 pounds of flour made with
that wheat, and in their house in Aia Orio, near the Cantabrian Sea, butter was
baked and bread was baked in a wood oven three times a week.

Poor as they were, as a child she never ate a donut in a store, but in return she ate
everything that came out of that oven that perfumed her childhood. At that time I
dreamed of the smell of vanilla. He grew up listening to his dad tell his children that
they would be champions, whatever, but champions.
He did theater in Barcelona and Madrid. He went to London to study acting and
five years later, title of the University of Surrey in hand, returned to Spain. She was
a television actress and tried the honeys of fame until she did not want to do more
than "Moroccan girl". She wanted to fly and felt like a prisoner of the character that
made her famous in the land that gave birth to her.
The magic of the kitchen
Adrin went to travel the world and lived with women and street children in Iran,
Afghanistan, Chile, Brazil, Venezuela and Nicaragua, determined to show the
dispossessed of all rights, that beyond survival there is a life and that yes Can, that
"the impossible only takes a little more time".

He believes that everyone is born with a star and walks through life in search of
hers: in the kitchen. Fate took her to The Hague, Holland. To make a living, he
started making tapas. He rented a kitchen in Rotterdam and in nine months had a
thriving but very strenuous cateringbusiness . Tired of the tortilla and the
mushrooms, it was used in one restaurant and then in another.

He studied Culinary Arts at the Albeda College in Rotterdam and in one super
intensive year did what others would have taken three. One day he saw a
documentary on television about the English chef Heston Blumenthal of The Fat
Duck (three Michelin stars) and Dinner (a Michelin star), and one of the precursors
of the so-called molecular cuisine. She was fascinated by the alchemy behind the
kitchen.
Until finally they sent to call of elBulli . Marc Cuspinera, right hand of Adri, wrote to
him saying that they had decided to receive her for two seasons. So from Per Se ,
in New York, he went to Barcelona, and from there to Girona, to Roses, to the
apartments that the genius of the deconstruction of food, had for his team. When
he arrived at Cala Montjoi, on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, he felt "as a
star feels when it falls into the sea". Adrin was everything she had always
dreamed of. I had all his videos. He knew how he breathed and how he blinked,
how he knew the wine he was drinking, and what the starchy cotton of his uniforms
smelled.