Hi everyone.
Welcome to Pot Luck Food Talks.
Today we have a special guest, Deora Fadul from Guatemala.
She's running Diaca, one of the leading restaurants in Guatemala City.
And we're going to have a talk today.
Welcome Deora.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much for having me.
Well, to talk a bit about your current project, Diaca.
As far as I understand, I haven't been there.
I haven't eaten there, but as far as I understand, it's a restaurant that has,
that links, anthropology and understanding the territory and showcasing local
products.
And that's kind of like your proposal.
How did that start?
Because I guess if you go to culinary school, most of the times you learn French
traditional cooking in most of the restaurants.
At least 20 years ago, there was no Latin American fine dining.
This is something relatively new.
So how was your process to find that and deciding to get into that, that
wave, that train?
So when I started 18 years ago, imagine that 18 years ago, the first thing that
popped into my mind, like I said, I like to question everything.
So for me, it was more about, it is more about the why of everything, why we're
doing this, why we're here, why, why we use this, why we cook like this, why
everything was why.
And like you said, like I went to study to a school that everything was French.
And, but my teacher was so nice and he was such a good teacher of teaching you,
how to question everything and, and how to be yourself also in the kitchen and
not get lost only on the French cuisine.
He's from Cordon Bleu.
So he's like, obviously like very Frenchy basis that I remember when I, I
graduate and I started the company.
I started the pop-up company 18 years ago.
Every single time that I put something on the table, every word of mine was like,
oh, these tomatoes are so amazing.
Where do you buy them?
And it was like, oh, this is a type of producer that works this way from
Guatemala.
And I'm like, yes, from, from here.
And they were like, tomatoes are even from Guatemala.
And I was like, oh my God, I got it in shock.
Like something that was, yeah, something that was normal for me.
It was not a thing.
So it was like an automatic like question that I did to myself.
And I started to realizing, oh my God, what is the main purpose of a chef in
a community, in a society?
And I asked myself that question and it was super easy for me.
It was like, obviously it's like, we know that what a policeman does, we
know what a doctor does, we know what an architect does, but chefs have a more
deep relationship with society that you can't imagine.
Cuisine, culinary, the culinary world, gastronomy touches everything.
It's the base of society at the end of the day is that what we eat is what we are.
I started to question myself like, oh my God, we'd have lost our main purpose
as chefs, as cooks, as leaders in the kitchen to connect what is the most
important, to connect two worlds at the same time that is on the same.
The nature world with the producer passes through our kitchens and we're like a
channel, we're like a channel, communicators, and we're channeling this information to
the customers, to the people, to the person that is eating our food.
So we have lost that main purpose.
Like our main job is to connect.
So I started to say like, oh my God, like I need to go more and more and more and
more deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper and rooted myself in Guatemala
and trying to get to know more our territory, our producers, the way we do
farming.
And that time I had three people that had impacted in my life in a very amazing way,
my dad, my mom, and my grandmother.
But then my now husband came into my life and he's a farmer.
And I started to realize how something that I knew that it was hard, something that I
knew that it was something that we as chefs had to do to take out ourselves from the
center and be part of the chain and be part of this amazing wheel.
I just reassure it with my husband whenever I have to listen to him like, oh, this is
so hard because we have to do this.
And I was like, this is so unfair.
Why the government or why the newspapers or why nobody knows this?
Like nobody's talking about this.
Nobody's like defending this amazing job that you guys do.
Nobody's talking about this.
I was like very strong and I still like I'm very stubborn about that.
Like we have to tell the stories.
We have to make the connections.
We have to do this stuff.
So that's why the first 10 years of the company, we were a pop-up and we were like popping
in different places and doing stuff.
But the name that I put it, it was Chef of Moncure.
That is Chef of my heart.
And it was because we respected the heart of the territory and the heart of the people
that we were cooking.
I put that name because when I started the company, I was 20, 2021.
And I was like, I need a name that breaks eyes.
Like something that when I tell the name, people ask why.
So it was like a reason to tell the story behind it, why I was doing this.
But then like six years or five years later, the name was working against me because whenever
I had to do a talk or whenever I have to travel, everyone was like, you talk so beautiful
with Guatemala.
You do everything about Guatemala.
But why the French name?
Why do you have a French name?
That's super, super interesting because I've given lectures at the Vasco Lunar Center about
Latin American avant-garde.
And this is a story that has repeated itself over and over again.
I mean, even here in the Basque Country, a hundred years ago, there were no Basque restaurants.
All the restaurants were French.
And if you see like, I would say the key figures or the oldest figures in Latin American avant-garde,
let's say Gastón Acurio, Alexa Tala, and Olvera, the three of them, they opened French restaurants.
And through their process, it became gradually local, you know, but it was a process because
that's the way it used to be.
And it's super interesting that naturally you went through the same process in a different
country and it happened the same.
In a different way, because I was doing Guatemalan food.
I was not doing French cuisine.
I was doing everything Guatemala, everything with local ingredients, everything with producers,
everything was Guatemalan, but not the name.
And so everybody was like, it doesn't make sense that you have everything from Guatemala,
but it's just this tiny part that doesn't make authentic Guatemalan.
Right.
And I was like, so yeah, of course it made his service for the time that I needed.
Because in Guatemala, the name was like, as noble.
Like when I started, everyone was like, oh, you have to call her because she asks for a
meeting and she gets to know you and knowing your personality and knowing your taste.
She's going to make the menu.
So I didn't have a menu.
I was making the menus personally with the client.
Like I interview you and I asked your flavors and then I made the menu.
So everything was so personal using local ingredients and everything.
So it was like a snowball.
But then when I got the attention outside Guatemala, it was like, everything is amazing.
You talked about Guatemala so beautiful, but why the French name?
So I made a promise to myself that when I got to 10 years of doing that,
I was going to change the name to Diaca.
Diaca in Spanish means from here, but it's like a local way of saying it.
It's kind of like a slang, right?
Yeah, it's a slang.
It's not the Acá, it's Diaca, like we say it.
So I put it that way.
I patented the name and when I was like going like seven years and when I got to 10 years,
I opened the first restaurant and I put it, I changed the name from Chef Amonkhe to Diaca.
And it was the first restaurant with one table in Guatemala.
I don't know if in Central America, but in Guatemala, it was the first restaurant with one table.
I remember chefs and friends and everybody was like, one table?
Just one table?
And I was like, yeah, because I want to teach and I want to like every single time that someone
sat down in our table, enjoy the meal and it's something more holistic.
It's not just eating and going away.
I want everybody to enjoy and to listen to the stories of the producers.
So it was an amazing way of starting the Acá and now we're heading to eight years almost with
the Acá restaurant and we had grown like very fast.
That's also something really interesting.
Yes.
Yesterday, I was listening to a podcast from the New York Times on 100 years of solitude,
the novel from Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
And they were analyzing the novel and they were talking a lot about this novel,
talks a lot about imperialism and colonialism and about how identities got lost in Latin America.
And this is something that you see in food over and over again.
And I think these movements of Latin American avant-garde are really, and this is also something
that I've seen patterns in different countries, like projects like the Acá or other projects
in other parts, they start to establish new value chains with their producers or indigenous
traditions that were forgotten or are not visualized or showcased in restaurants or in
supermarkets, let's say, and creating this connection with those producers and giving them
a voice through a plate somehow.
Yeah.
And it's amazing because when people see the photos of our food in Instagram or in a website
or in a magazine or whatever, they think we do molecular techniques or avant-garde French
techniques, but when they come to the kitchen and they see that we only have fire and a blender
and that's it, they get like, how do you do that?
And I'm like, every single technique that we use are Mesoamerican techniques or American
techniques.
But people tend to think that dehydration, nistimalization, crystallization, like all
of this, like even barbecue, like all of these techniques, they think are more European without
knowing that comes from Mesoamerica.
I was talking about the cartocho technique or the papilote technique, and it's not even
European to it.
It comes from Mesoamerica, from the amixiote.
It's something that Europeans brought to Europe and then they started to do the papilote and
the cartocho with obviously a wax paper.
But here in America, in Mexico, it was in the part of Mexico and obviously Guatemala
and all this part of Yucatan, the amixiote that they use the part of the agave that looks
like wax paper and they used to cook this, all of their meats like that.
So it's something that came from here too.
So there's a lot of techniques that we missed out to know that they come from our side of
the world.
And I think it's something because I had a lot of friends and chefs and like journalists
and whatever that they come to the restaurant and they go into the kitchen and they see that
everything is so basic.
And they always ask, like they get in shock, like they don't know why I don't have like
a flash blast freezer and all of this like new stuff that everybody uses and it's okay
if you use it.
But in my case, I always tell them, I have a lot of people that comes from other parts
of Guatemala that doesn't have the money or doesn't have like the sources to buy all
of this expensive cuisines and they come to do internships in the restaurant.
And it's for me, it has more value that they see everything that we have achieved without
using that stuff.
So it gives them like power and it empowers them to see a comal, to see fire, to see stuff
that they get related to.
They go in without thinking that they are creative and that they don't have money.
And when they go out, they feel so empowered that they have the power.
They have gold in their hands.
They have fire.
They have nature.
They have everything that they can use that surrounds them, that it's beautiful to maintain
the kitchen.
So if you go to my kitchen, you will see stuff that comes from Mesoamerica like the pollo,
the comal, like I said, like the fire.
It's a Mesoamerican kitchen.
It's not a European kitchen.
If you go to the restaurant, yeah, you will see that.
By the way, for people who don't know, tomatoes are from America, not the European.
Well, from America, because we're still trying to figure out if they came from the Masonian
and at some point they mix it.
It's America.
Like I always said that I always talked about America as the whole continent.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a messy continent.
There is a lot of, for example, when I was young, I remember somebody discovered that
cocoa beans and cacao came from some part of Venezuela.
Now I'm listening to the same thing about Ecuador.
So to determine where these ingredients originated is sometimes complicated.
Because in time, you are discovering new stuff.
You're figuring out new stuff.
So it's something that evolves, right?
The story you mentioned about the equipment, it also reminds me of Maria Fernanda de Jacobé
in Venezuela.
She created this project Cacao de Origen where she trained thousands of women in chocolate
producing.
These were women that were originally cocoa farmers, but had never been in the production
side of creating chocolate out of their produce.
And they started creating chocolate basically with blenders.
You will have different qualities with different equipment, but if your cocoa is amazing, your
chocolate will be pretty good with any kind of equipment.
Imagine doing chocolate here in Guatemala.
There are still some parts in the country that they use the piedra or el brazo.
I was talking about...
Like a stone mill, right?
It's a stone.
It's called...
Yeah.
It's made with volcanic stone.
So we have two types.
We have the one for corn and the one for cacao.
And it's beautiful to see the difference between el brazo that it's from corn is like more
flat round and the other one is like more long and super round.
So you can really take out the fat of the cocoa beans.
So it's beautiful to see that in like, I don't know, like 60% of the country, we're still
doing chocolate like that.
And it's beautiful to see how they can go to very refined chocolate because it's like
doing chocolate is another world.
Like you have to...
The fat content and the way you dry it, you ferment like first ferment it, then you dry
it, then you...
It takes so much to do chocolate.
Like you said, like even like a tiny part of it, it could change like the flavor, it
could change the color, the texture.
Everything.
But when you have really good product, you can do...
It's no way back.
But like I said, I always said to my team, you have to first respect yourselves and then
respect the ingredient because it doesn't matter if you have like top notch ingredient
in your table, but if you're not paying respect to it, the ingredient is kind of messed up.
So I think it's a mix between like having respect to the ingredient and knowing the
quality of the ingredient that you have in your table.
Yeah.
Then I also wanted to talk about around, I don't know, like maybe six years ago or so
you started to get recognition from Latin America and 50 Best, just recently from the
Best Chef list.
I also understand that your current venue on a rooftop is not so old.
Like, how was the transformation from the early Diaca to the spot where you're right
now?
It was a nice transition because we started as a one-table restaurant, like I told you
in a tiny street in an old part of the city that I love that part of the city.
And it was a one-table and everything was going super good.
That was the first time that 50 Best recognized our job as best.
On that list, it was the first year.
It was in 2020.
First, it was a racing star for Female Chef.
We were four or five.
I think it was Marcia.
Yeah, it was Marcia, Pia from Nueva.
I think it was Tasia too.
And we were like five girls and the racing star was for Marcia.
She's an amazing cook.
I have a pending interview with Marcia.
I worked with her for two years.
She's amazing.
She's an amazing person and she's an amazing cook.
And then the pandemic came.
I remember that when we talked with the team, I was like, listen, first we need to think
about our farmers and how we're going to help them.
With us, don't get nervous.
I will figure it out.
Just give me three days and I will think about an idea so we can do.
So we did the tasting menu and delivery.
It was a delivery tasting menu, but everything was very delicate.
And it was two wood boxes.
Everything was designed for you just to open it and eat it.
You're eating hors d'oeuvres.
The menu at that time were eight curses.
And I don't know why I decided that we're going to do it 16 curses in delivery.
Yeah.
Why not?
Yeah, why not?
So we changed the menu six times in the pandemic.
It was like the same because we changed the menu seven times in the year because we change
it in every single season.
For us, we have seven seasons.
We don't have two like most Guatemalan things that we only have summer and rainy season
because we have a relationship with the producers.
We know that we have more than two.
We have seven.
We changed the menu six times in the pandemic.
We went into the kitchen at 3 a.m.
And we started cooking at 3 a.m.
And went out at 1 p.m. to deliver ourselves the boxes to the clients.
Imagine that before the pandemic, we only have like two or three tables per day because
it was one table.
So it was a reservation of 12 people or 10 people or mixed people in the same table.
But we only can do like three because it was like three different hours.
But in the pandemic, that grew a lot because we could do like more tables, right?
So the idea was that we were five working at that time in the restaurant.
Every single one of us did two reservations per night.
So imagine you with your friends wanted to get together.
So because of the pandemic, you couldn't.
So you ask for the service and everybody from your table got into a Zoom.
And I was the one that it was in charge of your reservation.
So it was like your table.
Every single one of us like accompanied the whole evening.
It was the same as being in the restaurant.
Wow, that's incredible.
I never heard about that.
That's crazy.
Yeah, it was crazy.
It was amazing.
Even from Japan, we had people from Japan, from Germany that write us like,
oh my God, we saw what you did in the pandemic.
It was amazing.
I can't believe that you managed to do the whole plate.
Like it was eating like you were eating at the restaurant.
I had people that cry in the Zooms.
I have people that felt that it was very special.
So imagine growing for two to one reservations per day to almost 12 or 15 reservations per day.
So we grew three times the size of our ingresos.
I don't know how to say ingresos.
Incomes.
Yeah, income, sorry.
So that's why we grew.
We grow and it was amazing.
And I think we did 4,000, yeah, 4,000 tasting menus in four months.
Wow, incredible.
Yeah, so we grew a lot.
So we had to make the decision because when the city opened again, we were like,
yeah, but now we want to go to the restaurant because it's one table we want just for us.
And we started to think like, oh my God, we're getting small.
Like we have to grow.
So we grow to this rooftop area that we grew to one table to four tables.
And it was amazing.
For three years, it was the best, but it happened again.
It was too little.
It was too small.
I didn't have space for my staff, for my team that could rest or something like a space,
somewhere that they can just rest or read, drink water, whatever in a comfortable area.
And the other part, it was that I became a mom and my daughter is just breastfeed.
I remember the first seven months, no, the first nine months, oh, a year, sorry.
The first year I went to the restaurant and because I didn't have a space or a office
or something that I can breastfeed my daughter, I went to the stairs of the restaurant,
to the door of the restaurant and to the stairs of the restaurant
and I breastfeeding my daughter there, sitting there for a year.
Imagine doing that nine times a day.
Yeah, that's crazy.
So it was like, this is too small.
We need to grow and now we are the place that we are right now.
And we have a space for my daughter is called Ella's office.
And we have a, yeah, yeah, we have a space for my team that it's one of my joys too.
And now we grow from four tables to nine tables.
We have been growing like that, like very organic and like in 18 years,
this is the story of the restaurant growing step by step and trying to accommodate
to the necessities that we have every day.
Yeah.
Amazing story.
Thank you so much for sharing it with us.
Thank you.
That's it for this week's episode of Potluck Food Talks.
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