FOOD,DRINK & TRAVEL

Begoña Rodrigo, La Salita, Valencia, 1975

INDUSTRIAL engineering was her first plan, but instead she set off for the Netherlands and worked her way up through the restaurant business. After a couple of years at the head of London club Aquarium’s 2-Michelin star restaurant, she came home and, in 2005, opened La Salita in Valencia’s foodie barrio, Rufaza. The winner of Spain’s first Top Chef TV show (in 2013), Valencia’s Cook of the Year title in 2014, she has a second restaurant, and a phenomenal cocktail bar, La Coctelería al Nu.

MICHELIN STARS

REPSOL SOLS

Rising Stars

Elena Lucas, La Lobita, Soria (Castile and Leon)

SHE wanted to be an artist and it shows in the way she converts the hearty rural mountain food of Soria into gorgeously presented, technically sophisticated seasonal tasting menus. Lucas studied gastronomy before re- turning to the family restaurant founded by her grandparents in 1952. Known for her use of local mushrooms and black truffles, if you could eat a walk in the woods, it would taste like this.

Here are some of the future female stars breaking into the cooking scene

Vicky Sevilla, Arrels, Valencia,1992

IN 2021, the 29-year-old from Sevilla became the youngest female chef in Spain to get a Michelin star.

Alba Esteve Ruiz, Restaurante Alba, Alicante, 1989

SUCH was the impression she made when working in Rome in 2018, she won Italy’s best young female chef award.

Now home and running her own restaurant, her elegant and aesthetically pleasing dishes are, writes one critic, impregnated with a touch of Italian.

Alba (another graduate of the hit machine that is Joan Roca’s El Celler de Can Roca) is the only woman on the shortlist for Spain’s best young chef award (results due imminently).

Incidentally, Joan Roca has received Michelin’s Chef-Mentor 2023 award for services rendered.

Camila Ferraro, Sobretablas, Sevilla, 1987

Just four years earlier, she’d been begging banks to loan her the money to start a restaurant. Despite her grit and determination, she drifted into chef-dom by accident when, as a 17-yearold, instead of flying home from a holiday in Menorca, she stayed and got a job in a restaurant. She later worked with both Susi Diaz and Begoña Rodrigo (who she counts as mentors).

Rocio Parra, La Parra, Salamanca, 1982

IT would be wrong to call her the Pork Queen, but she loves the stuff: 13 of the 25 courses on one of her tasting menus feature it in some form, from tartar of salchichon to an Iberian pate éclair.

The Madrid-born chef trained under Michelin-star chef Paco Roncero and also worked with Yolanda Leon before moving to Salamanca for love.

MICHELIN STARS

REPSOL SOLS

The amount of skill and imagination, artistry and sheer graft that goes into the two lengthy, seasonal tasting menus on offer, defies belief.

It won her a Michelin star five years after opening, in 2020 – she was the only female chef in Spain to get a first star.

Rakel Cernicharo, Karak, Valencia, 1985

CERNICHARO creates dining experiences: Her restaurant is a world of its own, where design, art and moody lighting complement the food.

The tasting menus are journeys through the senses and based on themes (currently ‘fire’, ‘smoke’ or ‘embers’) and truly unique.

Karak has been going for ten years, though in its current central location (at Hotel One Shot Mercat 09) for just five.

Another Top Chef winner (2017), she finally got on the Repsol radar last year.

ANOTHER chef who learnt her trade at El Celler de Can Roca and other great restaurants of the north, Ferraro’s fresh reinvention of traditional fare in her home town of Sevilla generated a gigantic buzz when Sobretablas opened in 2018.

Bouncing back after lockdown, she became the first female winner of Spain’s Cocinero Revelación (young cook of the year) award in 2020.

INDITEX - the world's biggest fashion retailer - posted a 27% rise in net profits last year as sales exceeded pre-pandemic levels. Net income soared to a record €4.1 billion in results covering the first full year that Marta Ortega, daughter of Inditex founder Armancio Ortega, took over running the company. In-store and online sales reached €32.6 billion - 18% more than the €27.71 billion posted last year and 15% higher than in 2019, before the Covid pandemic struck. The positive figures come despite Inditex closing and then selling off its 514 stores in Russia - its biggest market outside Spain - following last year's invasion of Ukraine.

THE value of Spanish pension scheme assets fell by €482 million to €82 billion in February 2023, according to new data. Following an increase in asset values in January, a more ‘challenging market environment’ caused the drop last month, according to pension advisory organisation Inverco. But Inverco suggested that projected returns in the medium to long term for individual schemes were positive.