On September 24, Ana Roš joined chef Ángel León at his restaurant Aponiente in the Bay of Cádiz. Aponiente was not unfamiliar territory for Ana. She had visited before and long admired Ángel’s work, but this time she returned for a different reason: to cook.

The day did not begin in the kitchen. First came the landscape. The marshes of the Bay of Cádiz, the tides, the salt water and the ingredients that Ángel and his team have spent more than two decades exploring and finding new possibilities for in gastronomy. For Ana, whose cooking has been shaped by the very different surroundings of the Soča Valley, it was above all an invitation to stay curious and look at unfamiliar ingredients from a new perspective. From these local ingredients came Ana’s part of the lunch: celeriac pocket, kohlrabi with horseradish and pine nuts, orzotto with blue crab and truffle, gilthead sea bream with lentils and beetroot, and beeswax ice cream with puff pastry and Emoli plums. Ángel then continued the lunch with Aponiente’s seasonal menu.

“Welcoming Ana to Aponiente gave us a chance to see our marshes from entirely different perspectives. Each brought their own culinary language and found new possibilities in our ingredients. That is what makes these encounters so exciting: seeing how the same landscape can inspire such personal interpretations,” says Ángel León.

Aponiente and Hiša Franko were both born far from the world’s major culinary capitals, and both are deeply shaped by the places they call home. But it is precisely the differences that make encounters like this interesting: leaving behind your familiar ingredients, routines and landscape for a moment, and seeing what happens when you cook somewhere else.

This time, among the ocean, salt and marshes of Cádiz.

Photo credits: Handa Films