Rómulo Hidalgo

Chef of long career, with studies in Lyon, France, was a cooking instructor at the Colegio Universitario Hotel Escuela de Los Andes Venezolanos and cooking instructor for 5 years at ULA (Universidad de los Andes), currently host and executive producer of the cooking show La Alquimia del Chef broadcast by TLT, with more than 392 chapters (in which he travels the country, finding local ingredients and transforming them into novel dishes), finding local ingredients and transforming them into novel dishes) winner of the Inter 2012 award as best cultural and educational program of Venezuelan television for exalting national values by discovering a sustainable cuisine, National Journalism Award Anibal Nazoa 2016 for representing the Venezuelan culture through the kitchen.

 Son of rural producers in the livestock and dairy area, he has been dedicated for 25 years to promote the new Venezuelan cuisine, a movement he decided to create seeing the need in Venezuela to value what is at hand, encouraging the creation of a cuisine of national product and inventiveness, based on this concept not only in highlighting the typical cuisine but also in creating a new cuisine based on the productive potential of each region of the country.

To promote this movement, he has given lectures, courses and free workshops in productive rural areas of the country, to encourage the transformation of raw materials, thus giving them an added value that will allow cooks in the future to have high quality products totally natural and enhancing the regions where they are produced.

Rómulo currently works in a production center where he researches to create innovative products using cassava as a base (a product from the yucca used ancestrally by indigenous ethnic groups of the Caribbean and the Amazon) focusing on creating gluten-free foods and demonstrating the immense potential of this product at an industrial level.

For 12 years he owned the restaurant Cardamomo in the city of Merida, which he used as a platform to promote his style of cuisine, became one of the most recognized restaurants in the country for its changing menus focused on using local products in a new way.