Chema de Isidro, cook
«I am from Madrid and I am 54 years old, with 34 years of experience in cooking. For 17 years I have been dedicated to training groups at risk of exclusion. “I am the founder of the NGO Gastronomía Solidaria and more than 5,000 young people have taken our cooking courses.”
You grew up in Vallecas.
I am a Vallecano and a citizen of the world. I don’t like borders, I don’t like labels, I don’t like football, I don’t like politics… I want a better world, because I don’t like this one at all.
What don’t you like?
I’ll finish sooner if I tell you what I like.
And what do you like?
This is very poorly distributed. Some have a lot and some have nothing. Everything should be more balanced. What I like is that there are people who still think about others. I have two daughters and I think we have taught them well that what is really important is to be good people.
Where does the desire to help come from?
I was going down what they call “a bad path.” Imagine, in the 80s in Vallecas there were a lot of drugs and I did my dealings and my little things. But my teacher, to whom I will be eternally grateful, Mr. Iñaki Zaguirre, national Gastronomy winner with two Michelin stars, gave me a hand and in the end it didn’t go so badly. He taught me a lot of values, he taught me to love this job and he changed my life. When I already had a restaurant, one day I caught two junkies who were in the neighborhood, I put them in a cooking class and they loved it. If it worked for me, why wouldn’t it work for other people? I left the restaurant, set up a school and started working with kids from the Cuatro Caminos neighborhood, from a Latin gang that hung around there. We saw that the kitchen functions as a tool for social and labor insertion.
Why does it work?
Firstly because all of us cooks are half crazy. And this, for strange people, works. Now we chefs look like stars of the rock and roll, But the normal thing is that you go into the kitchen and no one sees you. You don’t have to expose yourself much. You can have thousands of tattoos and a swollen face and no one will see you. You also forget about problems, because there are a thousand things to do and you have to put all your mind into it. And then the goals are immediate. You start making something and, bam!, you have a dish that is beautiful, that smells good and that is very delicious.
Could it also have to do with you doing something for someone?
Yes of course. I tell the kids, that they are going to have more friends, that they are going to flirt more. Once we went to Galicia with the boys, they had only been cooking for a week. It was like a showcooking in which I was telling them what they had to do and at the end they fed the public. We made a seafood rice with milk, and when everyone started applauding, one of my kids started crying. “But what’s wrong with you, stump?” “Damn it, Chema, I’ve never been applauded before.” They are kids who are very marked, everything has gone wrong for them, so we work a lot to make them strong in soul and believe in themselves. Look, now all our kids want to get a tattoo of the scratch (the Gastronomía Solidaria logo) because I think it’s the first time in their lives that they feel proud to belong to something.
How do guys get to you?
After all the time we’ve had, almost always by word of mouth. This year we worked with juvenile centers. We show up there and tell what we do. Now all the kids we have are serving sentences for various reasons, in an open regime or about to be released, and the objective is to prevent them from returning to what they were. For that we train them as cooks and we find them jobs. Insertion in this country works like this: I give you a sentence of so much time and then I throw you out on the street so you can find a life. We try to prevent them from committing crimes again and we give them a tool so that they can move forward.
Among your boys, some are African.
Our training programs are open to everyone: Africans, Colombians, minors, seniors… We do not receive money from anyone, so we do not have vetoes. That’s why our logo is a scratch, because they are like waste, the people that no one wants, the discarded. But you know what? We make very good broths with these “raspitas”. Some of them have even been rejected from reintegration projects because they have more problems or because they do not have papers. We work with many Africans, from Cameroon, Senegal, Gambia, Ethiopia…, a profile that I love because they are very hard-working and super brave. In February we were in Senegal living with them, and I would spend my entire life applauding them because those who migrate in the cayucos are heroes, leaving as they do with so few means to make a living. They don’t even do it for themselves, but for their families. And so many who stay at sea…
What do you think of the rejection or indifference that these people often suffer when they are already in Spain?
That people have no fucking idea. When there are tough situations, what people do is look the other way for various reasons: for self-protection, to not suffer, or to not say “what sons of bitches we are.” We are all complicit in the unjust world we have, and when there are people who are having a bad time, you prefer not to see it, or for your family to see it. They have told me: “And you are taking your daughters?” My daughters, since they were very little, have lived with the kids and have seen everything. I believe that humans, in essence, are good, but very cowardly. That’s why I so admire how brave Africans are. We must give all these kids the opportunity to have another life. I can tell you about the most extreme cases that we have had, like that of boys who have been hitmen because they grew up in families where there were hitmen. What are you going to ask them? You have to give them the opportunity to develop. The world must be changed by training people. People don’t come to invade us or take our jobs, they come to make a living. If they could do it in their countries, they would not come.
Tell me about the project you have in Senegal.
We were in Niaga, a small town about 40 kilometers from Dakar, providing hospitality training to boys and girls who barely knew how to hold a knife. It was my partner, Paula, who is a pastry chef, my daughter, who is also a cook, and me. We meet people with immense talent, but without the possibility of developing it. It occurred to us to bring them, train them here and then have them return to their country to train other people. And we created a project to provide scholarships to these kids from Niaga who learn at a very prestigious school in Madrid and come back as trainers. And repeat this every year.
Could you tell me a success story with any of these young people?
Many. 80% of our kids manage to work. I estimate that we will have about 100 who are head chefs. I always tell the case of Eric, a Dominican boy who was in prison when he started with us. It came with the shackle and everything. Now he has three restaurants and they are going to give him the star. Many of the boys and girls who have passed through here have achieved what they dreamed of. And I love that some of them are the ones who are training the kids of today. We are a big little family.
Apart from training, what do you think they need most?
I think what they need are dreams. And they need to help people. But they have to be strong. There is nothing better than them helping other people. During the pandemic we helped many people, feeding almost 3,000 people every day. Do you know what it means for a child who is rejected, who is constantly told that he is bad or who is denied papers, to feed a lot of people, who may even look at him badly? That is invaluable. They need dreams and goals. And for society to begin to see them differently, their stories must be told. If people knew why they came, they would surely give them a hand. They are survivors, human beings like you and me. I insist: no one leaves their country if they can stay.
In an interview I heard one of your daughters say how proud she is of you because you see in all these kids what no one sees.
You have to look deeper inside. They are all heroes. Behind every kid there is a story, there is a reason. I would like to leave my daughters a better world and I believe that with this project we are achieving it. They were people who were very bad and now they are well and proud of the life they have managed to have. I’ll tell you something: if you walk down the street and you come across someone with a scratch tattoo, they’re good people, for sure.
WITH THE
«The raspa is the logo of our NGO. I have a very special affection for this one because an artist made it for me with the plastic of recycled sea nets. For me it symbolizes not only an apology for the recycling of materials, but also for recycling people, which is what we do with these kids through education.
