“We must be much more demanding with ourselves and not simply do business for business”

Matias Cilloniz (Lima, 1986) has been working for several years on a responsible cooking model that tries to achieve the least impact on the environment, reduce its carbon footprint and, at the same time, seeks to work with small producers to value the products of their regions. Its objective? Educate and disseminate urgent issues such as sustainability, nutrition and the environment. A way to reflect on the excessive consumption of today’s society and thus assume responsibility for our own pollution, or at least be aware of it and its seriousness.

Through Gocta Natura, a hotel located in front of the wonderful waterfall, Cillóniz fully develops the ideal of a responsible kitchen, with its own garden, which composts and recycles, and can generate a small consumer market with producers of its surroundings. That way everyone benefits. Cillóniz, representative of a generation of chefs very concerned about good nutrition and the pollution of the planet, is currently in Chile where he participated in the discussion “Collaborative dialogue for the construction of sustainable environments and productions” together with Álvaro Romero (Chef of La Table), Cazú Zegers (Architect), Pablo Zamora (Doctor in Biotechnology). Tomorrow he will offer a dinner where local producers (from orchards, vineyards, among others) will participate in order to make visible the local work of the region.

We talked with him about his proposal and ideals:

-When you talk about your kitchen, you talk about the role of instinct. What does it consist of?

I start to develop this idea just before opening the first Mo Café, in Barranco. With a friend of mine, Mónica Kisic, we would go every Monday to a garden in Huampaní and decide right there what we wanted to prepare based on what we harvested and found. It was a super nice exercise not to think so much and let ourselves be carried away by instinct. Basically, this is how I have continued my work, basing a dish on a product and developing it with instinct and palate, and making sense to the stomach as well. Digestion is quite important to me, I care about my digestion and nutrition.

-Why is it important for you to attend to digestion?

I think that the work of a cook should not end with coffee, but with digestion. There is a tasting menu where you end up with indigestion that doesn’t even allow you to sleep; or barbecues of meat at night that prevent sleep. I have realized that due to the cuts I have been having or the diet I have, eating more vegetables allows me to have a much more friendly digestion, swim the kilometers I swim and work the hours I need. I worry about everything I have eaten during a day and I try to apply it to my cooking style.

Gocta is at 1,800 m asl, we have many foreign guests with an age range above 50 years, so I have to be particularly careful so that they sleep well and the next day they go to Gocta or wherever they want to go. I worry that there is a bit of everything: fruits, colors, vegetables. Yes, it is my responsibility to offer good nutrition, especially at Gocta Natura because I have them all day and I want them to leave feeling good.

– We are talking about a rich, sustainable and nutritious cuisine…

My cuisine is very vegetal, I try to make it very balanced, not only in one dish but also in the whole experience. At Gocta Natura we work a lot with local producers and with what the forest and orchards offer us. The forest gives us pine mushrooms or Porcón mushrooms, herbs, etc. Now we are working on the black potato with a producer from the Cuemal community, Mrs. Hilaria. There are several women friends and neighbors who produce different products with feminine knowledge. It is the women who have passed this knowledge from generation to generation, working organically and biodynamically, that is, with the stages of the moon. This completely purple potato, which is probably suspected in Lima of being spoiled, we love it. A neighbor of Hilaria, Doña Peta, plants ollucos and it is very difficult for her to sell them because they are very small, misshapen and colorful, but we buy them all. We love them because it is easy to serve it whole, respecting the shape and the product. As for the structure of a proposal or a menu, I want them to eat a bit of everything, a bit of protein, whether animal or vegetable, carbohydrates, fats, so we put together the menu according to that and the plans of our guests and, obviously, depending on what we have.

– Would this be an example of sustainable and responsible cooking?

We make this constant effort to respect the premises and promote business, so that the ladies of Cuemal sell more of their product, our success must be due to the ladies of Cuemal, the chocolate from Bagua, the coffee from Rodríguez de Mendoza or the mushrooms from another community.

The closer the product is, the less impact it has and the greater benefits we are giving to the community and the region. We are lucky to be in a town that overlooks an important waterfall, to have become a destination in recent years, but the Cuemal gentlemen do not have that opportunity, they do not have a waterfall in front of them or Kuelap, then I have to take responsibility as a professional to try to share this success. I think it’s sustainable and look at it not only environmentally, but also culturally.

– How is your work to reduce the environmental impact?

In Mo we are working with Sinba who train us and help us to separate the waste, collect it and, with the organic ones that are 85% of the waste, they make compost as food for pigs. That greatly limits our carbon emissions because if we don’t compost it, all this waste would be going to the landfill, which is terrible because it pollutes a lot. At home I recycle with Lima Compost, it’s not as much of an impact as it can be in a restaurant; and, in Gocta, we have our compost bins because we also have to nurture our garden. Here we are promoting coexistence with biodiversity through a profitable business, making biodiversity profitable. We have been consuming since the industrial age and we have to change the way we do business, consume, live and our eating habits. Our guests eat from the garden, they can observe the spatula-tailed hummingbird that is endemic to a small part of the planet, or the yellow-tailed monkey that has returned over the years.

– How could gastronomy entrepreneurs become aware of environmental impact or recycling?

I have mixed feelings because we don’t all have the same values ​​nor am I one to tell people what to eat or how to make money. I have always had this doubt about who starts first, if the public demands it from their favorite restaurants or if businesses invest in it first, if it is an essential requirement or a government law. I think that the Sinba or Lima Compost service should be a municipal service. There are times when you have to lose or cut expenses to survive and that is the first thing that is cut because it is an additional expense, we could decide not to invest in that and have the municipality take our waste, but I do think that we should be much more demanding with ourselves and not simply doing business for business’s sake, but living consciously.

– As for Mo Café, what does it currently offer?

The pandemic made us take a series of business changes where I threw in the towel a bit in terms of my fights and principles for what society wanted. There are certain battles that I can fight, such as recycling, and the next one is the improvement due to the quality of the inputs. We have overcome the pandemic, we are doing amazing, we can pay for the recycling service. We have excellent coffee, olive oil, excellent suppliers, but I want to improve more and more, I have to know how to choose my battles and at Mo these will be: the quality of the product, the relationship with producers and recycling.