“Life is wonderful”

“I wasn’t born wanting to be a cook, I ended up in the kitchen by way of a rebound”, Maca de Castro, the youngest chef in Spain to attain a Michelin Star, confesses initially. “When I was young I wanted to be a sportswoman, I played tennis, I did windsurfing and sailing. I’ve always liked a challenge”, she says.

And yet the story of Maca and cooking were destined to be entwined ever since her family opened a restaurant in Port d’Alcúdia in 1996. “I was 17 years old and I had dropped out of school, so my father put me in charge with six people under me. I would frequently come home in tears. I felt that wasn’t the place for me”.

Her frustration would continue for two more years. Until when she was 19, her father offered her the chance to accompany him to a gastronomy congress in San Sebastián, in northern Spain. “When I arrived and saw all those young cooks, talking about such interesting things, of what they had learned in places like New York or Asia, a light was switched on inside of me. If that meant I would be able to combine two of my great passions, eating and travelling, then maybe it would be a good choice for me. I went off to travel around Asia for two months, and when I came back I had already decided that I wanted to be a cook”.

Maca began studying cookery, but she didn’t finish the course. “I told my father I wanted to work in the family restaurant in summer, and go and learn more in the restaurants of the Basque Country in winter. I trained in kitchens around the world for eleven years. That was my real course of study”.

In 2012, the restaurant Jardín (now renamed Maca de Castro) earned a Michelin Star for the first time. “We knew we were doing things right. By that time I was preparing the dishes that were in my head, but they didn’t appear on the menu without the approval of my father and my brother. I had just turned 30 and I focussed on my career one hundred percent, nullifying my personal life”, she confesses.

The inertia of success and a passion for the work led Maca and her brother Daniel to open a restaurant in José Ignacio, Uruguay, where they worked in winter for five years. Without stopping to catch their breath, they opened another restaurant in Düsseldorf, Germany.

Until 2017, when she exploded. “I remember I was cooking and the tears were rolling down my face. I couldn’t see anything. I would get up in the morning and feel I couldn’t go on, I wanted to experience everything but something inside me had broken”. The psychologist she went to see was categorical: “Go away, travel”, she said. So she packed her bags and went off alone for a month to travel around Singapore, Hong Kong and Bali.

That trip was a turning point. She was revived. “I realised what and who I wanted to have at my side. And I was able to appreciate everything my family had done for me even more. I came back more confident, believing in myself more. And I accepted my family’s proposal of naming the restaurant after me”.

Maca acknowledges that she has made mistakes “many times. But things have only moved forwards after the failures. Success doesn’t happen magically, it’s a case of struggling. Behind every prize, there are many moments of solitude. There have been passages in my life when I am certain most people would have [...]

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