I am simply the first nomad of this community

My name is Elisenda. My life — both personally and professionally — has revolved around gastronomy, humanism, and travel.

In my teens I began a career in haute cuisine, working alongside some of the most prestigious chefs of the time and the most celebrated restaurants in the world, including El Bulli.

After my years in the restaurant industry — during which I was lucky enough to open a restaurant in Tallinn the very year Estonia joined the EU, and to work alongside the internationally renowned French chef René Bajard, who holds multiple Michelin stars — I trained in food chemistry in Barcelona, my home city. I wanted to understand why the ingredients I worked with transformed the way they did under my alchemy. That is where I discovered microbiology — our greatest ally, if you know how to work with it. One of the things that fascinates me most, and in which I place great faith, are the natural probiotics found in traditional cuisines all over the world.

After that, studying at the Universitat Autònoma de Bellaterra, I realised I was too young to spend my life between laboratory walls, and turned my compass once more. I turned towards the sea — one of my greatest passions since childhood. I sailed the Mediterranean and its islands, the Caribbean and its wonderful exotic produce, and worked for prominent families on Park Avenue, in the whirl of the Upper East Side of New York City. It was there I understood I had been chasing a social dream, not my own.

I had my first major emotional crisis when I realised I had everything — and felt empty and alone. I went on to design and build galleys (boat kitchens) for yachts and vessels, discovering an engineering capacity in myself that pleasantly surprised me. I have always loved building and dismantling flat-pack furniture, and a new profession grew from that passion: project manager for a company specialising in the maintenance and installation of galleys. I was running projects on some of the largest vessels in the world — cruise ships. Then COVID arrived, and I lost everything, literally.

That was when I truly hit rock bottom, and began to face the shadows that were rising to meet a reality of global confusion and fear. I stepped away from gastronomy — the great love of my life, or so I had thought — and opened a small toy shop for children in a village in northern Catalonia. Another defeat added to my back, reducing to ash what little remained of that ambitious young woman who had dreamed of her first Michelin star at just 21. Where was the dreamer who had got it wrong so many times?

Then there was nothing left but to be reborn, like a phoenix from the ashes.

I studied neuroscience, and together with my insatiable hunger to understand people — built through ten years as a nomad, three of them at sea — I realised that my purpose is to cook as a way of teaching a path: one on which you discover who you are, and can give yourself what you need and what you desire. Because without both of those things, at least for me, I am never quite whole. And you — are you satisfied with the lifestyle habits you have right now?