- The current number 6 best chef in the world, according to World’s 50 Best, Virgilio Martinez was recently in Dubai
- He was in town to celebrate the 2nd anniversary of his restaurant Lima Dubai
- So what happens when you put a world’s best chef on a fishing boat off the coast of Dubai?
For those not in the know, Virgilio Martinez entered mass consciousness after his appearance on the Netflix hit Chef’s Table in 2017. He has a number of restaurants all over the world, including Central Restaurante which is currently ranked number six on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list.
He opened his Dubai restaurant Lima Dubai in 2017 and while he was here for the second-anniversary celebrations, we decided to take Martinez out on a boat in the middle of the Arabian sea to see if we could catch some fish and ask him some questions on what sustainability means to him.
As the founder of the first Peruvian restaurant to win a Michelin star (with LIMA London) the chef has become a strong ambassador for the cuisine globally and his wife, Pía León, was recently named the Best Female Chef in Latin America. With a brand-new restaurant in Hong Kong (Ichu, Peru in collaboration with Dubai’s Bulldozer Group), he’s definitely spreading some Peruvian food across the world.
But we didn’t want to just do one of the same run-of-the-mill chef interviews at his restaurant in City Walk. We decided to take Martinez out at 7am after a late evening out into the middle of the Arabian sea to see if we could catch some fish.
But while we had chef Virgilio held as our captive out at sea we managed to get some time with him to understand why sustainability and awareness on this issue is such a big burning project for the Peruvian chef.
