About Navarra Gastronomic Week
The Navarra region in Spain visits Miami and New York to present its unique food and wine. Restaurants feature special menus and events are scheduled highlighting the unique Navarra gastronomy. Chefs and enologist will be conducting wine tastings and culinary exhibitions to demonstrate Navarra’s rich history that spans centuries producing a cuisine of complex flavors and mixed textures.
Climate and topography make Navarra an extraordinarily fertile region…an historic distinctive cuisine with multi-national influences. Navarrese cooking incorporates local products of the highest quality, with a great variety of mushrooms and other fungi; superb meats, game, and fowl; Cantabrian fish; regional cheeses like Roncal, Aezcoa-Valcarlos and Idiazabal; and locally produced olive oil.
Navarra in the North of Spain, bordered by France, Castilla, Aragon and the Basque Country is a vital part of the Route of Saint James (Camino de Santiago). Its rich history is celebrated today with many festivities that attract visitors world-wide. The best known is perhaps the Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona, celebrated each July with eight animated days of bull running and immortalized by Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises.
Expert chefs and enologists from Navarra are available for cooking demos and wine tastings.
Featured enologists:
ANA LAGUNA – Navarra School OF Tasting
Ana Laguna has been a wine-taster for 15 years; she is a wine specialist with experience in wine export and marketing. Ana, working in collaboration with the Navarra School of Tasting, organizes tastings and other wine and culinary events internationally as well as in Spain itself.
The Navarra School of Tasting was founded and is directed by Pilar García-Granero. This graduate of the University of Burgos, is an enologist of various wine cellars, as well as a member and ex-president of the Navarra Association of Wine. She is also a professor of a “Wine & Gastronomy” course at the Navarra Tourism & Business School. A renowned wine connoisseur, she has trained many professionals and lovers of wine in the delights of Spanish wines, especially the wonderful vintages of Navarra.
For the past ten years, The Navarra School of Tasting has organized tastings of local Spanish wines and global vintages, also tasting courses for professionals and aficionados. It directs and oversees the training of staff for restaurants and hotel chains, specializing in elegant wine presentations of various Spanish vineyards. The school advises vintners about presentations of wine and gastronomy.
Spanish wine in general and Navarran in particular have become world renowned and this is why Ana Laguna has been collaborating with Pilar García-Granero. Together they prepare the wine and food presentations that the Spanish Institute of Foreign Trade and the Chambers of Commerce of Spain are introducing internationally.
Pilar and Ana are founders of the Tasting Club “El Enervo” in Pamplona, which helps in the familiarization and awareness of the rich Navarra Gastronomy. They collaborate with celebrated chefs and Navarra producers, developing products and recipes destined to accompany the Navarra wines. Both are founding members of the Navarra Gastronomical Academy. This institution selects and classifies the Navarra restaurants which will be included in the well-known “Campsa” Guide.
ROBIN KELLEY O'CONNOR
Robin Kelley O’Connor has been passionately involved in every sector of the wine and spirits trade: marketing, sales, educating, and tasting wines and spirits from throughout the world. His experience spans all aspects of the business: sommelier, importer, marketer, wine writer, international wine judge, and spokesman.
For the last seventeen years, Mr. O’Connor has traveled the United States, Canada, and Mexico as the tireless ambassador and spokesperson for the Bordeaux Wine Bureau, representing the Conseil Interprofessionnel du Vin de Bordeaux (Bordeaux Wine Trade Council) and its 10,500 growers, 53 cooperative cellars, 400 shippers, and its more than 6,000 châteaux. He aims to market the diversity, quality, and accessibility of Bordeaux wines to all sectors of the wine trade including university and culinary school students, business, law and medical schools, banking professionals as well as consumers. Since 1989 Mr. O’Connor has conducted over 1800 seminars spreading the word about Bordeaux wines. In 2002 Mr. O’Connor launched the Bordeaux Wine School USA. To maximize national exposure and geographic diversity he created the concept of a Bordeaux Wine School on wheels. He achieved this by forging strategic partnerships and alliances with organizations such as The Society of Wine Educators, The Institute of Culinary Education (New York City), Disney Epcot Annual International Wine & Food Festival (Orlando, FL), The Collins School of Hospitality Management California State Polytechnic University Pomona, House of Glunz (Chicago), and Boston University School of Hospitality Administration.
In addition to his Liaison role for the Bordeaux Wine Bureau Mr. O’Connor accepted a wine emissary position from WOSA-Wines of South Africa in the spring of 2005 to create educational modules for the trade.
A Maryland native, Mr. O’Connor credits a series of wine courses at the University of Maryland for sparking his interest in the wine profession. His initial study of wine was that of the Burgundy region. Fortuitously for Mr. O’Connor, his professor, Dr. Hamilton Mowbray was a passionate scholar of Burgundy wines. In addition, the University, conveniently located on the outskirts of Washington D.C., afforded Mr. O’Connor easy access to some of the best Burgundy wine merchants in the entire country. On Mr. O’Connor’s first visit to France he went to Burgundy for an extensive study exploration of the vineyards from Dijon through the Côte d’Or , Côte Chalonnaise to the Mâconnais.
Subsequent to his university studies, he worked as a student winemaker for two years in Libourne, France at Etablissement Jean-Pierre Moueix’s various Châteaux in the Pomerol, Fronsac and Saint-Emilion regions as well as their famed Château Pétrus. He also produced Champagne with the House of Krug. Further, he spent a harvest in Côtes du Roussillon, as well as Vevey in the Lavaux on Lac Léman in Switzerland and a year making wine in the Northern Spanish province of Navarra.
Mr. O’Connor has written a weekly wine column for The Trenton Times. He sits on several wine magazine tasting panels. Mr. O’Connor holds a diploma from the Wine & Spirits Education Trust (DWS) in London, has passed the Society of Wine Educators Certified Wine Educators (CWE) exam, Certified Specialist of Wine (CSW) exam. In October 2003 he became President of the Society of Wine Educators. He is on the Board of Directors of The New York Chapter of the American Institute of Wine & Food. Recently he passed the Court of Master Sommeliers’ Certified Sommelier exam. For sixteen years has been a regular panelist every June at Food and Wine Magazine’s Classic in Aspen. He annually lectures on Crystal Cruise Line. In January 2005 O’Connor was invited to join the Governing Wine Sterling Committee of the Los Angeles County Fair ‘Wines of the World Competition’ (the nation’s oldest professional wine competition). In the spring of 2005 he was the sole American judge at the Vinitaly International Wine Competition in Verona.
He is an active member in many wine and food societies, including several professional sommelier associations and the Commanderie de Bordeaux. Mr. O’Connor has been inducted into the prestigious Commanderie du Bontemps de Médoc- des Graves et de Sauternes-Barsac, the Jurade de Saint-Emilion and Les Hospitaliers de Pomerol.
Featured chef:
CHEF TERESA GIL - Restaurant Don Pablo
A calling to be a chef...
Teresa Gil abandoned her English Language degree in the University of Zaragoza when she, by coincidence, came into contact with the world of cooking. Step by step she immersed herself into this world through different courses and gastronomic collaborations with Chef Luis Irizar from the small region of Guipuzcoa. Through his tutelage her eyes were opened to the world of Haute Cuisine.
For many years she was head chef and owner of the Hotel Iturrimurri’s restaurant. Here she continued her culinary education inventing unique menus and participating in various gastronomic events.
With her growing rich experience and creative energy, she embarked on a new endeavour: converting a former highway diner into a gastronomic reference point between Vitoria, San Sebastián and Pamplona. It drew sophisticated clients not only for its daily menu but for its organization of business banquets, etc…
In 2000, Luis Irizar purchased along with her family, the DON PABLO of Pamplona. This move in her career melded her cuisine into a unique combination of stylish modern food trends of Pamplona and the traditional Navarran cuisine. She absorbed and perfected new dishes and techniques combining fares such as the Spanish Catalan and Japanese. Her imaginative menus have attracted a wide array of visiting chefs, coming all the way from Israel, Japan, Argentina and elsewhere.
The DON PABLO’S cuisine has become well known throughout the world primarily because of its perfect use of regional products: vegetables like spring and autumn wild mushrooms, seafood like baby squid in its own ink, Cod Ajoarriero, Sea Bass, and Turbot, meats such as Navarran beef, pig’s trotters stuffed with wild mushrooms and pigeon or dilled partridge.
In Teresa’s opinion dessert is one’s fondest memory of a good meal. Her creations are innovative with regards to form, colors and textures using the most varied products from apple to coconut, milk to cheese, without, of course, forgetting the different chocolates, sorbets and meringues.
Perhaps the most recent and distinguished of Teresa’s cuisine is her miniature Haute Cuisine or Pinxos (a kind of tapas); small plates designed to be savoured in little portions. They are prized for originality and presentation and have been awarded every year since 2001 in the Week of Pinxos in Pamplona. Recently, she was invited to be a speaker in the “VI Congress of the Best of Gastronomy” celebrated in San Sebastián in the month of November.
For more information:
www.restaurantedonpablo.com
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