 Hello, everyone. Hope you're having just as great a day as I am. I'm very excited to be here to introduce you to the next speaker today. It's, to me, a superwoman. A superwoman, just like Camilla who we saw earlier this morning, like Jessica who cooked lunch for us, like Trish, where are you, Trish? Back there. Trish, I don't know if you can see me, but thank you so much. Thank you so, so much. And please, everyone, just do what Trish says. Just listen. And we instantly have a better world, I feel. But also, J.F.A. this morning, who started just fueling me with positive energy. And just all of these people are a part of us. And I think it's very important to say with the, with mad and what mad is about, that it's not just someone doing something for others. We are all mad. Everyone in here is a part of this. And I think we need to take advantage of the things that we learn over these days and also use the power that it gives us to be a part of this community. But your next speaker is former colleague, very dear friend, someone that I admire and respect probably way more than she would realize. Please welcome Rocio Sanchez. Hello. Okay. Well, thank you. First of all, I really do want to thank the mad team in all the previous symposiums. I've always been the one with the mad T-shirt running around like crazy, not sleeping anything. So being here on stage is something that I don't take for granted. Very proud. I'm very happy to be up here and share a little bit about what I've learned. And how I, sorry, I got the wrong notes here. And how I've managed to find a purpose and identity in my life and work. My name is Rocio Sanchez. And I'm a chef here in Copenhagen. I make Mexican food. And it's pretty good. Yes, in Denmark. So three years ago, I opened my first taqueria in 2015. And the year after that, I opened the second. And early this year, we opened a restaurant called Sanchez. Before that, I worked at Noma for five years. First as a head pastry chef. And the last few years as a head of research, one of the head of research chefs in the test kitchen. So I have a lot of experience kind of working on the menu, both for here in Denmark and in all the pop up restaurants that we did, mainly Japan and Mexico. I was born in Chicago. My parents met there after they immigrated from Mexico. So from Guanajuato and San Luis Potosi. So I grew up in a Mexican family in a neighborhood called La Villita. It's also known as Little Village. So it's primarily Mexican immigrant neighborhood. Really a working class neighborhood. That's me in a September 15th parade with a Mexican flag. So I started cooking professionally in Chicago when I was 19. And then I quickly set my eyes to work in New York City. I thought that I really should take this very seriously. And if I really wanted to do it, I needed to go work among the best. And at that time, technique meant everything to me. So I really sought out to work with the best. And for me, that was with Wally Dufresne and Alex Stupak spent a long time there. Because the food that they were making was really the most interesting to me. So throughout all my life, I've always kind of gravitated towards challenges and kind of allowed my interest to dictate where I lived. So I've been in Copenhagen now almost 10 years. That's Laura, my head chef. Woo! She gave me a nice shot of mezcal backstage. So thank you for that. The truth is, yeah, Laura. The truth is I could have stayed at Nomar forever. I find it so inspiring. I think there's always that push to do something more and challenge yourself. But as with any aspiring chef, you always get the question of what you should do with your life. And you start asking yourself what you should do with your life. But when I tried to imagine the kind of food that I would be cooking, I was a little confused. As a teenager, even as a little girl, I always thought I would want to own something. I always really wanted to have some sort of small shop or something I thought about, but I never could really think of what that was. In my early 20s, I always talked about opening a mezcal shop. But that's as far as I got. I worked so hard for so long trying to cook other people's food and working my butt off to execute their vision while at the same time trying to add my little tiny bit of personality into it. So now I needed to hone in and focus all that energy on myself and what matters to me. The problem is I wasn't sure what that meant. I mean, a few years ago, if you would have asked me where I'm from, I maybe would have got a little defensive or what you need to know or ignored you a bit, but not because, you know, that Renee used to call it New York attitude. But I just didn't know how to talk about myself. And I didn't know what I should say about myself. So as far as I was concerned, I had that same old boring immigrant story. You know, grew up in Chicago from immigrant parents considered Mexican by the American and the American or the Mexican considered me American. So I moved to Europe because I really wanted to get away from it all. And I wanted to kind of start from scratch because I truly thrive in that fear that you get when you go into a new kitchen or when you go into a new city and you feel this huge potential. And I quickly found that at Noma. All the bursts of flavors, everything that I've never tasted before, the culture, the way of working, everything was new to me. And it was exactly what I was looking for. And this is when you were introducing Woods Oral to the world. So that was fun. So when I first began working on the taquerias, my creative vision was far from complete. I was really attracted to the idea of showing my respect and appreciation for Mexican flavors. Growing up as a child of immigrants, there is a little bit of cloud of shame that the food that we're doing is not worth paying real money for. So I dreamed of making a little bit of a difference, maybe in Europe, because I did see it kind of a few decades behind the states. And I dreamed of making a nice masa from corn from Mexico and making some nice salsa on top with it. But I still couldn't put into words why I was doing it. I couldn't answer the simple question of where's home? I felt at home in Mexico. Every time I was in Mexico, my soul is fulfilled and I feel happy. But my family, all my immediate families in Chicago, my dad and my brother, but physically I've been in Copenhagen for 10 years almost. So I worked frantically my whole life and I buried those questions very deep. And once we opened the taquerias, I worked at that same frantic pace. Last year with the taquerias up and running, I entered into a creative partnership with Noma in Tulum. And we spent a third of the year researching in the Yucatan. It was an amazing eye-opening experience. And when I got back, I decided that I really needed to remove all of this clutter from my head. I had all these people in my ear telling me who I am and what I should be doing. And up until that point, I tried to listen to it all and try to find the path that satisfied the most people. So when I got back, I decided to start meditating, to find a calmness within myself, to close my eyes and find solitude, and to ask myself these difficult questions without panicking. To find a clarity about who I was and where I was going. Did I ever feel silly when I was meditating? Sometimes. But it was only because I wasn't used to taking that time for myself or asking for that privacy. I hear a little murmurs from the chefs at work if I'm going to grow off, but it doesn't matter because as far as I'm concerned, it's some people need caffeine, some people need exercise to get through the day. And I think taking care of your head is no different. I have a little story. If you ever practiced meditating, you're told that you shouldn't allow yourself to be interrupted. And I made a mistake the first time sitting in my apartment and my phone wasn't off. And someone called me and I quickly answered it. And as soon as I answered it, a pain shot right to my head and I fell back on my back with my phone in my cheek. The conversation super fuzzy and I was trying to kind of fade away the pain and I don't do it ever since. I don't allow myself to get distracted because taking care of ourselves is not something that we're taught to do as cooks, but it's a really important lesson. This symposium is all about gaps. And I think this is a gap that a lot of cooks can relate to. For most of our careers, we're taught super, super affection and fine inspiration with somebody else's vision in mind. We're taught that great cooks are dedicated people that are willing to execute what they're asked to do. Yes, chef. And that's true to a certain point. But we're also told that the best chefs are the chefs that cook the food that's the most personal. And it takes an incredible amount of courage and self-acceptance to break away from what you've been taught your whole life and to find something that's really new and personal. That means that for most of us, there's a huge gap between what we do as cooks and who we are as people. I've spent the last couple of years trying to close that gap. My hope is that everyone in this industry can figure out a way to make their lives a little more complete, to close the gap between what they do for a living and what they really care about in life. And I'm not here to tell you how to get from point A to point B or how to be creative or what to do in your career or how to run your business. But I want to tell you what I've learned and that is to take care of yourself. To let yourself be a part of the process. If I had to compare it, I'd say it's like being in beta mode. Even though the results may be scary, you have to trust that no matter how many times you fail, you'll be able to get back up. Maybe you'll open up a restaurant and it closes and maybe you open up five and you close them all or maybe you open up at the caria and it closes. The truth is, if it's worth, it's worth it if it's getting closer to finding what's important to you. There's not going to be one moment of clarity where you'll know exactly what you should do. It's not going to fall in your lap. I can think of so many well-respected chefs, chefs, people that we admire who are in this room and they're still trying to figure it out. They're still trying to figure out how to define themselves, how to define their food. Still searching for that way. For me, I've traveled the world trying to figure it out and I've been away from home for almost a decade. But it wasn't until I actually shut down and closed my eyes and asked myself these questions that I can really find any answers. 10 years ago or 20 years ago, a few would have asked that Chicana girl from the south side of Chicago, if she ever would have had the confidence to open a Mexican-inspired restaurant in Europe, I think the answer would have been very different. Today, not only am I sure about the food that we're cooking, but I believe in its value to the city I now call home. It takes work, meditating and stopping to concentrate on tough questions, working to put into words who you are and what it represents. These are the aspects of cooking you don't really think about, but it's very, very apparent in the food that you serve. For me, it's worked out that my identity comes from my heritage, my family's from Mexico, and now I'm trying to focus in on those flavors, but with my experiences of them. But that's not the case for everyone. Your identity can come from anywhere. My point is that it won't come naturally. I've only been working on this for maybe a year. Meditation has really improved my form of communication. We've still got a lot of work to do, but we're definitely trying to fly in the plane as it's being built, and I can't stress how important it is to accept and take care of yourself. It's important for your development, your team, and your business. This process has helped me push toward what matters to me, which is my staff, whom I consider family, this city, and my community around the world. I feel there's a purpose to what we're making now. Today at the restaurant, I think that people can really feel the pride and emotion in our food, and it's not authentic Mexican food. It's not Nordic or fusion. If we still use that word, it's food that reflects the experiences of my team and I. Mexico's culinary culture is incredible. There's a great taco culture in Chicago, where I'm from. There's an amazing one in LA that we all know of, and now, funny enough, a little teeny tiny one in Copenhagen, and it's pretty fucking crazy what can happen when people can just accept themselves and say it's going to be different and it's going to be fine. So allow yourself to be in the beta mode, put in the work to find yourself and own it.