Elisa Menendez
LESS than a month after achieving every chef’s dream of winning three Michelin Stars, Dani Garcia has announced that he will close his Marbella restaurant.
The news has rocked the global gastronomy scene, after the Andalucian chef spent 20 years striving for the highest culinary accolade available, only to let it go 22 days later.
It comes after Garcia, 42, won the highly coveted third star for his eponymous Puente Romano restaurant on November 21 in Lisbon.
The Marbellin announced the shock news on Instagram this afternoon, with a video of a team meeting in which he reveals there will only be 314 days left in business.
He explains that he will close the restaurant in a bid to focus on his next challenge of making the world fall in love with Andalucian cuisine.
“What is life without a dream ahead?” the chef questions his staff in the video.
“Now we will chase another dream, to conquer the world in reverse, inverting the pyramid. I’m sorry to do this but we are not only haute cuisine – we are chefs.”
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However, Garcia made it clear that they will have ‘three stars for the rest of our lives’ and asked the team for the ‘utmost respect for Michelin’ as they owe their careers to the organisation.
“Achieving this dream, I will take my vision of Andalucian gastronomy to every corner and every audience in the world,” the father-of-two wrote on Instagram.
The chef has always been somewhat of a visionary, having achieved his first Michelin Star at the age of 25 – the youngest in Spain at the time to ever be awarded the accolade.
