For Chefs, Being Ethical Is More Important Than Being Famous

Sumito Estévez is the most mass-media-saturated chef in Latin America: he hosts several TV shows, writes cookbooks, and is the face of many brands. But this famous cook is not looking for fame. What he really wants is to shape a new type of cook: a guy that cares more about ethics than celebrity.

I don't pretend to humble-brag. I know that I have a legacy in the Venezuelan gastronomy scene, and that there is a "before" and an "after" of what I have done as a chef.

I have spent years dividing my time between the kitchen, TV and radio stations, publishing houses, and newspapers offices. I love to be a cook, but I have always felt it necessary to communicate, to evangelize—even when I was a physicist, even before I dedicated myself to being a cook.

Laureano, my manager, once told me: "If you had stayed in physics, you would have a radio show, a TV show, and a newspaper column about physics."

I studied physics because I loved it, because my father is a physicist, and because ever since I was a little kid, I had been hearing about the subject. When I sent my thesis to my university, however, I saw an interview with Franz Conde; he had come to Venezuela to do a festival of haute cuisine. It was 1989. Out of curiosity, I went to eat at the restaurant at which he was cooking. I was very impressed, because I didn't know that it was even possible to cook in such a perfect way. It was like a slap to my face when I got to know that world.

I spoke with a chef to see if he would let me stay in his kitchen. It was like love at first sight. I never intended to be unfaithful to physics, so I had a crisis in which I had to make the decision to be a cook. It was a hard decision, but it was the right thing to do.

Six years after changing path, I started my first restaurant, Sumito, in the city of Mérida. Since then, my career grew immensely. I did a few internships in kitchens in New York and LA, and in 2003 my first TV show, Puro Sumo, was broadcast across all of Latin America. Then I hosted a weekly show, Nueva Cocina Latina, on a Spanish network called Canal Cocina. During those years, I started numerous culinary enterprises. I became the announcer of a radio show called Diary of a Chef, and I started writing a column in El Nacional.

Yes, I am one of the most mass-media-saturated cooks in Latin America. But in that way I help to make cooking as a career more popular in Venezuela.

Television makes people interested in a cultural expression. I grew up in a household in which we listened to opera all the time, even when it wasn't popular in Venezuela. But when the Three Tenors—Placido Domingo, José Carreras, and Luciano Pavarotti—started to do massive shows in the 90s (with awful acoustics, of course), every snobbish fan and opera expert yelled: "What a disgrace!" But that was a good thing. There are now thousands of kids studying opera in Venezuela because they saw it on TV.

The same thing happened with cooking. When they saw cooks on TV, the kids wanted to be cooks, too. It's part of my legacy. But there is a more serious thing behind all that.

I don't care about being famous; I am interested in being a good chef and conducting myself ethically. Now that Venezuela is producing world-class chefs, I want them to understand that cooking is a profession and not just a way to become a celebrity.

That is why I funded two cooking schools—one in Caracas that follows a traditional educational system, and another one in Margarita city, where I accept just 54 students a year that come from all over the country. That one is more like an ashram: Once they get in, they are compelled to follow our philosophy.

The first thing that I want to teach kids is that when they become chefs they should stick to their culture, because cooking is a cultural practice. We should recognize where we stand and contribute culturally to our country through our professions. At the same time, we should be aware of our community around us, our neighborhood, the producers, our coworkers. People are important.

Beyond that, I am interested that they understand that cooking is a profession. This is the easiest way to explain it: "If you are a carpenter, you are learning a profession. You are not doing a PhD in carpentry and specializing in ebony. You just prepare yourself to open a shop."

On the other hand, I always ask them to document everything that they do. If you search for "Norway" on Google, you will get many results related to the culture of that country; but if you look up "Venezuela," the first things you'll find are news stories about violence and food shortages. But our kitchens can change this, and not only show the dark side of our country. Besides, I believe that documentation is important because of what a friend once told me: "To know is an individual act, but intelligence is a collective act."

But the hardest part to teach is ethics. I tell my students that before making something, they should ask themselves: Doing what I'm doing, have I negatively affected people financially? Did I hurt the planet? Did I make someone else sick? Did I make someone else culturally poorer?

I ask myself these things all day. I am in no position to take someone out of poverty, to reverse climate change, to cure a sick person, or to dispossess someone culturally, but I am able to not make it worse. I won't cook anything that died stressfully. That is why is so hard for me to use beef, because cows suffer too much in the slaughterhouse. I never cook if I am in a bad mood, because if I feel terrible I will transmit it to the food. I don't waste food, which is why my garnishes are ugly—I hate radish wheels because you waste half of the product just to make the plate visually pleasing.

It can't be possible that aesthetics trumps poverty.

I don't want to live anywhere else but here in Venezuela, even with all the craziness that we are going through at the moment. When I leave my country, I act like Hansel and Gretel: I leave little pieces of culture around to know the way back to my homeland—but also so that others will want to come visit my country, and see that there is more to it than violence.

As told to Issa Plancarte