# Alberto González first Cuban chef to obtain a Michelin Star

**Date:** 11/28/2021

Alberto González, a chef by profession and baker by heritage, enjoys his work at Salchipizza, a small business he started just a few meters from where he was born 50 years ago in Centro Habana, and there he serves everyone who comes to taste his breads with the same affection he shows to the neighbors on the block.

Many told him he was crazy to start a bread business on the busy Infanta street, near other local bakeries even, at a time when private businesses were beginning to boom in the country in 2013, but Alberto turned a deaf ear to all the criticism he could receive back then.

After more than 15 years living in Italy, where he even became part of the Michelin Guide by winning one of its coveted stars while working at a prestigious local restaurant—which he maintained from 2007 to 2009—the renowned international chef returned to his beloved neighborhood and started his bread business, as a way of giving thanks for what he learned there and to his origins.

Any other person who arrived here with his accolades and fame might have sought another market, offered exquisite service and grand displays, but Alberto seems to reject all that whenever you visit the place, without distinctions or protocols.

Upon arriving at the place, a curious eye would notice the mechanism with bottles installed near the ceiling of the local, which at first glance seems part of the décor, when it really is "aerodynamic physics, to disperse heat. The air conditioning that is here is a satire. With this bottle method we maintain a stable temperature for our breads and we don't use a stove either. So one way or another, they say the breads are good," he jokes about it.

Alberto takes his life experience very seriously, evidence of which is precisely this mechanism that was engraved in him since childhood when he learned of "a similar method, but in reverse that was found in the San Francisco de Asís convent, before it was repaired at a time when it was destroyed, when Old Havana was nothing, back when you went to La Bodeguita del Medio and ate with 25 Cuban pesos."

"Rescuing traditions is being reborn, in a figurative sense. When you rescue that you turn to memory and ancestors and then is when you relive the past, which doesn't mean going backward, but remembering," he affirms with the certainty of someone who has lived a lot and likes to share his knowledge.

That's why he opened a bread business, to pay tribute to the tradition of his grandmother, a great master baker whom he never stops mentioning whenever he's asked about the reasons why he decided to go ahead with this idea.

Whenever they interview him—he says—they ask him how he came to deserve the much-coveted Michelin Star and "I myself don't know, bro. It's a very strange thing because everyone asks me and I can't explain it with certainty," at that moment he was working at a prestigious restaurant in Italy, where he maintained the distinction.

Really, that doesn't keep him up at night nor does he boast excessively about the star, perhaps because he didn't think he would receive it when he decided on cooking. "I went young with eagerness, so much eagerness to see what a fried egg really was, what bread really was, what many things that existed in the kitchen that I didn't see really were," he recalls.

"That allowed me to open my horizons having already studied Food Chemistry in Cuba. I wanted to know that there was a little more to what cooking is, and that doesn't mean that ours is boarded up."

About our cuisine and what is necessary to carry out a business of this kind, he comments that the fundamental thing is not to forget our traditions which are nothing more than "your roots, and without that you can't have a clear path, so you'll drift. You have to know where you came from because that is the solution to many problems, not forgetting that."

"You have to know where you came from because that is the solution to many problems." Photo: Otmaro Rodríguez

"Regardless of whether you can have 20 pesos to start a cooking business, you have to have principles and a good concept formed about what you are going to do, especially in the case of food, because then if you only seek to make money, don't open a restaurant, set up a 'chinchal' and make money with that," he clarifies.

It's not just any business model, he adds, "we're talking about what moves the world which is food, not gasoline and oil. Through food you can even know the culture of a country, so imagine if everyone who had money in Cuba opened a restaurant..."

In his case, he points out: "I saw the opportunity and honestly it's up to us to fix this, not someone else, that's why the idea of coming back and giving the Cuban the opportunity, in my case with bread, because I don't do anything else, it's the opportunity to give people another variety of bread and not just one type, we make between 14-16 varieties of breads, even whole wheat flour made here by us."

"It's crazy—he doesn't deny it—but with sense, with concept in my origins because I took the knowledge from my grandmother who was a great baker."

"I don't know how to do anything else but this, although really I'm not a baker, I did this in honor of my grandmother. I'm an International Cuisine Chef, with degrees in several places, but I don't have a baker's degree, although I'm not 'putting myself out there' either, as we say in good Cuban."

"It's something I do with a lot of love and dedication, putting my all into it, also giving myself the opportunity to know that there is another possibility. Here when I started almost 10 years ago they told me I was crazy and look now... I didn't invent any of this because whoever tells you they invented bread, that person is the one who's crazy."