Showcooking: Versàtil and Zero-Mile Cuisine

Local cuisine begins long before an ingredient reaches the kitchen. It starts in the territory, in understanding the people behind the products and, in the case of fish, in the direct relationship with the sea and those who go out fishing every day.
In this showcooking, Dragos Badea, chef at Versátil restaurant, will prepare a dish using locally sourced fish, demonstrating how local ingredients can become the starting point for contemporary, sustainable cuisine that is deeply connected to its surroundings.
The preparation will provide an opportunity to explore the restaurant’s relationship with the local fishermen’s guild and reflect on the importance of building closer connections between restaurants and the local fishing sector. Understanding which species are landed at the harbour, respecting their seasonality and adapting the kitchen to what the sea provides makes it possible to work with local products while also giving greater visibility to species that may be less familiar to consumers.
The showcooking will also explore the recovery of traditional fish recipes and preparations. This culinary heritage has been built over generations around the ingredients provided by the local environment and can now become a source of inspiration for contemporary cuisine. Recovering these recipes does not necessarily mean reproducing them exactly, but rather understanding their ingredients, techniques and origins in order to reinterpret them from a contemporary perspective.
Through live cooking, Dragos Badea will demonstrate an approach to gastronomy based on the zero-mile philosophy, where proximity is not simply a matter of distance, but also of knowledge, commitment and relationships with producers.
Local ingredients, tradition, territory and sustainability will come together in a session that explores the role restaurants can play in promoting local fishing, preserving culinary heritage and building more responsible gastronomic models.
A proposal that shows how looking towards the future of cuisine also means looking again at our immediate surroundings, discovering what we have close to us and strengthening the connections between the sea, fishermen, chefs and the table.