This blog has been years in the making – in the dog-eared lifestyle magazine in my brain. 

As a long-time journalist, decade-old Madrid expat with ties to the restaurant industry, and staunch believer of Foodism, I’ve long wanted to scribble down my culinary and oenophile adventures and rubberstamp my membership in the blogosphere. Madrid after all is a city of discovery – walking down its vibrant streets that form the architecture of this global metropolis, you will always find something new and cool and worthy of offering to the Instagram gods. 

(Por ejemplo, just a few weeks ago, a cozy new coffee takeaway called Santa Kaffeina opened up on my street and it’s been a godsend in fuelling my my arabica habit with its Fair Trade-produced coffee beans from the coffee-growing countries in Latin America.) 

Yet years of mastering the art of procrastination have prevented me from starting this a lot sooner. Today however, I have a living, breathing and growing baby of a project that’s part culinary enterprise and part social initiative that I am excited to chronicle. It’s called Project Chefugee, where me and a small team of volunteers have volted in with refugee chefs from different parts of the world to offer pop-up dinners and cooking classes around Madrid. (More on that later!)

I will also be tackling some important food and nutrition issues, starting with the (baseless) war on gluten, conversations with chefs and nutritionists, and what everybody should know about sugar.

As much as I love food and discovering new places in my adopted city, I also believe that part of the eating experience is sharing it with people. From my humble little vantage point, I’ve been so lucky to immerse myself in many other cultures just by being invited to dine with people from all corners of the world – a testament to the growing diversity and multiculturalism of Madrid. 

And so I’d like to think of all my readers and future readers like my companions on the dinner table, breaking news while breaking bread and savouring a copa as well as sparkling conversations. Here’s to a new year of finally getting over years of procrastination! Here’s to new discoveries, new words, and good food to bring people closer together in the name of Foodism.