Part 1
There are very few things that Ángel León hasn’t done with the fruits of the sea.
In 2008, as a young, unknown chef, he took a loin from one fish and attached it to the loin of another, using collagen to bind the two proteins together. He called them hybrids and served them to unsuspecting diners at Aponiente, his restaurant in the southern Spanish port town of El Puerto de Santa María, just across the bay from Cádiz. He discovered that fish eyes, cooked at 55°C in a thermal circulator until the gelatin collapsed, made excellent thickening agents for umami-rich sauces. Next he found that micro-algae could sequester the impurities of cloudy kitchen stocks the same way an egg white does in classical French cooking. In the years since, León has used sea bass to make mortadella; mussels to make blood sausage; moray eel skin to mimic crispy pigskins; boiled hake to fashion fettuccine noodles; and various parts of a tuna’s head to create a towering, gelatinous, fall-apart osso buco.
It is these creations, and the relentless curiosity behind them, that have helped turn León into one of most influential chefs in the world. The Spaniards call him the Chef del Mar, a man singularly dedicated to the sea and its bounty. But Aponiente isn’t anything like other gilded seafood temples around the world. You won’t find Norwegian lobster there. Or Scottish langoustines. Or Hokkaido uni. In fact, unless you’re an Andalusian fisherman it’s unlikely you’ll know most of the species León serves to his guests.
That’s because León isn’t interested in plucking from the sea its most celebrated creatures. He wants to go deeper to find something you didn’t know existed: “What’s more hedonistic, eating something no one on the face of the earth has ever tried, or eating another f-cking spoon of caviar?” Jellyfish, sea worms, a bounty of sea “vegetables” foraged from the ocean floor: all have found their way onto his menu.
But for León, hedonism is beside the point. Everything that he does communicates an unshakable -commitment to honoring the ocean. He thinks about the sea the way a physicist or an astronomer thinks about the sky: as an infinitely discoverable space, where the right mix of curiosity and discipline can yield solutions to some of the most pressing problems of the 21st century. In his wide-eyed enthusiasm and boyish curiosity and fierce marine mania, he comes across as a mixture of Captain Nemo and Willy Wonka.
Follow León long enough, and you’ll learn that his venture ever deeper into the abyss isn’t a gastro free-for-all but part of a very specific dream that’s been taking shape in his head for years. A dream that extends well beyond the walls of his restaurant and into the coastal plains of Cádiz. In this dream, he sees men with long wooden brooms scraping the surface of the marshes, piling up coarse salt crystals in little white hills that shimmer in the Andalusian sun. He sees the region’s vast network of estuaries overflowing with flora and fauna—tiny, candy-sweet white shrimp, edible seaweeds like marine mesclun mix, sea bream and mackerel in dense silver schools. He sees a series of mills, stone-built and sea-powered, grinding through grains for the region’s daily bread. A wind-swept, sun-kissed saltwater economy, like the one that once made Cádiz a center of the world.
Founded by the Phoenicians in 1100 B.C., Cádiz is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in -Europe. Over the course of three millennia, many of the world’s greatest empires have settled here, attracted by the strategic location: a narrow appendage of land at the edge of the Iberian Peninsula, just beyond the mouth of the Mediterranean. The Romans, Visigoths and Muslims all had their Cádiz years, -fueling their empires with the wealth of this teeming water world. But it wasn’t until the Age of Exploration, when the city served as the launchpad for Spain’s greatest ambitions, including the second and fourth voyages of Columbus to the -Americas, that Cádiz became one of Spain’s wealthiest cities.
Those days have long passed. After Spain lost its American colonies in the 19th century, Cádiz never recovered. Today, it has the highest rate of unemployment of any region in Western Europe. León wants to fix that, to help rebuild the robust sea economy that defined Cádiz’s most storied years. His career has been a slow, steady fight to do just that.
But now, he believes he’s discovered the centerpiece of his ambitious dream: fields of rice stretched out for miles of paddies, the feathery stalks -protruding from the sea itself. Scientists have long identified seagrasses as one of the most vital ecosystems in the fight against climate change, but what few knew is that those blades of grass also contain clusters of small, edible grains with massive potential. Of all the dreams León has chased in this quiet corner of southern Spain, this is the one he plans to build his future around. This, more than the Franken-fish or mussel sausage, is the one that could help rebuild his beloved region and, with any luck, even change the way we feed the world.
“The sea saved me,” León told me one morning in 2019 aboard his 26-ft. fishing boat, Yodo. The sun had just peeked above the horizon as we made our way past the tip of Cádiz, its church spires and mosque domes casting a silhouette of the city’s multi-layered history.
“I was a terrible student. Couldn’t sit still, always in trouble,” he said. “But when my dad took me out here on his boat, everything changed.”
León was born and raised in Cádiz, along with two older sisters and his younger brother Carlos, who helps manage Aponiente. Their dad kept a small fishing boat, and after school and on weekends, he would take his two sons out fishing in the Bay of Cádiz. Ángel León Lara, a hematologist, had high expectations, and often clashed with his son over his terrestrial troubles. “But once we were out on the water, we weren’t father and son,” says León. “We were friends.”
His brother Carlos saw a different sibling out on the water: “The boat is where the barrier between father and son broke down. We’d smoke a joint, tell stories, things that friends did.” Ángel couldn’t sit still long enough to be in a classroom, Carlos told me, but he was captive to the sea. “Most kids are scared to touch creatures from the sea. But Ángel would smell them, touch them, rub their scales, poke their eyes.”
León’s success at sea only served to underscore his struggles on land. His hyperactivity made him a menace in the classroom; he went to five high schools and barely graduated. He enrolled in a hotel school in Seville, where he studied cooking for three years and began to find his footing on terra firma. In 1996, he moved to France to cook at Le Chapon Fin, a Bordeaux institution that opened in 1825.
León remained quiet as we passed fishing boats and jetties on the outskirts of Cádiz, an espresso pinched between his fingertips. Since those early days with his dad, he’s rarely missed a sunrise on the water. His first goal when he fires up Yodo is to get out—out of cell-phone range, out of reach of his restaurant team and his family. “The truth is,” he said, staring- at my notebook, “I like to come out here alone.”
When we hit the open seas, the spell of silence was broken. “Turn left and you hit the Mediterranean, turn right and you’re in the Atlantic,” said León. “Two totally different worlds.” This nexus of two great bodies of water, where two vastly different ecosystems mix into a special cocktail of ocean life, continues to be a chief source of inspiration for León.
León turned on the fish tracker and showed me the schools of fish swimming some 20 m below us. He opened up the bait storage in the rear of the boat, grabbed a squid the size of his hand and worked it onto a giant hook. He rolled another cigarette, put it to his lips and sank into his chair.
“Some days I don’t even fish. I come out here to clear my head. I used to be a -psychopath—-I’d go way out into the ocean on my own. But now I have a family to think about.” León and his wife Marta, who runs the more casual Taberna del Chef del Mar down the road from Aponiente, have a 5-year-old boy, Ángel. “Easily the best dish I’ve ever helped create.”
France taught León discipline—how to clarify a stock, how to debone a quail, how to cook 14 hours a day without complaining. Afterward, he bounced around, cooking in Seville, Toledo, Buenos Aires, preparing to start his own venture.
Back then, El Bulli, on the coast of Catalonia, was known as the best restaurant in the world, and its virtuoso leader, Ferran Adrià, was busy rewriting the rules for fine dining. By the time El Bulli closed in 2011, a generation of disciples had dispersed across the country, spreading the gospel of technical, modernist cuisine that shaped Spain into the gastronomic center of the world for the first decade of the 21st century.
While León is one of the few prominent chefs in the country who did not emerge from the El Bulli system, he carries within him the restaurant’s most enduring legacy: the need to question all conventions. When he opened Aponiente in 2007, León set out to change the way people thought about the ocean. Not just through a radical reimagining of what to do with familiar fish, but by looking for ingredients nobody had ever tasted. He built his menu around pesca de descarte, trash fish: pandora, krill, sea bream, mackerel, moray eel. But in León’s mind, these are some of the most noble and delicious creatures in the sea. He did this as much for the culinary challenge as for a growing streak of environmentalism.
For the first three years, people stopped by, read the menus and turned around. They didn’t -understand what this strange restaurant was trying to do. León found himself teetering on the edge of ruin.
He remembers a talk with Adrià in those early years that helped him trudge on. “Nobody understands me,” he said to the famous chef. “Perfect,” said Adrià. “That’s because you’re pushing the vanguard.”
Nothing was biting aboard Yodo. We were waiting for the tidal bulge, that moment before the tide turns when gravity and inertia cancel each other out—eight minutes of equilibrium that, according to León, is when fish are most active: “If we’re going to catch anything today, it will be then.”
When it hit, León cast his rod off the back edge of the boat and set the line, then ran inside and used the radar to try to position the boat -directly in the middle of what looked like a smudge on the screen. “This is where the action is.”
We sat in silence, waiting for the action, but the action never came and slowly the boat began to be sucked back toward the coastline. The tide had turned.
In 2010, after years of serving just a handful of guests a day, Aponiente won its first Michelin star, a recognition that León says “helped change everything.” In 2014, it won a second star, and suddenly people began to travel to Cádiz specifically to eat at the restaurant. By the time it received its third Michelin star in 2017, Aponiente had gained a strong international presence. León used the growing platform to sharpen his message, working with universities on sustainability projects, organizing events with chefs and academics to discuss the fragility of our ocean ecosystems, developing commercial products like sea bacon, made from the discarded bellies of sea bream and smoked over pineapple.
For all his success, León is not your typical celebrity chef. He rarely leaves his hometown, eschewing the international circuit in favor of long mornings on the water and long evenings in the lab. His clipped-consonant Spanish and small-town humility are more befitting of a fisherman.
“He’s carving out his own path in the food world,” said Cristina Jolonch, one of Spain’s most respected food critics, but “it’s his defense of the sea that -matters most.” León is aware of that. “The day that I have nothing more to offer beyond being a good cook, Aponiente will no longer make sense.”
Every year in January, León and his R&D team travel by train to Madrid Fusion, the food world’s pre-eminent culinary conference, to dazzle auditoriums of journalists and chefs with their latest discoveries. In 2009, he unveiled an edible form of phytoplankton, now used in kitchens across the world. In 2011, León announced the first line of seafood–based charcuterie, using discarded fish parts to make mortadella and blood sausage and chorizo, all dead ringers for the real thing. In 2016, the auditorium went dark as León emerged on the stage with a special cocktail filled with luz de mar, bioluminescent bits found in the bellies of tiny crabs that glowed like a galaxy of stars as he swirled his gin and tonic.
In 2018, León and his team decided to take a different approach. He explained: “We turned the sea upside down. We wanted to really look at the ocean floor to see what secrets it held.” What they found in the murky depths was a vast and varied garden of ocean flora: roots, fruits, leaves. León has a tendency to liken everything he finds underwater to a terrestrial analog, and soon his menus were brimming with sea pears, sea tomatoes, sea artichokes. The so-called vegetables didn’t have the same impact as sparkling crab guts or fish-belly bacon, but León knew he needed to keep his focus on the ocean floor.
That’s how he found something he had been staring at all along. León remembered as a kid in Cádiz seeing vast fields of rice along the fringes of the bay. As he talked to his team, he realized that what he -recalled as rice was actually Zostera marina, eelgrass that grows in coastline meadows around the world.
Juan Martín, Aponiente’s resident biologist who has worked with León for years, knew the plant well. “I had been studying seagrasses for 15 years—but always from the standpoint of the ecosystem. It never occurred to me or anyone else studying it that it was edible.” That is, until León showed up one day at Aponiente with a printout of a 1973 article in Science documenting the diet of the Seri, hunters and gatherers of Sonora, Mexico, who have eaten eelgrass for generations. Like many grains, it required an elaborate process of threshing, winnowing, toasting and pulverizing before being cooked into a slurry with water. The Seri ate the bland paste with condiments to punch up the flavor: honey or, preferably, sea-turtle oil.
There are very few things that Ángel León hasn’t done with the fruits of the sea.
In 2008, as a young, unknown chef, he took a loin from one fish and attached it to the loin of another, using collagen to bind the two proteins together. He called them hybrids and served them to unsuspecting diners at Aponiente, his restaurant in the southern Spanish port town of El Puerto de Santa María, just across the bay from Cádiz. He discovered that fish eyes, cooked at 55°C in a thermal circulator until the gelatin collapsed, made excellent thickening agents for umami-rich sauces. Next he found that micro-algae could sequester the impurities of cloudy kitchen stocks the same way an egg white does in classical French cooking. In the years since, León has used sea bass to make mortadella; mussels to make blood sausage; moray eel skin to mimic crispy pigskins; boiled hake to fashion fettuccine noodles; and various parts of a tuna’s head to create a towering, gelatinous, fall-apart osso buco.
It is these creations, and the relentless curiosity behind them, that have helped turn León into one of most influential chefs in the world. The Spaniards call him the Chef del Mar, a man singularly dedicated to the sea and its bounty. But Aponiente isn’t anything like other gilded seafood temples around the world. You won’t find Norwegian lobster there. Or Scottish langoustines. Or Hokkaido uni. In fact, unless you’re an Andalusian fisherman it’s unlikely you’ll know most of the species León serves to his guests.
That’s because León isn’t interested in plucking from the sea its most celebrated creatures. He wants to go deeper to find something you didn’t know existed: “What’s more hedonistic, eating something no one on the face of the earth has ever tried, or eating another f-cking spoon of caviar?” Jellyfish, sea worms, a bounty of sea “vegetables” foraged from the ocean floor: all have found their way onto his menu.
But for León, hedonism is beside the point. Everything that he does communicates an unshakable -commitment to honoring the ocean. He thinks about the sea the way a physicist or an astronomer thinks about the sky: as an infinitely discoverable space, where the right mix of curiosity and discipline can yield solutions to some of the most pressing problems of the 21st century. In his wide-eyed enthusiasm and boyish curiosity and fierce marine mania, he comes across as a mixture of Captain Nemo and Willy Wonka.
Follow León long enough, and you’ll learn that his venture ever deeper into the abyss isn’t a gastro free-for-all but part of a very specific dream that’s been taking shape in his head for years. A dream that extends well beyond the walls of his restaurant and into the coastal plains of Cádiz. In this dream, he sees men with long wooden brooms scraping the surface of the marshes, piling up coarse salt crystals in little white hills that shimmer in the Andalusian sun. He sees the region’s vast network of estuaries overflowing with flora and fauna—tiny, candy-sweet white shrimp, edible seaweeds like marine mesclun mix, sea bream and mackerel in dense silver schools. He sees a series of mills, stone-built and sea-powered, grinding through grains for the region’s daily bread. A wind-swept, sun-kissed saltwater economy, like the one that once made Cádiz a center of the world.
Founded by the Phoenicians in 1100 B.C., Cádiz is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in -Europe. Over the course of three millennia, many of the world’s greatest empires have settled here, attracted by the strategic location: a narrow appendage of land at the edge of the Iberian Peninsula, just beyond the mouth of the Mediterranean. The Romans, Visigoths and Muslims all had their Cádiz years, -fueling their empires with the wealth of this teeming water world. But it wasn’t until the Age of Exploration, when the city served as the launchpad for Spain’s greatest ambitions, including the second and fourth voyages of Columbus to the -Americas, that Cádiz became one of Spain’s wealthiest cities.
Those days have long passed. After Spain lost its American colonies in the 19th century, Cádiz never recovered. Today, it has the highest rate of unemployment of any region in Western Europe. León wants to fix that, to help rebuild the robust sea economy that defined Cádiz’s most storied years. His career has been a slow, steady fight to do just that.
But now, he believes he’s discovered the centerpiece of his ambitious dream: fields of rice stretched out for miles of paddies, the feathery stalks -protruding from the sea itself. Scientists have long identified seagrasses as one of the most vital ecosystems in the fight against climate change, but what few knew is that those blades of grass also contain clusters of small, edible grains with massive potential. Of all the dreams León has chased in this quiet corner of southern Spain, this is the one he plans to build his future around. This, more than the Franken-fish or mussel sausage, is the one that could help rebuild his beloved region and, with any luck, even change the way we feed the world.
“The sea saved me,” León told me one morning in 2019 aboard his 26-ft. fishing boat, Yodo. The sun had just peeked above the horizon as we made our way past the tip of Cádiz, its church spires and mosque domes casting a silhouette of the city’s multi-layered history.
“I was a terrible student. Couldn’t sit still, always in trouble,” he said. “But when my dad took me out here on his boat, everything changed.”
León was born and raised in Cádiz, along with two older sisters and his younger brother Carlos, who helps manage Aponiente. Their dad kept a small fishing boat, and after school and on weekends, he would take his two sons out fishing in the Bay of Cádiz. Ángel León Lara, a hematologist, had high expectations, and often clashed with his son over his terrestrial troubles. “But once we were out on the water, we weren’t father and son,” says León. “We were friends.”
His brother Carlos saw a different sibling out on the water: “The boat is where the barrier between father and son broke down. We’d smoke a joint, tell stories, things that friends did.” Ángel couldn’t sit still long enough to be in a classroom, Carlos told me, but he was captive to the sea. “Most kids are scared to touch creatures from the sea. But Ángel would smell them, touch them, rub their scales, poke their eyes.”
León’s success at sea only served to underscore his struggles on land. His hyperactivity made him a menace in the classroom; he went to five high schools and barely graduated. He enrolled in a hotel school in Seville, where he studied cooking for three years and began to find his footing on terra firma. In 1996, he moved to France to cook at Le Chapon Fin, a Bordeaux institution that opened in 1825.
León remained quiet as we passed fishing boats and jetties on the outskirts of Cádiz, an espresso pinched between his fingertips. Since those early days with his dad, he’s rarely missed a sunrise on the water. His first goal when he fires up Yodo is to get out—out of cell-phone range, out of reach of his restaurant team and his family. “The truth is,” he said, staring- at my notebook, “I like to come out here alone.”
When we hit the open seas, the spell of silence was broken. “Turn left and you hit the Mediterranean, turn right and you’re in the Atlantic,” said León. “Two totally different worlds.” This nexus of two great bodies of water, where two vastly different ecosystems mix into a special cocktail of ocean life, continues to be a chief source of inspiration for León.
León turned on the fish tracker and showed me the schools of fish swimming some 20 m below us. He opened up the bait storage in the rear of the boat, grabbed a squid the size of his hand and worked it onto a giant hook. He rolled another cigarette, put it to his lips and sank into his chair.
“Some days I don’t even fish. I come out here to clear my head. I used to be a -psychopath—-I’d go way out into the ocean on my own. But now I have a family to think about.” León and his wife Marta, who runs the more casual Taberna del Chef del Mar down the road from Aponiente, have a 5-year-old boy, Ángel. “Easily the best dish I’ve ever helped create.”
France taught León discipline—how to clarify a stock, how to debone a quail, how to cook 14 hours a day without complaining. Afterward, he bounced around, cooking in Seville, Toledo, Buenos Aires, preparing to start his own venture.
Back then, El Bulli, on the coast of Catalonia, was known as the best restaurant in the world, and its virtuoso leader, Ferran Adrià, was busy rewriting the rules for fine dining. By the time El Bulli closed in 2011, a generation of disciples had dispersed across the country, spreading the gospel of technical, modernist cuisine that shaped Spain into the gastronomic center of the world for the first decade of the 21st century.
While León is one of the few prominent chefs in the country who did not emerge from the El Bulli system, he carries within him the restaurant’s most enduring legacy: the need to question all conventions. When he opened Aponiente in 2007, León set out to change the way people thought about the ocean. Not just through a radical reimagining of what to do with familiar fish, but by looking for ingredients nobody had ever tasted. He built his menu around pesca de descarte, trash fish: pandora, krill, sea bream, mackerel, moray eel. But in León’s mind, these are some of the most noble and delicious creatures in the sea. He did this as much for the culinary challenge as for a growing streak of environmentalism.
For the first three years, people stopped by, read the menus and turned around. They didn’t -understand what this strange restaurant was trying to do. León found himself teetering on the edge of ruin.
He remembers a talk with Adrià in those early years that helped him trudge on. “Nobody understands me,” he said to the famous chef. “Perfect,” said Adrià. “That’s because you’re pushing the vanguard.”
Nothing was biting aboard Yodo. We were waiting for the tidal bulge, that moment before the tide turns when gravity and inertia cancel each other out—eight minutes of equilibrium that, according to León, is when fish are most active: “If we’re going to catch anything today, it will be then.”
When it hit, León cast his rod off the back edge of the boat and set the line, then ran inside and used the radar to try to position the boat -directly in the middle of what looked like a smudge on the screen. “This is where the action is.”
We sat in silence, waiting for the action, but the action never came and slowly the boat began to be sucked back toward the coastline. The tide had turned.
In 2010, after years of serving just a handful of guests a day, Aponiente won its first Michelin star, a recognition that León says “helped change everything.” In 2014, it won a second star, and suddenly people began to travel to Cádiz specifically to eat at the restaurant. By the time it received its third Michelin star in 2017, Aponiente had gained a strong international presence. León used the growing platform to sharpen his message, working with universities on sustainability projects, organizing events with chefs and academics to discuss the fragility of our ocean ecosystems, developing commercial products like sea bacon, made from the discarded bellies of sea bream and smoked over pineapple.
For all his success, León is not your typical celebrity chef. He rarely leaves his hometown, eschewing the international circuit in favor of long mornings on the water and long evenings in the lab. His clipped-consonant Spanish and small-town humility are more befitting of a fisherman.
“He’s carving out his own path in the food world,” said Cristina Jolonch, one of Spain’s most respected food critics, but “it’s his defense of the sea that -matters most.” León is aware of that. “The day that I have nothing more to offer beyond being a good cook, Aponiente will no longer make sense.”
Every year in January, León and his R&D team travel by train to Madrid Fusion, the food world’s pre-eminent culinary conference, to dazzle auditoriums of journalists and chefs with their latest discoveries. In 2009, he unveiled an edible form of phytoplankton, now used in kitchens across the world. In 2011, León announced the first line of seafood–based charcuterie, using discarded fish parts to make mortadella and blood sausage and chorizo, all dead ringers for the real thing. In 2016, the auditorium went dark as León emerged on the stage with a special cocktail filled with luz de mar, bioluminescent bits found in the bellies of tiny crabs that glowed like a galaxy of stars as he swirled his gin and tonic.
In 2018, León and his team decided to take a different approach. He explained: “We turned the sea upside down. We wanted to really look at the ocean floor to see what secrets it held.” What they found in the murky depths was a vast and varied garden of ocean flora: roots, fruits, leaves. León has a tendency to liken everything he finds underwater to a terrestrial analog, and soon his menus were brimming with sea pears, sea tomatoes, sea artichokes. The so-called vegetables didn’t have the same impact as sparkling crab guts or fish-belly bacon, but León knew he needed to keep his focus on the ocean floor.
That’s how he found something he had been staring at all along. León remembered as a kid in Cádiz seeing vast fields of rice along the fringes of the bay. As he talked to his team, he realized that what he -recalled as rice was actually Zostera marina, eelgrass that grows in coastline meadows around the world.
Juan Martín, Aponiente’s resident biologist who has worked with León for years, knew the plant well. “I had been studying seagrasses for 15 years—but always from the standpoint of the ecosystem. It never occurred to me or anyone else studying it that it was edible.” That is, until León showed up one day at Aponiente with a printout of a 1973 article in Science documenting the diet of the Seri, hunters and gatherers of Sonora, Mexico, who have eaten eelgrass for generations. Like many grains, it required an elaborate process of threshing, winnowing, toasting and pulverizing before being cooked into a slurry with water. The Seri ate the bland paste with condiments to punch up the flavor: honey or, preferably, sea-turtle oil.