The event started at 5 p.m. when guests arrived and joined an animated conversation with Oscar, Chris, and Marguerita at the bar. Soon, everyone was talking about their places of origin, the story of their families, the countries they have visited before, and the personal search that brought them to New York City, a city strengthened by immigrants. Some attendees came to New York from different states, such as Colorado and North Carolina, while others came from different parts of the world, like South Africa and Peru. A very special guest, Charlie, shared the excitement of these new friendships—although he was working; he was the service dog of one of the guests!
As the sun fell, we all moved to the tables. Chris and Marguerita presented the Reimagining Us project. As an immigrant, Chris recalled the difficult times that inspired this initiative: the year 2018, when the political context promoted intolerance and encouraged political hatred towards immigrants. The uneasiness of that situation was later exacerbated by the pandemic, which halted the project and its healing spirit. During that isolating hiatus, Chris kept working, not only as a designer but also as a visual artist, while also envisioning the moment to relaunch Reimagining Us. In a hopeful sign of good fortune, he met Marguerita. Months later, they married, and soon, she started sharing in the spirit of Reimagining Us with Chris.
The culinary adventure began with a Tiradito. This Japanese-Peruvian-rooted dish has thinly sliced fresh fish, accompanied by ají amarillo leche de tigre, avocado, and tobiko. Then came the Crispy Yuca, fried yuca with an emulsion of ají amarillo. Yes, both dishes were delicious. But the entree, Arroz con Pato (rice with duck), brought complete silence to the shared tables. I am not exaggerating when I say everyone was intensely focused on enjoying their dishes. When we finished, it was as if all the guests had returned from a chicha de jora inspired dream. (Chicha de jora is one of the ingredients that Oscar used for his version of this traditional dish from Lambayeque, a region in the north of Peru.)
After that experience, everyone wanted to hear the stories of these dishes from Oscar himself. His personal voyage started in Peru, being a son of a mother who was the 20th child born to her family—a large family indeed! After entering college to study law, he remembered, he made a radical turn, exchanging the books, suits, ties, for the herbs and spices and the creativity, speed, and craziness of professional kitchens. “I am a bit curious,” Oscar reflected, “about why some of the most famous Peruvian chefs, such as Gastón Acurio or Virgilio Martínez, also started out studying law.”
Oscar grew up enjoying the Peruvian culinary tradition, made of a mixture of indigenous, European, African, and Asian cooking. This undeniable cultural variety of Peru is magnified by the rich biodiversity of a country with 1,900 miles of Pacific Ocean coastline, legendarily fertile coastal valleys, numerous Andean ecosystems, and the Amazon rainforest. After that, Oscar came to work in New York City, where a stroke of good luck found him in a restaurant job that took him to France, where he became familiar with the most important culinary paradigm of the Western world—French cuisine and technique. Before starting Contento, his dream project, Oscar oversaw the kitchen in restaurants such as Nice Matin, Waverly Inn, and Marseille.
After a cake made with algarrobina—Algarrobina comes from the algarrobo, a tree with big thorns that grows in the deserts of the north coast of Peru—the happy conversation continued until all the guests, including Charlie, said goodbye. Contento went silent again. We all had the feeling of sharing an extraordinary culinary adventure and a wonderful evening of conversation and friendship, just like the ideal of Reimagining Us.