A Tasting-Menu Experience At The Gustu Resturant, La Paz, Bolivia

A Tasting-Menu Experience At The Gustu Resturant, La Paz, Bolivia Leave a comment

Matt, Ty and Tom with head chef Marsia Taha and the Gustu Resturant staff (August 17, 2019)

We arrived early Saturday morning in La Paz, Bolivia to begin our Madidi National Park adventure in the upper Amazon river basin in Bolivia. After a couple of hours sleep at the Rosario Hotel in downtown La Paz, we spent most of the day taking in the downtown sites before a 4:00 pm meeting with Rob Wallace, Director of the Greater Madidi-Tambopata Landscape Conservation Program for the WCS (World Conservation Society) Bolivia. Tom Markey met him at the Typica Cafe and spent a couple of hours talking to Rob about community-based natural resource management projects, indigenous organizations and protected area conservation planning and monitoring in preparation for our river adventure in the Madidi National Park.

Rob Wallace and Tom Markey at Typica Cafe.

Next, we took a taxi to Gustu Resturant for dinner. In the planning stage of our trip, we read an article in The New Yorker, “The Tasting-Menu Initiative.” Gustu was opened in 2013 by the Danish food entrepreneur Claus Meyer, whose goal was to offer a fine-dining experience with an avant-garde tasting menu, composed entirely from indigenous ingredients. (A future posting will share our August 17th tasting-menu experience.)

Before the evening was over, the head chef, Marsia Taha took us on a tour of the Gustu kitchen. Marsia, who is Bolivian, became the head chef in 2017.

— kenne