Conversations in Culture: Eating up Don Quixote

An evening of reading and feasting on Cervantes’ masterpiece, reproduced for the occasion on a fully edible format by chef Firo Vázquez.

Conversations in Culture is a mostly monthly series featuring some of the best of European culture, including music, visual arts, theater, culinary arts, and literature organized by the Delegation of the European Union to the United States. In informal discussions leading and emerging experts provide insights about their art form, in combination with a demonstration or performance.

Eat Spain Up! is a cultural initiative that aims that seeks to bring Spanish food culture closer to the rest of the world by sharing the cultural essence of its gastronomy: its origins in the soil that shapes Spain's land, its dependence on the people who inhabit it, and its contribution to society as an instrument of communication. The project brings together tastings, cooking workshops and demonstrations, screenings, art exhibitions, and round table discussions that showcase regional Spanish cuisine and culture. A virtual trip around the country to discover people from Spain and how they live their food: what traditions they have kept and which they have blown to pieces to give birth to the new Spanish cuisine.

Eating up Don Quixote is a literary and gastronomic experience, a journey into the world of Don Quixote, an exploration of the famous novel in edible format.

The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha –or Don Quixote, as it is often referred to– follows the adventures and misfortunes of this self-proclaimed knight errant. The novel transports us to a world where reality and fantasy overlap, where windmills turn into giants, friars into enchanters, and common men into heroes. Throughout time Don Quixote has come to stand for the mix of madness and temerity needed to go against the expected. Eating up Don Quitoxe is chef Firo Vazquez’s own quixotic adventure, the daring proposal of an errant chef convinced that words should be feasted upon, quite literally.

Firo Vázquez de Parga is the chef and owner of the restaurant El Olivar, located in Moratalla, In the northwest region of Murcia, Spain. He has been appointed "ambassador" for Extra Virgen Olive Oil and for Facyre, Spanish federation of chef's and confectioners associations. He has developed the project GastrOleum®, Application (App) for the dissemination and use of Extra Virgin Olive Oil in the kitchen. Based on a proprietary method of classification developed to harmonize food gastronomically with Extra Virgin.