Avant-garde is an intriguing word that is ubiquitous in artistic circles, and increasingly often in everyday life, has certainly made everyone pause to think about what it really means. Those who followed the culmination of this year’s Weekend Food Festival had the opportunity to lift the veil of mystery from this word in the company of its absolute king—Spanish chef Dabiz Munoz, the world’s best chef in 2021 by Best Chef Awards and owner of DiverXO, the first and only restaurant in Madrid with three Michelin stars.
This revolutionary of the fine dining concept has dedicated his rich career to the avant-garde. Munoz avoids everything that has already been seen and done. Instead, he seeks the undiscovered excellence that has so far gone unrecognized, used or tasted. He demonstrated his unconventional, uncompromising, unique and visionary approach in the introductory video, which left the filled hall breathless and earned him a well-deserved a round of thunderous applause as a suitable overture to what followed.
“I opened DiverXO many years ago with the desire to be completely unique, different and incomparable to anything done before. We could use the same adjectives to describe the period of the pandemic, before which, for example, we could not imagine cooking in camper vans and other unusual locations. However, we realized that we could apply our principles of creativity and the culinary avant-garde absolutely anywhere,” he said as he began his story about the concept of the avant-garde, his driving principle.
“There are different rules for creativity, but above all you need to be brave and ready to make mistakes. That is creativity—to make a hundred mistakes but to continue in your desire to walk the untrodden path and create something new. That is the avant-garde,” emphasized Munoz.
As avant-garde and creativity are two inseparable concepts, the logical sequence of questions for this Spanish virtuoso moved in exactly that direction. “Innovation is a constant risk. If there is no risk, there is no innovation. Innovation and risk are linked by an unbreakable bond, while success requires blind commitment to one’s goals. However, avant-garde and creativity are not the same thing, because creativity also means doing something that already exists in a new way. However, the avant-garde means opening a whole new door,” he explained.
“If you love to travel, eat and discover like me, it’s hard to witness the great work of chefs around the world and not be inspired by them. It’s nice when our colleagues inspire us. But it is one thing to be inspired and another to be infatuated. I love being inspired, but I love being 100% original even more. Of course, it can drive you crazy, because you always have the feeling that something is missing or not creative enough, which is why we try certain things 100 times,” he concluded, while pointing out that the avant-garde is, after all, something that someone before us simply has not done yet.
He spiced up his extremely impressive performance even more with a small sneak peak of his latest restaurant RavioXO, which has yet to see the light of day in Madrid, and thus honored everyone with an exclusive.
