“Without landscape there is no cuisine,
and our landscape is Madrid”

Madrid, 1977. Chef Mario Sandoval, winner of the 2013 Spanish National Gastronomy Award, leads the kitchen at Coque. He began to fall in love with cooking and its secrets at the age of ten in the family restaurant, as part of the third generation of cooks to which he belongs.

There, day after day, he learned the basic techniques of a craft that he later consolidated and refined at the Escuela Superior de Hostelería de Madrid and through specialist courses and stages in Madrid, Catalonia and France. In 1999, together with his brothers, he took over from his father as culinary director of Coque.

Today, alongside his work as chef at the helm of the restaurant, Mario runs an intense business activity, coordinating full-service catering and offering strategic restaurant and gastronomy consultancy to companies. He is a regular speaker at the leading gastronomy congresses and researches new culinary registers, techniques and technologies, projects that place him at the most vibrant edge of the Spanish culinary avant-garde.