Chef at world’s best restaurant to offer charity dinners in Cancún

The owner of the world’s best restaurant is preparing to offer two charity meals in Cancún next month.

Massimo Bottura’s Osteria Francescana located in Modena, Italy, was ranked No. 1 this year on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. It became the first Italian restaurant to earn the award in 2016 and ranked second in 2015 and third in 2013 and 2014.

Bottura will travel to Mexico next month to prepare two dinners on August 17 and 18 at the Moon Palace Hotel.

Tickets will cost US $600 but the proceeds will go to Bottura’s non-profit organization, Food for Soul. Founded in 2016, its goal is to encourage public, private and non-profit organizations to create and sustain community kitchens around the world, as well as to engage professionals from different fields, including chefs, artists, designers, and food suppliers, to promote an alternative approach to building community projects.

The Italian chef’s altruism took him to Brazil in 2016 for the Rio Olympic Games, where he set up a kitchen in a city slum for 60 days.

Bottura is driven not by money but transformation. Interviewed after this year’s win, the chef told Forbes Life that “Cooking is a poetic act that promotes social transformation. The interest I have in this business goes as far as it allows me to live my dream. But I’m not interested in money; if that were the case, I would be an oil dealer like my father, or a Ferrari engineer. Happiness is not that, it’s something else.”

Source: El Universal (sp)