Forest to table: Chef Rodrigo Pacheco brings sustainable culinary vision to Yale

Ecuadorian chef Rodrigo Pacheco says he bears a responsibility that goes beyond preparing delicious food. He aims to use his culinary skills and creativity to promote sustainable cuisine and environmental conservation and generally be a force for positive change.

“Cooking is the easy part,” he said. 

Pacheco, who is also founder of Foresta, a restaurant in Quito that serves dishes made of ingredients from his regenerated forest and prepared with ancestral cooking techniques, recently spent a weeklong residency at Yale, where he shared his unique culinary craft and philosophy with the local community and the staff of Yale Hospitality. 

“Yale is a remarkable institution that provides a great platform for people from across many fields to share their visions,” he said. “In my case, coming here to discuss my vision of sustainable gastronomy and the preservation of the ecosystems has connected me with scholars, students, and others who have a shared mission to protect nature.”

Pacheco came to Yale through a program known as Global Table — a cross-campus collaboration between the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale, Yale Hospitality, and the Yale Schwarzman Center – which explores how cuisine can be used to connect people across borders, promote cultural awareness, appreciate diverse perspectives, and create a shared sense of responsibility for the natural world.

A nature-based chef, Pacheco directs Bocavaldivia Research and Development Restaurant, an enterprise he founded in Puerto Cayo on Ecuador’s Pacific coast that approaches food and hospitality as a means to connect people and protect the planet. He offers guests innovative tasting menus and immersive experiences, including angling with local fishermen and hiking through a cloud forest, to teach them about the region’s Indigenous cultures, biodiversity, and ecosystems. 

“I built an open-fire kitchen in the middle of the forest,” he said “The pantry is alive. All the ingredients are there. We’re almost 100% sustainable. If you come for a meal, we will go fishing for you, we will forage for you, and we will harvest for you. We create our own plates out of ceramics.”

Through Bocavaldivia, Pacheco has transformed 150 hectares of previously deteriorated land into a thriving “biodiverse edible forest” — a corridor of regenerated wilderness that produces edible native species of fruits, vegetables, and herbs, and protects howler monkeys, red-faced parakeets, and other endangered animal species. 

During his Yale residency, Pacheco met with students at the Native American Cultural Center and the Latin American Cultural Center; visited the Wooster Square Farmer’s Market and Sanctuary Kitchen, a local organization that promotes the culinary traditions, cultures, and stories of refugees and immigrants resettled in Connecticut; and participated in a public talk with faculty members on Indigenous ingredients, health, and community. 

He also visited a session of “What We Eat,” an undergraduate writing seminar on food studies that meets weekly at the Yale Farm, an acre of land on Edwards Street where students explore the relationships between food, farming, people, and planet. 

“Spending time with Chef Rodrigo was a highlight of the semester for my students and me,” said Alison Coleman, a lecturer in English in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, who teaches the seminar. “He expressed such genuine interest in the students’ research projects — on topics ranging from Indigenous herbal healing practices to rural food access inequities to the untapped nutritional and ecological potential of the banana peel — that they felt empowered and excited to continue developing their work.” 

For his part, Pacheco called the class visit a highlight of his week.

“The students were exploring their own visions of how food connects to wider questions about the world,” Pacheco said. “It was very interesting to learn about their work and rewarding to share my vision and hopefully be a source of inspiration to them.”

In response to a question from a student about the small steps one can take to promote Pacheco’s approach to food and the environment, he encouraged them to use their windowsills as spaces in which to try growing their own edible plants. 

“I have no doubt that many of them will do just that and will be inspired to continue exploring regenerative eating practices at Yale and beyond,” Coleman said.

In addition to these events, Pacheco worked closely with Yale Hospitality staff, teaching them his culinary techniques and approach to sustainable gastronomy — skills and knowledge that the staff will apply to their work. 

His visit marked the fourth iteration of the Global Table program, following residencies by Chef Jeong Kwan of South Korea, Chef Ebru Baybara Demir of Turkey, and Chef Selassie Atadika of Ghana. 

‘A culinary adventure’

The main event of Pacheco’s residency was a public dinner in the President’s Room at the Schwarzman Center where about 50 members of the campus and local community gathered to enjoy dishes that he prepared with Yale Hospitality staff. He described the menu as an “culinary adventure” in three acts that embodied his commitment to sustainability, environmental stewardship, and utilizing Indigenous knowledge. 

The adventure’s first act had three parts. The first, ceviche of shore-caught fish with tamarind, peanut, rosemary, and golden plantain that represented Pacheco’s commitment to “blue” food — the use of aquatic plants and animals that are sustainable, nutritious, and have a low carbon profile.

The second embodied Pacheco’s forest-to-table approach by combining smoked venison with wild berries and foraged mushrooms topped with a “forest cracker” made with toasted seeds. It was accompanied by a foamy venison broth infused with the smoke of pinewood that he brought from Ecuador. 

The final plate offered the diners locally sourced fresh vegetables presented in the spirit of a “chakra,” a traditional agroforestry system of the Kichwa people of Ecuador in which staple crops like cassava are interwoven into the forest with fruit trees and herbs. 

The dinner’s second act highlighted the Indigenous wisdom that guides Pacheco’s cooking. Guests enjoyed a take on “maito,” a traditional Amazonian dish, in which polenta and wild boar were wrapped in large leaves and roasted. It was served with several traditional condiments, including neapia, an Amazonian black chili sauce.

“Many Ecuadorian cultures do not eat sugar or salt at all, but they do have spice,” Pacheco said before the course was served. “A lot of spice. Be aware of that.”

For dessert, diners enjoyed chocolate mousse topped with a generous pour of chocolate sauce.  Inspired by an ancestral ritual, Pacheco personally poured the chocolate for the diners at one table using a replica of a 5,500-year-old vessel from the ancient Mayo-Chinchipe culture of Ecuador. 

In a whimsical finale to the meal, diners were presented a plate bearing three citrus segments — lime, lemon, and blood orange — and Synsepalum dulcificum, a red berry from West Africa. Pacheco instructed the guests to taste the lemon, eat the berry, and wait a minute for a surprise. The guests’ eyes widened in surprise as the sour citrus taste transformed into sugary sweetness — a closing “miracle” to the dinner service. 

The experience was meaningful to diner Peter Vanderbloomer, a master’s student at the Yale School of the Environment whose thesis explores the Indigenous agro-forestry systems of the Waorani people of the Ecuadorian Amazon. 

“Chef Pacheco is cultivating a food forest, and food forests are literally what I’m studying for my thesis,” he said. “This experience was very relevant to my research, and it was cool to try food prepared in that way. It was absolutely delicious.”

Pacheco closed the event by posing a question to guests.

“My humble restaurant with an open fire in the middle of nowhere in Ecuador has protected 150 hectares of forest, including critically endangered animals,” he said. “If I can do that, imagine what can we all do together?”