Since his incontestable triumph in MasterChef 3, Carlos Maldonado has become one more attraction in the city of Talavera de la Reina. The chef, whose professional career is the most varied and unusual among his colleagues in the kitchenopened his restaurant Races in the city where he was born and in just a few months he obtained the only Michelin star in the region.
Dozens of visitors travel to the city of ceramics to taste the exquisite menus of a place that has a long waiting list. Practically all of them highlight the kindness of a Maldonado who does not hesitate to chat pleasantly with the diners and even, according to some of them, prepare the odd ham sandwich for those who still have room in their stomach after 17 or 26 passes of their menus.
What from the outside might seem like a successful business in which both Maldonado and the city win, seems to have become an unsustainable hornet’s nest. Tsomething that the chef has told in an interview in Straight to the Palate who is going to move his art to another municipality. It is a place with a spectacular swamp. They have opened their arms to us and told us: What do you need?. The locality, taking into account the slopes, will be Cazalegasjust a few kilometers from Talavera.
It’s a bitch because I want to stay at home, but really they are just obstacles. I want to leave because I don’t feel comfortable. I don’t want anything more or less than another businessman, but I’ve been here for almost seven years and I’ve only received blows from the administrations. I don’t want to be pettedbut not that they hit me either, he expressed.
Two examples of this treatment that Maldonado denounces have to do with the surroundings of his premises, located in an enviable setting in the town on the banks of the Tagus River. We have around 100 parking complaints between us and our suppliers for parking on the pavement. The suppliers have told us that they have to stop serving usbecause every time they stop they get fined, he explains, justifying his request to have a loading and unloading area.
Along the same lines, Maldonado and His team requested that a container that was in front of them be removed and that was causing the surrounding area to be filled with rats and a bad smell. However, the problem is repeated as work on a parking lot near the town’s Ethnographic Museum had to be stopped when archaeological remains were found.
Problems with your social integration project
Always aware of social issues and the common good – like when he offered to prepare breakfast for hospital health workers during the coronavirus pandemic -, Maldonado founded Semillas, a project that aims to train and help people at risk of social exclusion to have a professional future. In fact, many of the members of Semillas have ended up working at Races.
The foundation has also caused a problem with the authorities, since the city’s Councilor for Agriculture, Livestock and Rural Affairs and Regional Identity, Gerardo Sánchez, has accused it of owing 30,000 euros for the use of the facilities and, more specifically, for light supplies. I have never stopped paying a bill and I will never stop paying it. But it is an area in which the light is not sectorized and they pass the light of the entire fair to meMaldonado denounces.
The cook, in fact, goes one step further. What cannot be is that this person, not the City Council, attacks what we do, a system of social integration. The foundation is apolitical and social and works solely and exclusively to provide training to people at risk of social exclusion, regardless of their color, ditch.
