Interview with Daniel Maldonado, Chef and owner of Anker by Urko

We believe in the talent, creativity, and resilience of our chefs and allies, for this reason we have developed interviews, where we will present various gastronomic projects that will inspire our community. 

On this opportunity, we have created an alliance with the segment “Who is Who”, alongside our communication ally, Juan Carlos Castillo, where every week we will talk about well-known chefs, their stories, creations, formation and inspirations. This week we present the Chef Daniel Maldonado, one of our clients and owner of the restaurant Anker by Urko.  

Cooking has been part of Daniel’s life since he was 12 years old. He grew up on the field and then decided to study Industrial Engineer. After traveling around the world, he wanted to learn how to cook better, because of this he decides to go to Spain in order to do this. He considers himself an entuthiastic entrepreneur, who discovered food can change the world, for him, a plate of food means happiness and help us live more consciously. Thanks to this, he leads two gastronomic projects, Urko and Anker, which are spaces of social and cultural development and change.  

Anker’s pillars are sustainability, local cuisine and community. Tha concept of this restaurant was developed by thinking about a conscious and coherent cuisine. It aims to being a space of collaborations, that will allow people to form a community around the gastronomy of our country, Ecuador. They work for sustainability and the reduction of food waste in order to demosntrate that it is possible to change gastronomy’s paradigm. Their objectives are bet for creativity and teamwork in order to creater a space of development and support new alliances between the community that will develop gastronomy in Ecuador.  

For Daniel and his team, chefs have a very important role nowadays, since they have to promote and take care of the richness and diversity of our local flavors. Because of this, Anker’s gastronomic offer is diverse, casual and local. During the first months of the pandemic, the restaurant had to reinvent itself, but Daniel didn’t want to leave this essence behind. Thanks to this, Anker comes to live as a proposal of unique flavors and recipes that changes every week, and has developed the creative process of the whole team.  

“We choose the product and start to create. The creative process has grown a lot, we change our menu every week. It has been a very interesting time for us to connect and create with all our ingredients.” - Daniel Maldonado  

Learn more about Daniel Maldonado and how Anker has reinvented itself during the pandemic on the following interview made by out communicational ally, Juan Carlos Castillo. Let’s support local gastronomy so it can keep granting us with flavors, emotions and new creations.