Three years ago, when chef Gerardo Gonzalez announced that he would leave New York for a hotel gig in the Caribbean, some probably wondered why a bright young talent was cutting his career short.
“I always try to resist the myopic view of things,” Gonzalez says from the Grand Cayman’s Palm Heights Hotel, which granted him carte blanche to reimagine what a dining program should look like at a luxury resort. As it turns out, Gonzalez’s big move was arguably the third time the 38-year-old chef has been on to something. The first was around 2014, when the soft-spoken San Diego native turned heads manning the Lower East Side luncheonette El Rey.
This kind of multidisciplinary cross-pollination doesn’t exactly comport with the age of self-isolation. Gonzalez is eager to pick things up again. This summer, Trinidad & Tobago-born artist Adam Cooper and Hammer Museum associate curator Erin Christovale will aid in choosing themes, performers, and guests in a continuing investigation of the connections “between the West Indies and South Asia, West Africa, and beyond.
For Gonzalez, though, the themed dinners will always be the heart of the endeavor. He recalls an early bacchanal when the hotel was still under construction. Toward the end of the night, he overheard Arielle Johnson, a flavor chemist, and Raul Lopez, founder of the fashion labels Hood by Air and Laur, talking about working together. “Even if a collaboration like that doesn’t wind up coming to fruition,” Gonzalez says, “there’s this euphoric sense of possibility.
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