Vegetables for Dessert

The World’s Best Pastry Chef of 2023, Pia Salazar serves avant-garde desserts with Ecuadorian traditions and — yes, you read it right — vegetables.

By Marisa Guerra Echeverria

Upon arriving at the Palau de les Arts in Valencia for the World’s 50 Best Restaurants Awards in 2023, Ecuadorian chef and entrepreneur Pía Salazar had no idea she’d become the first Latin American to receive the pastry world’s highest honor. Looking back at it now, Salazar said the emotion that arose as her name was called was “indescribable,” and she burst with pride as she spotted her own Latin American colleagues in the audience. 

“This is our moment, as a region, as Latinos, as Ecuadorians,” Salazar said that day. “It’s the moment for people to look back at our side of the world in Ecuador.”

Two years on, her daring cuisine is continually lauded by the World’s 50 Best and La Liste for its innovation in texture, taste and composition, often bending the arbitrary limits of the sweet and savory. 

Her desserts, which spotlight local vegetables, Amazonian products and Ecuador’s biodiversity, weave together as a love letter to her home country and its natural bounty. 

Salazar’s early memories of family and festivals inCuenca, a colonial-style city in southern Ecuador encompassed by the Andes mountains, are a constant source of inspiration for her cooking.

Her grandmother, Estela, and mother, Miriam, were her first culinary companions, teaching her to make jams and chigüilis, sweet Ecuadorian tamales, for family gatherings during the holidays or Carnaval. 

“Since I was small, they’d tell me how to make sweets, or they’d also correct me,” Salazar said with a laugh. “They’ve inspired me to be where I am today.” 

While her family encouraged her to pursue medicine, as her father and his family before him, she took a chance on her love for cooking and enrolled in the gastronomy program at the UTE University in Quito, the nation’s capital. While she said she enjoyed medicine and wasn’t squeamish with blood, she wasn’t too keen on the added years of schools and medical residency. 

The people of Ecuador should understand what is here, because often, we don’t even realize it.

After finishing her studies in Quito, she went on to specialize in pastry in Mexico City’s Ambrosia Culinary Center, and then crisscrossed around kitchens in Latin America for restaurant experience, from working in bakeries in Quito to Brazil and Mexico.

As Salazar started out, she looked to her own childhood memories for inspiration and a creative challenge. She mentioned crafting a “turrón de alverja verde” in those first few kitchens she worked in — a sweet twist on her grandmother’s beloved green pea soup from her childhood.

“I always try to weave stories and emotions I’ve lived (into my desserts),” Salazar says. “When you try something in another country or in your own home, it invokes many memories and life experiences that you won’t remember again.”

That first dish, one of her early attempts to blur the lines between savory and pastry, would become characteristic of her culinary legacy.

Perhaps one of the most formative moments in her culinary career was when Salazar went to work at the Quito locale of the Peruvian powerhouse kitchen, Astrid & Gastón. The brand’s entrepreneurial husband-wife duo; chef Gastón Acurio, known as the godfather of modern Peruvian cuisine, and pastry chef Astrid Gutsche; were a “revolutionary force” for elevating Latin American cuisine on the world stage.

While Salazar started as a chef in their main kitchen, Acurio, Gutsche and the restaurant’s pastry team became “fundamental pillars” in developing her pastry-making skills and her culinary philosophy.

“Above all, they helped me fall in love with the passion they had for their country and everything it can give you,” Salazar says. “We always have to look inward to our country, and that’s what we did.”

Salazar gained one more gift from the experience at Astrid & Gastón — meeting her future business partner and husband of 19 years, chef Alejandro Chamorro.  

He started off as her subordinate in the kitchen and, according to Salazar, they did not get along initially due to their “polar opposite” natures, something she looks back on with a laugh. Pia describes herself as a stubborn risk-taker who focuses on flavor in the creation of the dishes, while Alejandro is more of a methodical artist who constructs plates more visually.

Their professional relationship soon blossomed into a romantic, then entrepreneurial, one. Both inspired by their time at Astrid & Gastón, they aimed to create a space to elevate Ecuadorian biodiversity, domestic products and culture into fine dining, both at a domestic and international scale. He would take over the main kitchen, and she would handle desserts — just like their Peruvian predecessors. 

In brainstorming the endless possibilities for their restaurant, Salazar saw a future in showcasing the best of Ecuador’s natural bounty, from its rich Amazonian chocolate to native spices and herbs. “There are so many more products we should explore and rescue.” Salazar says. “The people of Ecuador should understand what is here, because often, we don’t even realize it.” 

Salazar and Chamorro opened their restaurant, Nuema — named using the first letters of their three children, Nuria, Emilio and Martín — in 2014. What started out as a bistro-style restaurant with a dedicated pastry window evolved over the years into a fully-fleged 14-course tasting menu guiding diners on a culinary journey through Ecuador’s four geographic regions: the Amazon in the east, the Pacific coast, the Andean mountains and the Galápagos Islands.

Nuema’s tasting menu encompasses nine savory courses and five sweet courses, and highlights the native products of Ecuador throughout the seasons, including macambo, or white cacao, Amazonian and coastal cacao, maduro plantains and Ecuadorian condiments like the peanut and corn-based salprieta.

In her quest delving into tasting menus for Nuema, Salazar notes that restaurants often started strong with excellent appetizers and entrees, only to fail with desserts that were often too sweet for customers to finish. 

To Salazar, dessert courses are not the mere end to a multi-course meal, but the deciding factor that can make or break a tasting menu. Her solution is a unique twist on dessert composition credited to her past experience as a general chef, where she often sees vegetables as a vital “protein” needed to balance out a dessert’s profile. 

I need to make things I can see myself in and find happiness in.

No vegetable is off limits for Salazar’s innovative creations — she’s featured fungi, lentils, lima beans and peas in many a dessert. Her dishes are polished and minimalist; her desserts often feature at most three ingredients. Sometimes she only uses one ingredient in her Nuema creations, but experiments with multiple textures on one plate. 

This flavor-bending approach comes from her ample appreciation of working and innovating in both the savory kitchen and the pastry kitchen. “I say I make ‘cocina dulce,’ or sweet cuisine,” Salazar says. “I feel that pastry chefs create and contribute to cuisines just as chefs do.” 

Salazar’s signature cocina dulce emerged from risks and deep intuition in the face of industry criticisms. She recalls having to create a new dessert for two highly-respected colleagues visiting Nuema, chefs Enrique Olvera (chef/owner of Michelin-starred Pujol in Mexico City) and Colombian chef Álvaro Clavijo (formerly of Noma). The task came mere days after Salazar’s father (NAME TK) had died of COVID-19 in a second wave of the pandemic, and she sought to innovate despite the grief. 

The resulting dish combined ingredients that represented qualities she saw in her father, including coconut for his kindness, yeast for his strength and the pungent black garlic for his tenacity.

Though she recalls a colleague questioning the unconventional combination, Salazar stuck to her gut. “I told my husband once, ‘I can’t make something I don’t feel right with,’” she says. “I need to make things I can see myself in and find happiness in.” 

Pastry chefs create and contribute to cuisines just as [savory] chefs do.

That dessert, which she now calls a “revelation,” received warm acclaim from Clavijo and Olvera, and soon became her signature Nuema dish — a textural triumph with the feel and flavors evocative of eating a tender piece of coconut. 

According to Salazar, the effort and love embodied in that culinary homage to her father defines her culinary career today. 

Her daring desserts, as well as Chamorro’s leadership in the kitchen, debuted Nuema and Ecuador at #48 into Latin America’s 50 Best Restaurants in 2020. Then, in 2022, Salazar was lauded by the Républica de Cacao as Latin America’s Best Pastry Chef.

Finally, in the fateful year 2023, Nuema broke into the top 100 best restaurants at number 61, according to The World’s 50 Best. It was for that award that Salazar attended the ceremony at Palau de les Arts, not knowing that she would be crowned the best pastry chef of the year. 

In 2024, Salazar opened her own pastry shop, Pastelería Pía a couple of steps away from the flagship Nuema located on the same street – Bello Horizonte. “I always wanted to have my own space,” she says. As Nuema evolved from a bistro concept into a tasting menu, Salazar longed for a place of her own to experiment her “sweet cuisine” and provide an Ecuadorian spin to familiar pastry favorites such as opera cake and pecan pie. 

The shop echoes Nuema’s commitment to Ecuador — bestselling tartlets boast local flavors of macambo and green plantains, the coffee is locally-sourced and even the mugs and plates are handcrafted by an Ecuadorian artisan. The locale’s neutral tones, clean design and organic materials evoke a sense of calm and simplicity to relax its customers and let the pastries sing. 

Most recently, La Liste 1000 recognized Pastelería Pía as one the 2025’s best pastry openings in June, regaling her mix of cultural exploration and avant-garde experimentation as a “landmark of Latin American pastry.”

To Salazar, it was “gratifying” to see the pastry shop receive its first standalone award for its use and innovation of local products, all the way from a culinary leader in France. 

The pastry shop isn’t the last of Salazar and Chamorro’s endeavors – the entrepreneurial duo is set to open a new family-style restaurant by the end of the year. 

According to Salazar, the project, “Estelma,” is one powered by family and the woman who first introduced her to the culinary world: her grandmother, Mamá Estela. Through the new restaurant, Salazar aims to create a more democratized dining experience full of “fun and comfort,” perfect for weekend family dinners and preserving traditional Ecuadorian recipes. 

Beyond the couple’s expanding restaurant network, Salazar hopes to preserve the nuances of local ingredients and biodiversity in a national recipe archive, equipped from knowledge gathered by the local farmers and communities that power Nuema’s seasonal and sustainable menu. 

Even with all the international acclaim, new projects and avant-garde techniques, Salazar’s mission remains as it has from the beginning — firmly grounded in her roots, her country and the traditions she inherited. If anything, the awards have only boosted a primarily Ecuadorian clientele and a newfound pride for the nation’s culinary traditions. 

“The Ecuadorian people now feel very identified (in our cuisine),” Salazar said. “They now believe that we don’t need to look back at others, but to look inwards and value our own people, our products and gastronomy.” 

(This article appeared in the Fall 2025 issue of Pastry Arts Magazine)