Denise Monroy

Chef at Elektra (Bogotá, Colombia)

She became concerned with food after undergoing eating disorders in her youth, and has now carved a profession out of this.

Revelation Chef at Bogotá Madrid Fusión 2021, Denise Monroy has revolutionised vegetable cuisine with fresh, innovative fare that has surprised diners in Latin America, and demonstrated that plant-based cookery is anything but boring. She does this day after day at her Elektra restaurant, with fresh, innovative fare.

Although her relationship with cookery began when she was studying photography in Buenos Aires (“I began to experience eating disorders, and I ended up with anorexia. The best way to deal with that was to learn how to cook, and most especially how to eat, study the nutrients that would help with my recovery"), it actually commenced a decade ago in the world of vegetable cuisine. She studied at New York's Integrative Nutrition and at Plantlab, concentrating on the speciality of vegetable cuisine and fermentation, and created dairy products based on plants, among others.

She opened her first restaurant, De Raíz, with two outlets in Bogotá, and is also the creator of Elektra Punk and Food, a “vegetable-based fast food restaurant”. She set up an online platform, “Canasto Para Ti”, and helped devise the recipes in a book, “El Milagro Metabólico”, a best-seller for two years running in Colombia.