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Francisco ‘Paco’ Ruano

Cuisine Regionale L’evo

Francisco ‘Paco’ Ruano is a chef and co-owner of Alcalde, in his home city, Guadalajara, Mexico.

A rebellious temperament and obsessed with perfection, he is a permanent non-conformist. Tapatío (a colloquial term for someone coming from downtown Guadalajara) with a rebellious and perfectionist personality. Rooted in his mother’s and grandmother’s cooking education, he managed to develop a genuine passion for flavours, their free and graceful transformation, especially of traditional Mexican food.

Francisco ‘Paco’ Ruano – development and experience

After finishing his studies in Guadalajara, he made a stay in Puerto Vallarta with Thierry Blouet, owner of the Café de los Artistas. After a year, he embarked as a cook on a cruise ship, where he learned the discipline that mastery of the kitchen requires.

He studied at the Luis Irizar cooking school, one of the most prestigious in Spain; and once he graduated, he worked at the Mugaritz (Basque Country), El Celler de Can Roca (Girona) and Noma (Denmark) restaurants.

His experience in European kitchens had a decisive influence on his cooking. There he learned the importance of closeness to the land and adopted simplicity in the presentations of his dishes, two essential qualities in the daily exercise of Alcalde.

In love with the flavours that he learned in traditional Mexican cuisine and that he transforms with freedom and grace

Chef Francisco Ruano, together with his partners Luis Mora and Eduardo Cabrera, opened the Alcalde restaurant in January 2013. Its name honours a market in the center of the city, where chef Ruano translates his childhood and experiences in a unique gastronomy, showing its guests fresh products that are harvested in the surroundings of Jalisco.

He is convinced that Alcalde’s talent and strength lies in his team of collaborators, who strive every day to bring top quality ingredients from the field to the table.

“We make living cuisine that respects the seasons of the year and their virtues, we seek the excellence of the simple and transfer the product and our culinary heritage to a current gastronomy without artifice, only flavour and affection.”