Dani Carnero

Chef at Kaleja (Málaga)

A rebel with a cause, Dani Carnero has been feeding the people of Málaga for years at La Cosmopolita. He has also been doing this at Kaleja since 2019, where slow-cooked stews are the star feature.

By the age of 15 he had already decided that his professional future would be in cooking, at 16 he started out with Ignacio Muguruza, and a little later he worked alongside Martín Berasategui. He was with Manolo de la Osa for a while, and at El Bulli for a year before he went for it and set up La Cosmopolita, a tapas establishment in Málaga city centre, self-defined as a “stewbar”, and now a must in Málaga’s gastronomy.

Carnero, who prefers to be called a cook rather than a chef, took the plunge again at the end of 2019 and opened another restaurant in Málaga, Kaleja, where the cooking is slow and stock-based, “focusing on a primitive way of cooking the product”, constantly dependent on the seasonality of the produce.

This year the Repsol Guide awarded Kaleja a Repsol Sol, a prize already won by La Cosmopolita in 2017.