A bar counter, stoves, pans, pots, a piano? Are some of the “ingredients” of the television program that will be re-released soon, by the well-known “Chefarándula” Miguel Ángel Jiménez, under the direction of the young director Yoe Pérez.
In this second broadcast of the program, the viewer will perceive several adjustments in its structure, beginning with the name itself, which will be Chefarandulapopular nickname with which Jiménez, a Spanish culinary artist based in Cuba, is recognized in the cultural field.
“The change is due to the fact that with a new season there are also new recipes, new guests and a new address as well, so we wanted a different concept, starting from what we did at home at the beginning, which was also different in itself. to what we did in the first season”, Jiménez specifies exclusively to OnCuba.
There will be 25 programs with a duration of 27 minutes, where the public will be able to enjoy the presence of personalities from Cuban culture and society such as Isabel Santos, Alejandro Pérez, Ivette Cepeda, Haila, Frei Betto, José Rubiera; young artists like the Duo Iris, Laritza Bacallao, Yeni Soria, Alex Duvall, Danay Cruz; as well as regular television presenters such as Marino Luzardo, Edith Massola, Bárbara Sánchez Novoa, among many other guests.
For this new television installment, the chef explains: “now we want to give the public another vision of what worked the first time on television. The schedule will be later at night, a program closer to the variety ones, like the ones we usually find after the news.”
From Spain to Cuba: The culinary tradition of Miguel Ángel Jiménez
For her part, Yoe Pérez, more accustomed to directing and writing dramatized scripts, tells us that “one of the proposals that I brought when they contacted me was this, to do as a somewhat informal restaurant, vintage and small, where the guests were friends of the chef and were in a place where, in addition to cooking, they could enjoy guest artists”.
“From the desk work, everything moved quickly because we understood each other very well from the beginning, here at Studio 50. We looked for visual references and immediately set up everything in the studio”, a space where they managed to accommodate on the set, next to the kitchen, a small stage for the artists, achieving a welcoming and dynamic environment when filming the final result, which it will be able to be enjoyed shortly, as revealed by Yoe, its director, although without advancing the scheduled date.
“I am a graduate of audiovisual direction and I also write scripts, I work in both specialties, the dramatized It is what I like the most, in addition to the humor that I like very much, but I am always open to opportunities. What interested me about this project is that it was a kitchen project and that they gave me the opportunity to propose what I wanted to do with the program: duration, aesthetics, sections, I had the opportunity to propose and create freely”, affirms the young director.
this time Chefarandula It will maintain several fundamental aspects such as the section dedicated to the culinary traditions of the rest of the country, although without the initial variant of filming outdoors: “In each program I will have a guest Cuban chef from different provinces showing a culinary tradition,” explains Jiménez, who He also points out that the guest chef will alternate with a sommelier as a novelty, “who will prepare a drink to pair the dish that I prepare with the guest.”
“We would have loved to be able to film on location,” says Yoe, “because that possibility breaks with the typical stellar culinary program and brings you a little closer to the traditions, the natural environment of the dish and the traditional tools with which the recipes are made. traditional”.
“For dissimilar reasons, it was not possible for us to carry out this variant and we decided on this occasion to bring chefs from other provinces to explain the preparation with the ingredients you need, in addition to the variants with which they can be substituted,” Yoe points out. .
In the same way, in this re-release the guests who will cook and others who will give away their music are maintained, a dynamic of the previous program: “all the broadcasts will have a different scheme: sometimes a guest will start singing, in others we will start in the kitchen , in others it will be the guest artist who will start the program, because the script will also depend on the guest, there is no fixed list”, says the popular Chef, with the same enthusiasm with which he prepares the recipes in the kitchen.
“We vary the tone of the program: some with a classic style, others more related to the urban genre, there will also be the edge of humor, which is a different concept; but “the chicken of rice with chicken” remains from when I started with this idea in my house, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, of cooking with artists and personalities from Cuban society and culture.”
“The guests turned out to be the most complex part of the shoot, because many have tours, recordings, departures from the country and other work commitments, so we had to adjust to those dates, although fortunately Miguel had some committed and several artists had the ‘debt ‘ to be on the show. There is also the one who made a little hole in his schedule to be there and the shooting plan squeezes us… everything was achieved with a well-defined plan to respect all filming times, “specifies the director.
“In my case, I am young and I know that sometimes hazing is paid, we were able to make everything work, although now we are sad because we are already finishing, just when we were ‘turning around’ the shoot. It has been the work of many people, ”she says.
“I think that now we have found the exact formula that rescues the initial concept —says Jiménez— with a more attractive aesthetic to the viewer, also maintaining the idea of cooking with ingredients that we can find in agricultural markets, national products and their variants, to prepare the new recipes, which will not be the same as the ones in the book I presented last year, but which will be to the liking of viewers”.
