Andrés Torres, born in 1968, a Catalan from Barcelona, has long since moved to Sant Martì Sarroca in the Penedès wine region, where in 2009 he opened Casa Nova, a fully sustainable restaurant that has gradually grown to a brilliant present: a Michelin green star in the 2024 edition and a red star in 2025. Last October, he won the Basque Culinary World Prize, both as a restaurateur and as founder and president of Global Humanitaria, a non-profit organization fighting hunger in nations at war, currently focusing on Gaza and Ukraine.
The first step dates back thirty years ago, a perfect synthesis of his long commitment as a war correspondent in the four corners of the planet, a vocation for socially conscious journalism that blossomed very early, at fourteen. This didn't prevent him, in the 1990s, from writing texts for Raffaella Carrà at Telecinco, just as now he dedicates himself, through a different non-profit, to a second form of opposition, that against pedophilia: "Spain is one of the countries in the world where child abuse is most prevalent, but people prefer to look the other way." Words that we can apply to Italy as well.
Much longer is the list of countries where Global Humanitaria is active: Peru, Guatemala, Bolivia, India, Nepal, Ivory Coast, Jordan, Iraq, the Balkan regions, Syria, and the already mentioned Gaza and Ukraine, Cambodia and Colombia... soon Miami and the Bronx in New York.
His inn is nestled in the silence of the countryside, with an internal courtyard squeezed between two buildings that house the various dining rooms that make up the restaurant, but also Sandra's ceramics workshop - she's an actress, Andrés's wife, whom he met in Colombia - and an incredible number of coffee machines and mokas.
Just beyond the vegetable garden lies a world that nourishes Casa Nova in every possible aspect. Without it, the entire sustainability of the place would collapse. So here are the outdoor spaces where everything is grown, but also buried pots to collect rainwater and laboratories for roasting coffee, producing chocolate, collecting honey, the chicken coop for free-range hens and chickens, the vinegar cellar, products expressly made there, and the wine cellar.
What drove him to take an interest in others' problems is quickly explained: "I've always wondered how populations in war-torn countries lived, what hardships they had to face, what they managed to put on the table. I started in Colombia. I remember how they followed the tides because when the waters receded, they could collect the clams lying on the seabed."
Thirty years later, here he is as a starred chef: "I learned by watching those who knew how to move well in the kitchen. I stole from them something that could be a technique or a plant that I brought home with me. At the beginning, however, I wanted to help those who were suffering, I wasn't thinking about guides and conferences. That's why Global Humanitaria was born well before. Now it manages about 300 canteens scattered around the planet. The most current priority? Helping the children of Gaza, also thanks to four-hands dinners with colleagues."
