From a gastronomic week involving over 60 restaurants to an international paella tournament that will be broadcast from the Valencia CF stadium. Those are just two of the celebrations lined up for the world tribute to Valencia’s most universal gastronomic specialty, but there will be a full programme of online and live activities (with social distancing measures in place) to take paella to every corner of Valencia, Spain and the whole world.
World Paella Day, a tribute to Valencia’s most universal dish, will be held on 20 September with a series of activities around the globe. For one day a year only, Valencians renounce their prerogative to judge what constitutes authentic paella and invite the whole world to prepare this dish and gather around a plate of rice, because paella is togetherness, sharing happy moments around a table.
Two highlights of the World Paella Day programme are the special edition of the Paella Week that will take place from 17 to 27 September, and the World Paella Cup, an international championship that will bring together chefs from all over the world to prepare this universal dish on the main day of the celebrations, Sunday 20 September.
1. Paella Week
The key event of the World Paella Day programme of activities will be the special edition of a restaurant week centred around different versions of paella. This will take place from 17 to 27 September and will involve over 60 restaurants in the city. If you want to enjoy the proposals created specially for this contest, bookings are open here.
More than 60 restaurants in the city and province of Valencia, as well as other places in the region, will serve menus consisting of a starter, a special paella and dessert for the set price of 25 euros. There will also be quintessential Valencian versions, such as Alejandro del Toro’s traditional paella with green beans and butter beans, La Ferrera’s paella made from stewed rice with meatballs, and seafood varieties like the dry rice version with cauliflower and cuttlefish served at Kaymus and the creamy rice with cuttlefish, squid and shrimps favoured by Pelayo Gastro Trinquet.
2. World Paella Cup: a gastronomic tournament at Mestalla
In this event eight chefs – four men and four women – from Italy, France, Romania, Australia, Japan, China, the United States and Spain will compete in an international tournament inspired by the format of world sports championships to discover which of them makes the best paella. The contest will be broadcast on 20 September from the Mestalla stadium.
Leno Lattarulo from Australia, Nathalie Bertheu from France, Kawaguchi Yuki from Japan, Natalie Curie from the United States, Manuel Juliá from Mexico, Anne Marie from Romania, Mateus Coelho from Italy and Chabe Soler from Spain will pit their skills against each other in this online event that will combine the excitement of a sports event with culinary art and unusual ingredients in a series of live streamed online sessions and five-minute contests brimming with the type of passion usually reserved for sport but applied on this occasion to gastronomy.
The sessions will be broadcast from the Mestalla stadium, home of Valencia CF, and will be available on the official website of World Paella Day to enable the general public to discover cosmopolitan versions of this traditional dish.
3. Actions in more than 20 countries
Last but not least, supported by the international offices of Turespaña, more than 20 cities, from Abu Dhabi to Helsinki, New York, Tokyo, Vienna and Bombay, through Mexico City, Rome and Toronto, will host a variety of activities for World Paella Day, including online masterclasses and public tastings courtesy of internationally acclaimed chefs.
