Here we learn how to make a variety of Spanish dishes from cooking duo Alex Villar and Erick Belli, as well as how the pair’s individual upbringings influenced their careers.
Alex Villar, along with his business partner Erick Belli, co-founded the Cooking Clubhouse in Madrid, Spain in 2022, which teaches guests how to make mouth-watering Spanish meals.
A Third Culture Kid (TCK), Villar was born in Mexico of parents of Spanish descent and moved to Canada with his family when he was 3 years old.
At the age of 18, Villar left Canada to study at the Basque Culinary Center in San Sebastian, Spain and subsequently worked at Noma restaurant in Copenhagen, Denmark before moving back to Spain to start a paella cooking school in Barcelona.
When Villar started the Paella Club, he and his then-business partner hired Belli as their kitchen manager. Being born in Nicaragua of parents of Italian descent, Belli and Villar “clicked immediately,” Villar says.
“When we started to work together, it was like synchronized swimming,” he adds. “We would give the classes and I would take a step and he would just walk behind me and then he would walk in front of me, and I would hand him something. It was just, like, perfect.”
Consequently, when Villar decided to take a bigger step and move to Madrid, he “really wanted Erick to be a part of this because he’s a fantastic person, [and] the way that we work together is ideal.”
For Villar, growing up in Canada didn’t mean forsaking his Mexican and Spanish roots: His parents forbade speaking English in the home.
“If they heard us speak English, we would get in trouble, and that really made me learn both Spanish and English at the same time,” he says. “So, in the house, it was a very strong Mexican heritage, culture; and then outside in my school with my classmates and everyone else, it was very Canadian.”
That bicultural lifestyle allowed Villar to pick and choose from “the best and worst of each culture at the same time, and that really helped me become who am today.”
When it came time to apply for college, being bilingual opened up the opportunity for Villar to apply to cooking schools not only in Canada and the United States, but Spain as well.
As for Belli, he grew up in two very different households in Nicaragua: His father had a sustainable farm, while his mother had “a house where all the social relations were more the thing to do every day.”
Consequently, both of those backgrounds made him “not only a very happy kid because I was able to play in many different ways with animals in the field and we grew up with a lot of plants and a lot of trees, but I also grew up in a very social environment,” he says.
Belli studied culinary arts because of the reaction that people had for his cooking “and the immediate connection and immediate reward that I had with people eating the food that I made,” he says, adding that the food industry makes it difficult to get that reward every day.
Villar’s parents were born into wealthy Mexican families of Spanish descent, and he acknowledges the risk they took to move to Canada to give their kids not necessarily a better economic future, “but a better freedom, in one way or another.”
His parents, being foodies themselves, would often host parties where Villar and his siblings would help out, something he brought with him when starting both the Paella House and the Cooking Clubhouse.
As for the challenge of being an outsider, Belli has this advice: “Own it.”
“At the end of the day you’ll realize at some point in your life that we’re all special and we all come from a different place,” he adds. “And if you own it at the beginning of your life, then you’re not gonna struggle with it, it’s gonna become your armor instead of your weakness.”
While the Cooking Clubhouse is indeed a cooking school where one can learn about traditional Spanish culinary techniques, beyond that, the duo and their team “emphasize the social aspect of cooking and eating,” according to Villar.
“For us, in Spain and in many Latin American countries actually, food is a very social thing,” Villar says. “We do teach you how to cook, you leave with a lot of knowledge, but more than that, we want to bring cooking close to everyone, because cooking can be very therapeutic and also very social, very enjoyable.”
“The fact of seeing someone smile and hearing someone say how much of a good time they had every single time that we have a class — that’s one of my favorite things in this environment,” Belli adds.
For more info about the Cooking Clubhouse in Madrid, go to thecookingclubhouse.es.
