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The Future Is Fermenting: How a Spanish Chef Is Bringing Gastronomy to Stanford

10 Minute read

27 Oct 2025

Rafael Tonon

Journalist

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Mugaritz’s Ramon Perisé joins Stanford’s new Chef-in-Residence program, uniting culinary creativity with scientific research.

A Spanish chef walks into Stanford University, not to cook but to explore food as art through the lens of fermentation. It is the first time a chef has joined an artist residency at one of America’s most prestigious universities, and by all accounts the first of many to come. The new initiative, called Chef in Residence, aims to “bring the world’s best chefs to our lab and campus to learn, innovate, and collaborate in sustainable food,” as the program’s website puts it.

Ramon Perisé, Head of Creativity at the two-Michelin-starred Mugaritz in Spain’s Basque Country, is the first culinary figure to hold this role at Stanford. He will serve as the 2025–26 Doerr Visiting Artist “to celebrate food as art, through the lens of fermented foods,” hosted by the Department of Bioengineering with support from the Doerr School of Sustainability’s arts programming and the Office of the Vice President for the Arts. The residency bridges creative and scientific thinking by bringing chefs into dialogue with engineers, biologists, and artists to drive innovation in food and sustainability.

The idea originated in Stanford’s Hill-Maini Lab, led by Vayu Hill-Maini, a cook-turned-scientist working at the intersection of bioengineering and gastronomy. His research explores how fermentation can help build a more sustainable food system, in close collaboration with chefs. It is a bidirectional exchange: science inspiring new forms of cooking, and cooking expanding the questions science dares to ask.

Bridging the Kitchen and the Lab

The lab’s hybrid setup, part scientific laboratory and part R&D kitchen, allows both rigorous experimentation and sensory evaluation. “The Chef in Residence program was born from this hybrid work and from my own background in restaurants before becoming a scientist,” Hill-Maini explains. “Chefs are creative artists pushing the boundaries of food and sustainability. Scientists and engineers develop technologies and uncover principles. The question is: how do we bring them together?” he asks.

Perisé’s residency begins in late October and continues with a second phase in April 2026. His role is to explore communities across scales, from the microorganisms that transform food to the human networks shaped by those transformations. The program includes cross-school workshops and campus art installations that use the kitchen as a tool for connection and reflection on transformation, symbiosis, and community. “We want to use fermentation as a metaphor,” Perisé says, “to talk about community, symbiosis, and other shared processes through the installations and workshops.”

Workshops, lectures, installations, and research collaborations will invite students and faculty to engage with fermentation on a sensory and emotional level, sparking conversations about the future of food. “Being at Stanford allows us to think about food in broader terms, as a cultural, social, and ecological phenomenon,” says Perisé. “We want to bring the universe of healthy, sustainable food closer to the university community, using the kitchen as a tool for transformation.”

From Harvard to the Basque Country

Gastronomy’s path into academia has been building for years. In 2008, Ferran Adrià partnered with Harvard University to create an undergraduate course in culinary physics at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. The class, From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter, used cooking to introduce students to soft-matter physics—the study of suspensions and gels—in close collaboration with Harvard faculty.

In 2012, Mugaritz and AZTI launched the International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science, published by Elsevier. It was the first academic journal to position gastronomy within peer-reviewed research. The Basque Culinary Center later joined as a co-promoter, reinforcing its role as a shared space for dialogue between chefs and scientists. “Since the days of molecular cuisine, we have seen how science began to enter gastronomy,” says Joxe Mari Aizega, director of the Basque Culinary Center. “Today we are in a different stage: gastronomy has drawn closer to science, becoming a multidisciplinary field capable of generating knowledge of its own.”

In October, the Basque Culinary Center inaugurated GOe, the Gastronomy Open Ecosystem, in San Sebastián. The new hub brings start-ups, researchers, and chefs under one roof. Designed by the Danish studio BIG (the same behind Noma in Copenhagen) with Bat Architecture, the building signals the next step in linking gastronomy and science. “Today we cannot talk about culinary education without considering innovation, sustainability, and entrepreneurship,” Aizega says. “Schools must adapt, creating hybrid models that merge gastronomy, science, and innovation. GOe trains a new generation of professionals—cooks who are also scientists, and scientists who also cook.”

Gastronomy Open Ecosystem, in San Sebastián.

A New Era of Culinary Science

A scientist and cook himself, Hill-Maini believes chefs bring a cultural and sensorial dimension that science alone cannot provide, blending scientific rigor with artistic sensibility to create both innovation and meaning. He sees Stanford and Mugaritz as natural partners: the restaurant can absorb the energy of innovation and sustainability from the university, while Stanford can benefit from Mugaritz’s avant-garde approach to creativity and perception. “As CRISPR and cookbooks collide, new perspectives emerge,” he says. The residency, he explains, lays the foundation for “new sustainable food innovations, [which] pushes the boundaries of culinary creativity, and equips trainees with new skills and perspectives to build meaningful careers in sustainable foods.” Future residents, he adds, will be boundary-pushing chefs who see gastronomy as a cultural and intellectual discipline, not just about food but about ideas. “Chefs bring a perspective that’s desperately needed right now. They understand that feeding the planet also means shaping how we feel, think, and create.”

Perisé has long worked between Mugaritz’s kitchen and its upstairs R&D lab, where many of the restaurant’s most daring, fermentation-driven innovations originate, from Penicillium experiments to other microbial transformations he will explore during his residency. For him, the project confirms a long-standing Mugaritz ambition: to break disciplinary boundaries and show gastronomy as a field where art, science, and society converge. He sees the presence of a chef at Stanford as both symbolic and inevitable, part of an ongoing fusion of culinary and scientific inquiry. “Today it’s almost impossible for cooks to stay away from science and technology,” he points out. “The kitchen needs to engage with them, not to become scientific, but to better understand the world.”

27 Oct 2025