About Rosario
Rosario grew out of our love for Mexico and its cuisine.
The extraordinary diversity of Mexican cuisine is what inspires our cooking in Amsterdam. From the food of Yucatán and Oaxaca to the eating culture of Mexico City and the cuisines found along Mexico’s coasts, every region has its own ingredients, techniques and traditions.
At Rosario, we don’t try to reinvent Mexican cuisine. Sometimes we stay close to a classic dish; other times, we take a traditional preparation or technique as the starting point for something new.
Chef Nina Bogaerts
Before opening Rosario in early 2020, chef Nina Bogaerts spent several years cooking at Toscanini, the renowned Italian restaurant in Amsterdam. Together with its owners, she wrote De Bijbel van de Italiaanse Keuken (The Bible of Italian Cuisine).
At Toscanini, she developed an approach to cooking that would later influence Rosario: starting with a cuisine and its traditions, while allowing yourself, as a cook, the freedom and curiosity to explore them.
With a Guatemalan father and a grandmother who cooked at a market in Guatemala, the flavours of Latin America were part of Nina’s life from an early age. Her mother has been importing Mexican artesanías — traditional handicrafts — to Amsterdam since the 1970s, and Nina began travelling through Mexico with her family when she was young. San Cristóbal de las Casas, Oaxaca, Puebla and Mexico City became familiar destinations.
Markets, small restaurants, street food, ingredients and, above all, the people preparing the food are therefore among her earliest memories of Mexico.
Buen Sazón
Travelling through Mexico has helped Nina build a memory for flavour: an understanding of how something is supposed to taste.
Un buen sazón is at the heart of it. It is difficult to translate directly. In Mexico, sazón is more than seasoning. It is the instinct for making food taste right — the balance, depth and character that a cook brings to a dish.
An extensive collection of cookbooks, countless journeys, innumerable meals and conversations have formed the foundation of the deep knowledge Nina has developed over the years of Mexico and its remarkable cuisine.
Rosario became the place where her family history, her years as a cook and her fascination with Mexico came together.
Ultimately, the idea behind Rosario is simple: to take Mexican cuisine seriously without keeping it frozen in time — and to cook the food Nina herself loves to eat.