It will be easy to believe that amid a bath of cultural diversity in the Caribbean and the Americas, gastronomy must be extremely heterogeneous. The fact of the matter –without discarding each and every nation’s richness and contributions- is that local cuisine has more in common and less in divergence. 
But perhaps one of the most significant contributions of the New World came when Christopher Columbus’ expedition reached the shores of Guanja or Guanaja Island, off the coast of Honduras, during the admiral’s fourth journey. He was welcomed with cacao seeds and with xocolatl, a beverage that tasted oddly for the Spaniards.
Nobody could imagine then that chocolate, the gods’ food, would live out thousands of years after it had been discovered by the Olmec people in the delta of the Amazonian River. And it has not only been perpetuated, but it has also been rediscovered as it traipses down the inner roads of fusion and postmodernity, either as a tasty beverage, a treat, a basic ingredient in cooking, or even as a remedy to heal both the body and the soul.
In this new issue of Excelencias Gourmet, we invite you to skim through our pages, taste every piece of writing as if it were an exquisite chocolate, and feel the flavor of American and Caribbean cuisine. As gastronome Hugo Tolentino Dipp put it, this is a cuisine as unsettled as the sea might be sometimes, as mixed as its race and, consequently blended.