Cristina Oria chooses Donostia “guided by her heart”
The chef and businesswoman Cristina Oria has chosen Donostia-San Sebastián to open her first establishment outside Madrid. And she has done so in the heart of the city centre, on Avenida de La Libertad, in a large three-storey space that combines a shop and a restaurant.
The restaurant has three dining rooms, one on each floor, and a careful decoration where the corporate black and white predominates and in which elements purchased in French brocantes stand out, such as the ceiling of an old French theatre that has been placed on the main floor. In addition to the restaurant, there is a shop where you can buy gourmet products, crockery, cutlery and household items.
The restaurant is in the same style as the other establishments in Madrid, with uninterrupted cooking from 8am to 11.30pm from Monday to Wednesday and until 1am at weekends, when it opens at 9am. Almost fifty people work at CO Donostia to provide the service, the main ingredient of this gastronomic proposal.
The establishment has three dining rooms, one on each floor, and a carefully designed décor with a predominance of black and white corporate colours
Cristina Oria herself has been supervising every detail of the 600 m2 premises before it opened its doors on Friday. It is no coincidence that the first business to open outside Madrid is here. The daughter of Federico Oria and Rosa Riu from San Sebastian, founders of the Musgo gift shops, has always emphasised her sentimental attachment to San Sebastian. It is a decision "guided by the heart", Oria acknowledged, rather than by consultancy reports.
Cristina Oria
Cristina is a young chef and entrepreneur who, together with her husband Álvaro Corsini, has four restaurants, four gourmet and kitchenware shops in Spain, a catering company that serves events for up to four thousand people and a website that sends all over Europe the products she has created for both food and accessories for the kitchen, the table and home decoration.
Her firm employs more than 180 workers. She has an estate with more than 20 hectares of olive trees with which she produces her own extra virgin olive oil and large orchards to supply her kitchens with fruit and vegetables.
She studied Business Administration at the Colegio Universitario de Estudios Financieros (CUNEF) and worked in strategic consulting at Bain & Company, but in 2008 she turned her life around to study gastronomy at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris so that she could devote herself to her passion, which is cooking.
In 2009 she founded her company and since then she has not stopped growing and winning awards such as Madrid Fusion in 2011, the Entrepreneur of the year by Ceim, the Elle Gourmet Chef Revelation award, the Acyre award for the Gastronomic Business Career Acyre, the Plate selector award for its restaurants and the Fuera de Serie Gourmet award in 2020, the Asociación Víctimas del Covid 2021 award, the Ammde de Agroalimentario-Horeca 2021 award, the Inspiragirls 2021 award, the Usera Solidaría award in the company category and the honourable mention for social action Metrópoli Premios Gastronómicos 2021.
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