Luis Valls

Luis Valls’s practice is built from service and stove in equal measure, with local identity as the constant reference point. His formation at CDT in Valencia gave him a technical base that has been tested in demanding dining rooms and kitchens, from an internship at Torrijos in Valencia to work in London as head waiter and head chef at Cambio de Tercio and at Tendido Cuatro. Those paired dining-room and kitchen roles reflect a cook shaped by both production and service, with a strong sense of timing, reception and the way a dish is understood at the table. His experience continued in regional kitchens as a kitchen trainee / practitioner at Ca Sento and then as chef at Les Nits. He joined Vuelve Carolina as a team member from 2010 and also worked as a kitchen team member at Quique Dacosta Restaurante in Dénia. Across these posts, precision, product and a sense of place remained central. Valls later served as head chef at Vuelve Carolina from 2014 to 2017, taking on the operational demands of leading a team, maintaining pace and turning ideas into serviceable plates without losing identity. Since 2014, he has also been head chef of El Poblet, a role that anchors a major part of his professional development. Today, Valls works as gastronomic adviser at Palau Alameda in Valencia, Spain, where his experience is applied to hospitality as a whole rather than a single station or pass. The work draws on his formal training in Valencia, his dining-room fluency in London, his kitchen discipline in the region and Dénia, and the pressures of leadership at El Poblet. In this setting, product selection, the reading of territory, the handling of memory and the way a restaurant makes its local language legible become part of the same approach. Product provides the starting point, territory gives direction and local accountability, and emotion is treated through clarity, memory and restraint. At Palau Alameda, that perspective is carried into a hospitality project intended to make the city readable through the table. Market-led cooking at Àtic, where Valls is in charge of the kitchen from 2026 to the present, is described as approachable and based on market produce. The emphasis is on directness rather than complication, with food shaped by availability, local sense and a regional line that connects his early posts with his work at El Poblet. His career is defined by disciplined craft, the ability to move between service and kitchen, and a consistent attention to Valencian territory, product and emotion.