Ivan Castro

Mexican chef, owner of plant-based restaurant La Bartola in Toronto. A few years ago, he saw a PETA video on social media that showed the cruel lives of animals in factory farms. According to him, this video changed the life of the Mexican chef. He realized that he was eating pieces of animals that he loved and immediately stopped eating meat. Now, through his own restaurant, he wants to bring people to a plant-based diet with simple, tasty plant-based dishes. Ivan Castro likes to say that food is his activism. She respects the traditional recipes of Mexican cuisine and cooks according to her grandmother’s methods. He stays true to the origins of the foods he loves. However, he adapts traditional Mexican dishes to be plant-based. He does not try to imitate animal ingredients, rather he uses interesting plant ingredients such as banana flower or jackfruit. Ivan Castro hopes more people will give a plant-based diet a chance for whatever reason, because he says every decision to eat less animal products helps both animals and the environment.