Sueca paella contest crowns a Mexican chef from Tlaxcala

José Carlos Ruiz Zamora, chef at Burguettos in Apizaco, in the Mexican state of Tlaxcala, won the Sueca paella contest on Sunday 13 September, taking first place at the 65th Concurs Internacional de Paella Valenciana ahead of 39 other professional cooks.

He cooked with his assistant, Lionel Caldelas, and took home €2,500, a commemorative parchment and the silver medallion reserved for winners, handed over by Sueca's mayor, Julián Sáez. Burguettos reached the final by winning the contest's Mexican semifinal in Querétaro. A second qualifying round abroad, in Takatsuki near Osaka, sent Casalina, from Kanagawa, to Valencia.

How the Sueca paella contest was judged

The canonical paella travels well when the cook respects the recipe and reads the fire.

The final brought together 40 cooks from 14 countries, from Argentina, Australia and Japan to Morocco, Turkey and the United States. Everyone worked with the same ingredients, fixed by the contest's official recipe for paella valenciana, and everyone cooked over wood. The pans reached the jury in staggered turns, so that each rice was tasted as it came off the fire.

Seven judges did the tasting, among them the critic José Carlos Capel, president of Madrid Fusión, and Tomás Angulo Salas, last year's winner, while a notary oversaw the process. Restaurante Arrozante, from Seville, finished second and took €1,500; Ca Ladio, from Llombai in Valencia province, came third with €1,000.

Asked by COPE what had made the difference, Ruiz Zamora pointed to the two variables every paella cook argues about: the salt and the heat, and above all how the fire is managed. This is the first title, he said, and if they are allowed, the team intends to keep winning.

A second Latin American win in a row

Sueca, a rice-growing town south of Valencia that bills itself as the world capital of paella, has run the competition since 1961, and local media describe it as the oldest gastronomic contest in Spain. Angulo Salas, who sat on this year's jury, won the 2025 edition with Sabor Amar Paellas from Ecuador. The top prize has now gone to a kitchen outside Spain two years running.

That matters in a region where the ingredient list of paella valenciana is defended with near-legal rigour. Before the final, Sueca councillor Teresa Ribes presented the 65th edition as a way of honouring the contest's past while securing the future of the region's most international dish, and the qualifying rounds in Mexico and Japan are the most visible part of that bet.

Mexico, of course, brings its own deep regional cooking to the table, as our guide to what to eat in Oaxaca shows. For now, the most talked-about rice in Apizaco is a Valencian one, and the next semifinals will show whether the trend holds for a third year.