CHEF PAUL BARBOSA

Chef Paul transforms nourishment into ceremony. Drawing on his family roots in Mulegé, Baja California Sur, he designs cuisine that reflects the land and which is infused with desert botanicals, local flora, and wild fermentations.

Chef Paul Barbosa Jr. creates zero-waste, fermentation-focused cuisine using desert botanicals and local ingredients, transforming nourishment into ceremony while preparing the iboga total alkaloid extract.

A fermentation specialist and sustainability advocate, Paul practices a zero-waste culinary philosophy, creating living beverages and probiotic infusions from retreat remnants. As both a chef and plant medicine practitioner, his work unites gastronomy, ecology, and spirit, embodying ETÉREO’s ethos of “harmony as luxury.”

From High School Kitchen to Ceremonial Cuisine

Chef Paul Barbosa's culinary journey began not in a prestigious culinary school, but out of necessity in his mother's kitchen. After his parents split up, his mother had to start working full-time. "She's like, all right, you’ve got to fend for yourself," Paul recalls. "So I started just throwing stuff together. It was the first time I experienced creativity in food."

That teenage experimentation—throwing random ingredients together to see what worked—would become the foundation of his creative approach decades later. His mother recognized something in him and encouraged him to take an after-school culinary course. Though he initially planned to attend the Culinary Institute of America, life took him on a different path through real estate during the housing boom, then as a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu instructor who opened several schools.

But cooking kept calling to him. A student who was a restaurant chef offered him a way in: "Hey, I'm thinking about going to culinary school," Paul told him. The chef's response? "Oh, just come work for me." Paul never got formal training. Instead, he bounced between restaurants, learning through experience, books, and later, the internet.

The Celebrity Years and Burnout

Despite having no formal culinary education, Paul somehow found himself opening a fast-casual Barcelona street food restaurant in West Hollywood. "I had no business being the chef there at all," he admits. "But these people trusted me to do it. So I was like, well, let’s do it."

From there, he moved into high-volume meal prep, cranking out 5,000 Whole30 meals a week in Orange County. When he was ready to quit and move to Spain to work in restaurants there, a celebrity couple in LA called wanting Whole30 specifically. Paul was ambivalent—he was ready to leave. But he took the job thinking it would only be for a few months, giving him more money for Spain.

He ended up staying for years, working for John Legend and Chrissy Teigen. "They were my family for a couple years," he says. But the lifestyle was consuming: "I was there basically all the time...12-16 hours a day at their house, five, six days a week."

Then COVID hit, and everything stopped. For the first time since he was 16, Paul wasn't working non-stop. "That was the first time, probably since I was 16, since I had not worked that long. And so it made me go inward a little bit."

When he returned to work after lockdown, something had shifted. "I realized very quickly, oh, this is not for me anymore. Like I need—I want—to open my own thing, and I also want a different lifestyle, way more simple and thoughtful."

The Fermentation Obsession and Personal Crisis

With a decent severance, Paul decided to see how long he could make the money last without working. That's when he dove deep into fermentation—about five years ago now. He'd toyed with it before, but this time he became obsessed with "turning a new flavor or something that was going to be waste into something delicious."

"I actually didn't think about this until right now," he reflected during the interview. "It brings me back to that beginning when I was in my mom's kitchen, putting random stuff together and seeing what happened. I really love that part of cooking."

But this period also coincided with a personal crisis. Paul was in a toxic relationship that exposed him to someone dealing with depression and anxiety—conditions he'd never openly acknowledged or discussed. What he discovered was that he himself had been suffering from them his entire life.

"From probably 15 or 16, I just assumed everybody thought about killing themselves every day, and it was a daily struggle to suppress those feelings, to get through the day, and if I was emotional about it I was weak," Paul reveals.

The relationship deteriorated, and Paul fell back into self-harm—cutting, something he'd done as a teenager. At 30 years old, he knew something had to change. Fortunately, the family he'd worked with (Chrissy was vocal about her own mental health struggles) sent him to her doctor. Paul ended up going to a psychiatric ward for evaluation.

"That kind of shifted my thinking—like, I need to work on these things, because this is kind of ridiculous that every time I get into a relationship, it's this massive explosion. I just wanted to be balanced."

The Bufo Awakening

Paul's partner at the time received a free Bufo (5-MeO-DMT) session from her boss with facilitator Paije West (co-founder of ETÉREO Baja). She asked if Paul wanted to do it. His answer was immediate: no.

"I had never done drugs really. I'd done cocaine once and smoked weed a handful of times up until then, but I was very worried about losing control, so I mostly stayed away from drugs, though I would drink till I black out. So I guess it's not really that much of a difference, but it felt safer somehow."

What changed his mind was watching Hamilton Morris's Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia episode on Bufo. The beginning terrified him—particularly the scene of someone having a difficult experience in a river. But by the end, with its message about self-love, "I changed my thinking about it, and I was like, OK, I'm gonna try it."

That experience "was really the start of a big change, big shift in my life, or at least the way I perceived the world." Paul found peace he'd never known. "I'm able to regulate my emotions a lot easier, something I've always struggled with."

During his Bufo sessions, Paul developed a unique practice of reconnecting with nature. "In a lot of my Bufo sessions, I’d take all my clothes off and get as much into the sand or dirt, or throwing sticks and leaves on myself, like I wanted to be buried in the earth again," he explains. "It felt like I was back in my mother's womb being held by an unconditional love, but by the Earth."

The Call to Baja

In March 2023, Paul did another Bufo session at a retreat in Baja California that he was cooking for with Paije and Fletcher. During the ceremony, he saw his grandmother, who was born in Baja and has since passed. She told him he needed to move to Mexico—that he had family there he didn't know about yet, and that learning Spanish would help him express himself better. "There's words and phrases in Spanish that aren't as—I don't know how best to say this—articulate in English, or that don't carry the same meaning, or maybe as poetic."

Two months later, in May 2023, Paul sold everything he owned and drove to Mexico. He's been there for two and a half years now.

How Psychedelics Shifted His Culinary Approach

The Bufo experiences freed Paul from the insecurity that had plagued his career. "I had always felt insecure because I didn't have the formal training, that I was never a chef like somebody else, or comparing myself to them, and I had just been holding onto that self doubt."

He realized: "You know what, there are no rules for how somebody can be a chef or cook or whatever. Like, who cares, if people love the food?"

This liberation allowed him to dive deeper into fermentation and think "way outside the box." He's grateful now that he doesn't have structured education. "This way allows me to just think more broadly and more creatively than just repeating what somebody has taught me. You know, some things take a little longer to figure out, but I enjoy that part of it."

Fermentation as Ceremony

For Paul, fermentation itself is ceremonial. He starts preparations six months—even years—before a retreat. "I wake up every day and I check it, I taste it, I baby it, I'm caring for it as it's going through its life. So I think that's probably one of the real reasons why I like it so much."

He lets the ferments guide his menu creation. "A lot of my food, I let the fermentation be the guide. I'm like, oh, this tastes like this. This is going to be great in this. And that's how the dish is born."

This ceremonial approach extends to the medicine itself. Paul now ferments the iboga used in ETÉREO’s ceremonies. Working with a fermentation group on Instagram, someone mentioned using koji—a mold grown on rice that carries enzymes used in sake, miso, and soy sauce production. Paul's insight was that koji could pre-digest the iboga, making it easier on guests' stomachs and potentially faster-acting.

"Typically it's like 30 or 40 minutes. With the fermentation, we felt it like 10 minutes after we laid down," Paul says of the first ceremony using his fermented iboga preparation. "So there's definitely a difference."

Zero-Waste Philosophy: Waste as Treasure

Paul's zero-waste philosophy is rooted in curiosity and challenge. Throughout each retreat week, he saves all vegetable and fruit scraps separately. Fruit scraps become tapache, a fermented drink made using the natural yeasts on fruit skins (traditionally pineapple, but Paul uses whatever he has). "It's a nice way to show our guests, look all this waste we created during your stay. You guys are drinking this now, and it's something so simple and delicious, and really it's the scrap and some sugar."

Vegetable scraps—onion skins, carrot peels, chili seeds, pumpkin guts, "basically anything that's part of the organic material"—become a treacle. Through fermentation, Paul extracts all the sugars from these scraps and reduces them down to a "savory but also very sweet glaze" that can enhance carrots or meat, go in sauces, or combine with butter to add dimension to dishes.

"I take it as a challenge to find an edible use out of something that, in its raw state, might taste terrible," Paul explains. "Like, okay, we can extract some flavors out of this, or even just use it as a texture component. So starting to think of it less as what's traditional or normal and more like, no, this is all food. I take it as a challenge now to try to find something that's not edible, and make it edible or better yet, make it delicious."

Wild Ingredients from the Desert

Paul forages extensively around ETÉREO's desert location. One of his most unusual discoveries: velvet mites. These tiny creatures, looking "like a piece of velvet, like red velvet, just around," emerge after rain. Paul researched them and found they're used in Ayurveda for making vitality oil.

"They're definitely edible," he determined. So he fermented them with koji and honey. "They've got a very bitter flavor, which adds such a nice balance to so many foods when combined with nothing but the sugar in the honey." He takes a spoonful daily or mixes it with soda water. "You get this almost Amaro-ish kind of feel."

He's also fermenting rattlesnake (a friend called him after killing one) and collecting scorpions for a garum—a fish sauce-like condiment traditionally made from whole fish. Using koji's enzymes, Paul can create similar umami-rich sauces from any protein source. He's heard scorpions taste like crab. "In my mind, they seem like a crustacean of the land.”

These experiments serve multiple purposes: finding sustainable local protein sources (the beef in the area isn't great—"they're skinny desert cows"), and making food a bit more thought-provoking: “I know that probably nobody else is going to make this, but it does make you think about things differently."

Cooking Without Menus

Unlike most chefs, Paul doesn't plan menus in advance—at least not for ETÉREO. "Normally I don't make menus like this," he explains. "I just bought or found a bunch of stuff. I have a general idea, but I just take it day by day, wake up and decide, you know what, I'm gonna do this."

He listens to guests, adjusting based on what he hears them say they like. "For me, it's more fun that way. I don't know how to plan a menu and then cook that menu. It feels boring when I have to."

Fortunately, Paije trusts him completely: "You don't have to give me a menu, just do whatever you want,” and that's literally what I do.

The menus do shift based on ceremony type. For huachuma and 5-MeO retreats, he keeps things lighter and vegan. For iboga retreats, it's the opposite. "I've literally served ribs and potato salad as their last meal before the ceremony because we want to get guests their protein, carbs, energy—like, you guys are going to be seriously working. So we need to feed you."

Local Sourcing in Baja

Paul works closely with local farms and ranches. The lamb comes from a ranch that slaughters just one or two animals per week. "We're able to get just a limited amount, which I also feel is the way it should be."

For fish, he goes directly to the beach in the afternoon when fishermen come back in and buys right off their boats. The produce comes from farms he's built relationships with, allowing him access to fresh, seasonal ingredients.

He sneaks extra nutrition into everything through his ferments. "I'm sneaking that in through extra seasoning, things with miso, and so on" he explains. "So you're getting protein from the beans that I've made it with. And also, everything I make is still alive, so I’m getting a lot of those probiotics in there."

On "Conscious Luxury"

When asked about ETÉREO's positioning around "conscious luxury," Paul is refreshingly candid. "If I'm being honest, I don't like it," he admits. "It feels—it makes me think that we just go out and party and eat mushrooms, that we're enlightened, which sure, that’s fine for some people. It's just, I don't know, the term lacks the intention that ETÉREO is committed to, I think."

He's equally humble about what sets ETÉREO apart from other retreats. "I've never been to another retreat. I don't know what they're like. Everyone just tells me the food's bad and like, I'm not specifically trying to make my food stand out from other retreats. Like, this is just how I normally cook."

He doesn't get involved in the psychedelic industry scene. "I don't need to know like who all the ‘psychedelic’ people are. Like, I don't know. I just like to cook my food and ferment these things."

What he does love is the setting itself. "I'm very happy to do it in this setting, because I love the attitude here—it's definitely different cooking for people in a retreat setting than in LA’s celebrity culture. The people—they're more open to feeling the love and the intention that I'm putting into the food, as opposed to, oh, this is just a thing we're paying for."

Beyond ETÉREO: Space Food and Future Plans

In addition to his work at ETÉREO, Paul has one of the more unusual side gigs imaginable: he's one of four chefs who cooks for Blue Origin space launches. He travels to Van Horn, West Texas, to cook for wealthy space tourists during their four or five days of training and launch preparation.

"We go out there and we cook for them. They do their training, they do their launch, we throw them a party, they go home," he explains. The location is remote—"in the middle of the desert, there's nothing else around. Jeff Bezos owns all the land out there"—but beautiful, with stunning sunrises and sunsets. And the chefs get to watch the launches. "Which is, like, pretty fucking cool."

As Paul puts it with characteristic humor: "My miso has gone to space now in somebody's stomach."

Looking ahead, Paul dreams of opening a brick-and-mortar restaurant where he can fully explore his fermentation-focused, zero-waste approach. He also enjoys doing workshops and collaborations, like a recent trip to Guadalupe where he worked with a restaurant to help them reimagine their waste streams.

But for now, he's content in his small town in Mexico. "I just want to do my stuff here," he says simply.

The Intention Behind Every Dish

At the core of Paul's cooking is intention and love. "First thing, if you have a good meal and feel satisfied from that meal, that alone can be healing," he reflects.

He sees his role as creating dishes that "nourish both the body and the soul," incorporating traditional fermentation techniques in innovative ways, always thinking outside the box about what food can be and what waste doesn't have to be.

His approach is organic, experimental, and deeply personal—informed by his struggles with mental health, his transformative experiences with plant medicines, his reconnection with the earth, and that teenage kid in his mother's kitchen who first discovered the joy of throwing random ingredients together to see what magic might emerge.