Everything that honors the soul, nourishes the body.
a house of
We select, prepare, and present foods of extraordinary quality — oils, vinegars, preserves, ancestral sweets, and elixirs — each chosen with the same rigor as an apothecary compounding a remedy, not a factory filling shelves.
Since 1888. From Galicia to the New World. From the Botica del Sabor to your table.
Handcrafted creations. Available now.
OUR STORY
In the diocese of Mondoñedo, at the end of the 17th century, the ancestors of the Rego family worked as apothecaries. Their formulation books—preserved today in the family archive—are the physical testimony of a trade that would precede the family name by more than a century. The method was already here, before commerce, before the Atlantic, before Zales & Rego.
Alonzo Rego is born in Santiago de Goiriz, Diocese of Mondoñedo, Kingdom of Galicia. Son of the apothecary Don Jose Francisco Rego and Doña Francisca Fernandez, he learns the trade at his father's pharmacy, a trade that several generations of his family had already practiced: selecting, preserving, formulating. Vocation is not improvised. It is passed down.
Alonzo Rego leaves Galicia at the age of twenty-one and arrives in Cádiz, the gateway to trade with the Americas. There he meets Zales, a partner in the Portuguese trading houses of the port. For twenty years they build a house of spices, oils and selected products, marked with three letters engraved on each package: ZAR.
After twenty years in Cádiz, Alonzo decides to cross. The journey from Cádiz to Veracruz takes three months, fraught with storms, scurvy, and British privateers. The fare, provisions, and freight for the goods he ships to establish a foothold on the other side amount to a laborer's forty years' wages —in today's currency, nearly half a million euros. This is not an adventure; it is a patrimonial investment. Alonzo wagers everything he accumulated over two decades with Zales on the dock in a single throw. The ZAR brand crosses with him in his luggage.
Years later, trade with New Spain takes Alonzo across the Atlantic. When Alonzo decides to cross the Atlantic, Zales remains on the dock. His trail is lost over the years. The seal, however, is not. In 1797, at the age of 41, he married María Dolores Ortega Bustos in the Parish of San Miguel Arcángel in Orizaba. The parish record – preserved to this day – records his occupation, origin, and lineage: merchant, native of Santiago de Goiriz, Diocese of Mondoñedo, Kingdom of Galicia. It is the first documentary proof of the family in America.
Don Ismael Rego y Salcedo (1848–1916), Alonzo's grandson, gave structure to the family tradition: a catalog, a method, a name. The trade came from the 17th century. 1776 marked the beginning of commerce. 1888 is its baptism: Zales & Rego. His children—engineers, doctors, architects—would choose other paths. Ismael would be the last Rego to practice the trade.
Seven generations later, the house is reborn and returns to the old world. The same vocation of Cadiz — to compose, select, preserve the exceptional — now serving the entire world from Madrid.
Flavor Apothecary
An apothecary's shop was not a store. It was a place where knowledge met materials. Where a trained eye selected ingredients, where formulation was precise, where each preparation was made with a specific purpose.
That's how we think about food. Not as a product to be moved, but as a substance to be understood, selected, and preserved with the same seriousness with which an apothecary approaches a formula.
The file that proves everything.
The story of ZALES & REGO is not marketing mythology. It rests on a single verifiable document: Don Alonzo Rego's marriage certificate, preserved in the parish records of the Church of San Miguel, Orizaba, Veracruz, New Spain. February 1797.
Merchant. Native of Santiago de Goiriz. Diocese of Mondoñedo. Kingdom of Galicia.
Everything else—the name, the profession, the lineage—flows from there.
We don't sell products. We follow seasons.
