Two of the talents recognized by the James Beard Foundation this past year as the best chefs in this country were of Latin descent, as were three recipients of the organization’s media awards. While the food industry’s upper-echelon institutions are by no means a blanket indicator of our collective appetite, these milestones have merit: our experience of Hispanic cuisine in America continues to evolve as chefs tinker with fusions while staying true to the flavors and spices of their own heritages.
To celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month, which begins this week, here are six chefs who are using the nuances of spice as forms of celebration.
Daniela Soto-Innes of Rubra in Punta de Mita, Mexico
Though she made her name in New York City, Daniela Soto-Innes has recently returned to her home country—and she couldn’t be happier. After studying at Le Cordon Bleu and working under a staple of blue-chip restaurateurs, the Mexico City-born swimmer-turned-chef became the unexpected star of Enrique Olvera’s Flatiron hotspot Cosme, a modern take on Mexican cuisine. She won a cornucopia of fancy titles before the age of 30—including World’s Best Female Chef by World’s 50 Best Restaurants—but after opening Olvera s NoHo spinoff Atla as partner, she decided to go back to her roots.
At her recently-opened restaurant Rubra—whose name comes from the Latin word for supersaturated tropical flower that permeates parts of Mexico, Central America, Colombia, and Venezuela—she finally has. “I’ve always felt at home in the jungle,” says Soto-Innes from her new kitchen overlooking the boundless beaches of Punta Mita and surrounded by tropical wilderness, a 40-minute drive from Puerto Vallarta. “When I found this place and saw all the flowers surrounding it I knew it was for me.” The new restaurant, which opens in November, is a restart for Soto-Innes, focusing on what she calls “tropical food with a twist” as well as Milpa, the Mexican agriculture system where complementary crops are grown around corn. “I represent the ecosystem around me, all chefs do,” says Soto-Innes. “We cook not only with our memories but with what s around and what s available.”
But Rubra won’t diverge too far from its owner’s colorfully signature oeuvre. “Us Mexicans really love to layer spice,” the chef says of one dish she’s experimenting with for her first menu. Fresh from the Mexican port city Ensenada, Soto-Innes’s abalone is prepared as if it were al pastor; it’s seasoned heavily with adobo and grilled painstakingly slowly before being sliced delicately thin. The chef serves her spice-forward marine snails beside their prismatic shell and with a cold glass of seaweed tepache, a twist on a fermented pineapple drink popular in the nearby Jalisco state. It’s an unlikely pairing that will make your mouth salivate and then warm with fire before finding sweet relief. “I’m a young chef who has been lucky to be in a lot of kitchens in a lot of countries,” adds Soto-Innes. “Mexican food is my heart, and I’m so happy to be here.”
Enrique Limardo of Seven Reasons in Washington, D.C.
Enrique Limardo has led many lives, including a previous career as an architectural and industrial designer. But in 1997, after recognizing his passion for the culinary arts, he enrolled at La Casserole du Chef in his native Caracas, Venezuela before continuing onto EUHT Sant Pol de Mar in Barcelona and the Luis Irizar Culinary School in San Sebastián, Spain. He then went on to lead a number of kitchens—some his own, and in his own home country, or others across the world—before eventually settling down in Washington, D.C., where he now reigns over an empire of respected Latin and Spanish establishments that range from high concept to rotisserie.
The apple of Limardo’s eye, though, is Seven Reasons, a scene-y Pan-Latin joint in an ivy-covered, brick-lined townhome on the city’s 14th Street. While it doesn’t have the Michelin star of his Imperfeto, a Mediterranean meets Latin fusion chef’s table on 23rd Street, it was his first in this country’s capital, and has been named one of the most influential eateries of our time. “I wanted to create the most unique Latin American restaurant ever,” says Limardo. “I succeeded.” That’s why when the chef recently announced the closing of Seven Reasons by the end of this year, there was shock—and outcry. But for Limardo, this change is a good thing: the closure is only temporary, while the restaurant moves to a new home twice its size in CityCenter DC.
Until then, Limardo is revisiting his classics in what he calls Seavon Reasons’ “last dance.” Back on the menu are Limardo’s beloved dishes that honor his native Venezuelan cuisine, as well as incorporate culinary influences from Peru, the Amazon regions, and even the Caribbean. One of his most important dishes draws from paloapique, a typical meal eaten in the plains of Llanos, Venezuela, and is made of rice, plantains, goat, and coconut. Limardo’s version at Seven Reasons stars tender New Zealand lamb loins—cured and pan-seared to medium rare—as its main protein, served with Indian coconut curry over a bed of black Asian rice, which creates the perfect “cake-y” sensation. He tops that off with a sweet plantain mixed with molasses and his secret ingredients from the Amazon jungle: cassava root, which is fermented and juiced to create a serious hot sauce, and powdered ants taken from Venezuelan lemon trees. They create the perfect balance of “sour and spice,” says Limardo. “It’s a very unique flavor that reminds me of my childhood but also nothing else I’ve ever had.”
Wes Avila of Angry Egret Dinette in Los Angeles, CA
Wes Avila may have grown up in the suburbs of Pico Rivera, California, but his upbringing was far from cookie-cutter. The land on which there house was situated, which previously served as orange orchards, was so fertile that his father—who immigrated from Durango, Mexico to the U.S. in 1972—ended up growing everything from chilies to mint and bay leaves, and even aloe vera. It’s a palate the younger Avila always kept with him, particularly in regards to spice. After graduating from culinary school in Pasadena, the younger Avila went to work for Michelin-starred chefs including Gary Menes and Walter Manzke, and attended Centre de Formation d Alain Ducasse before traveling the world.
Over ten years ago, he founded Guerrilla Tacos as a street cart in the Arts District of Downtown Los Angeles, becoming an overnight hit and cementing the chef as one of the founding fathers of “Modern Mexican” cuisine. In 2020, he stepped down from the company a few months after opening a different taqueria, Piopiko, at Ace Kyoto, Japan. Now, Avila helms a series of Mexican-esque food properties into which he continues to channel his curiosity—although the James Beard-nominated Angry Egret Dinette is certainly his most experimental. The torta-slash-sandwich shop in LA s Chinatown is where its chef-owner comes to play. “Mexican is certainly our base, but we’re a melting pot overall,” he explains. “There’s California-Mexican, some Japanese here, a little Mediterranean there, you never really know what you’re going to get.”
Though the menu is constantly changing, the fish tacos remain a loyal favorite. “I grew up eating them, so I always personally go back to them,” Avila explains of the pair of wild-caught battered and fried rockfish, which is slathered with healthy helpings of mustard habanero aioli, chipotle aioli, heirloom tomato molcajete salsa, pico de gallo, cilantro, salsa China—all made in-house—cabbage, and a fresh pinch of lime. "There are three salsas on there, but it s not too much heat,” says the chef of the bright sauces that recall Pico Rivera. “It has a lot of flavors from all the different styles that are there.
Alberto Carballo of Casa Cruz in Manhattan, New York
Dashes of cayenne pepper, minty strands of fresh rosemary, chopped bitter parsley, creamy garlic, and spoonfuls of smokey paprika are among the flavors that Alberto Carballo remembers of his home country. Since earlier this spring, the Spanish chef has helmed the kitchen of one of New York’s most lavish—and expensive—restaurants, Casa Cruz, but he’s kept the muscle memory of the flavors of his youth with him his whole life. “It’s imprinted on me,” he admits, “I cannot escape it.” Carballo was born in Bierzo, Spain, a fertile wine region in Castilla y León that is culturally Galacean. When he decided he wanted to work in food, he went west to Galicia to study—specifically at Escuela de hostelería de Foz—before working in New York under the likes of Daniel Burns at the now-shuttered Luksus in Brooklyn and Quique Dacosta at three Michelin-starred Casa Dani.
At Casa Cruz, Carballo has focused on impeccable execution and refinement, creating a suitably sophisticated menu for its setting of a gilded townhouse. The restaurant-slash-members-club’s pasta offering was a particular focus for the chef, whose newest seafood addition was inspired by an early creation from Galicia, which he made after observing local fisherman prepare their catches of the day. Today, the dish is centered around fresh cuttlefish that is diced and simmered with onion, red pepper, paprika, and bay leaves (“which goes very well with seafood,” adds the chef).
He then adds white wine and tomato sauce before reducing it down to a paste. A healthy amount of cream brings the concoction together which is then served over fresh flower-showed campanelle ruffles, and topped with ruby-red chili grams made with cayenne pepper and lemon XX in house. It adds brightness and spiciness at the same time, as well as a texture that makes the dish feel complete, says the chef, who finishes the meal with pangrattato Italian breadcrumbs and squid fried in a charcoal oven. “Spanish food isn t necessarily spice heavy, but it does use spices to effectively enhance natural flavors. This chili has a distinct flavor, and that heat is important for the entire dish. It’s simple but very rich, and it reminds me of home.”
Tania Apolinar and Giovanni Cervantes of Taqueria Ramírez in Greenpoint, Brooklyn
If there’s one thing that will drive a New Yorker to the brink, it’s having to wait—and even worse, doing so in a line. But Taqueria Ramírez, not only rewards patient diners, it welcomes hungry converts back each night. It’s been said that the quaint eaterie’s funky tacos—fully loaded and served atop primary-colored plastic plates—are the best in New York, even if, or perhaps in spite of, its owners never running a restaurant before.
Real-life partners Giovanni Cervantes, who is from Mexico City, and Tania Apolinar, from Torreón from the north of Mexico, met several years ago while working at a photography studio in Greenpoint, the Brooklyn neighborhood that they continue to live and work in today. In their prior vocations, the pair always used to make lunch for their team—and their fated journey to the food world was officially sealed on one particularly eye-opening holiday back in their home country. “I grew up eating tacos; I’ve always loved tacos,” says Cervantes. “It just made sense to me that this is what I should be doing.”
On any given day Taqueria Ramírez, which opened in the summer of 2021, has six tacos on its to-the-point menu, many of which sell out daily. Cervantes and Apolinar grill their al pastor on a traditional trompo, a rotating burner Middle Eastern immigrants first brought into the city and state of Puebla to make shawarma in the 18th century. (Taqueria Ramírez’s trompo is so big its owners had to buy an industrial lifting machine to affix their meat.) They use a massive choricera that was custom-made in CDMX, where it is any local taqueria’s instrument of choice. Inside its convexed steel body, Cervantes and Apolinar stew slabs of beef, links of pork sausage, and tripe in lard for hours to get the tenderness and spice just right. “We make a soup of their juices,” says Apolinar, who prefers her tacos campechano-style, with two different meats, rather than one exclusively. Each is served on daily-made tortillas from Tortilleria Nixtamal, which uses Mexican corn with traditional Nixtamalization techniques. “It s something you can only get in Mexico City or here.”
