There are certain kinds of adversity that do not arrive in one dramatic moment. They accumulate. They seep. They become the air you breathe long before you realize the air is poisoned. My story is not one of a single catastrophe that defined me, but of a thousand small ones
For a long stretch of my early life, I lived in a kind of drifting fog. I was moving, but not going anywhere. I was working, but not building anything. People talk about being lost like it is poetic or cinematic. Mine was neither. Mine was a slow, quiet erosion,
There are moments in this work when the kitchen stops being a place and becomes a mirror, a projection on the wall of yourself and everything in you. Not the flattering kind you check before service to make sure you don’t have a smear of guacamole on your chin
My therapist has been telling me for months that I need to write. Not as a hobby, not as a side project, not as some “chef tries journaling” bullshit, but as a form of decompression. As survival. As a way to slow my mind down long enough to understand what
Anthony Bourdain said it best in Don’t Eat Before Reading This. If you want to understand cooks, look past the plates and into the hunger. Not the literal hunger, but the hunger that pushes you toward the unfamiliar, the urge to taste the world instead of just living in
Running a restaurant looks sexy from the outside: plates glowing, drinks sweating, servers gliding. But anyone who actually lives this life knows the truth is far uglier, far rawer, and far more expensive than anyone wants to admit. Behind every perfect plate is a spreadsheet that makes you want to
Mise en place: French for “everything in its place.” It comes from the old European brigades, long before modern restaurants, when order was the only thing standing between a cook and complete fucking collapse during service. It wasn’t a concept; it was survival. It was the understanding that the
Stories scraped off the grill — char, sweat, and whatever’s left.
When I opened Amparo Fondita, I didn’t want to build a restaurant, I wanted to build a movement. A living, breathing space that used food to shift power, restore dignity, and reframe what it means to be a Latin American person working in hospitality. Amparo means shelter, but not
November is Mental Health Month, something I used to roll my eyes at. For years, I thought mental health was a luxury or something for people who had time (and money) to take breaks, go to therapy, light a candle, breathe. In the restaurant world, you don’t get to
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about home, not the kind you can find on a map, or the building where you keep all of your shit. Rather, the kind that lives under your skin. The kind that shifts, expands, and sometimes hides from you. I was born in
Amparo just hit its two-year mark. Three if you count the year of build-out. Two years of excitement, fear, heartbreak, survival, and grace. I stopped for a moment this week, like, truly stopped and tried to take it in. What’s happened, what hasn’t. The wins, the stumbles, the
A lot of these things I’m writing are heavily prompted by my day-to-day interactions with my team and topics they trigger through conversation and sometimes just by me watching them work. They really are everything.Everyone loves to call the restaurant a family. It sounds noble, a band of
I used to think meeting your heroes was the thing that would change you, that shaking the hand of the chef whose food made you feel funny…down there, or finally getting yelled at in that kitchen and rubbing shoulders with those cooks, would somehow baptize you in purpose and
There was a stretch of time last year when I stopped being the first to show up — not physically, but in spirit. The team would be prepping, orders flying, service humming, and I’d arrive just in time to plug into something already in motion. On paper, that’s what
There’s a particular kind of quiet that only happens in a restaurant kitchen after the last plate goes out and the last guest leaves. Quiet. Not peace. Never peace. More like the silence of something that’s been wrung dry: bodies, minds, towels, pans, patience. The stainless steel still
The truth is, I didn’t plan to write this, at least not now, though I think about it more often than not and just can’t seem to put pen to paper or screen, as it were. I planned to cook, to lead, to feed. To build a restaurant
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