“I’m from Uruguay with Italian roots, I’ve been cooking for over 20 years and I started like many, as a dishwasher; I then got moved to pastry and it was horrible at first – imagine how important fire is to an Uruguayan? All I wanted to do was work on the grill for those 3 years. Then I moved to bread-making and it wasn’t until 2011 that I decided to do my own thing and I opened my first grill. That’s where I started doing what I always wanted – working with fire. In 2012 I got an offer in Houston and did a master’s in meat and that’s what brought me over to the states.

Eating first-grade meat in Uruguay is also hard, you always get third-rate stuff; the good stuff’s always exported.

Even though I’m from Uruguay, I believe the best meat is that from Argentina – they have more tender meat thanks to the rearing methods they use. Meat nowadays has an astounding flavor here in the US as well, the key is the combination of diets between grass-fed and grain-fed gives the meat a great ratio of fat/meat.

In hindsight though, moving through all those stations has been a learning process that has made me a more complete cook and I really value that experience nowadays.”