The Rise of Evil Cooks

It started as just another Saturday at Smorgasburg. Our huitlacoche supplier from Mexico mentioned the wildfires. It’s devastating how normal that kind of news has become—these days, all you can do is hope they calm down by nightfall. Seven years of running pop-ups and over 17 years in the industry couldn’t prepare us for what came next.

We were 25 hours without power, scrambling for generators to save the food at our brick-and-mortar, which had only been open a couple of months. But when the fires kept hitting, it stopped being about us. We started cooking for firefighters and families in shelters, giving everything we had until we ran out of food. Then something cool happened—an old friend @lifeandthyme, showed up with a donation of meat. Others sent money. That kept us going.

As chefs, this is what we do: serve, help, and make someone’s day better. But there’s a harsh reality. After the fires, people stopped going out. They’re saving for the next disaster. Wildfires might come again. It’s hard not to feel uncertain about the future.

Yet, rebelling against the current is what we know best. We both took different paths in the kitchen—one in fine dining, the other in large-scale school operations. We walked away from the usual chef’s path: no chasing accolades, no institutional food service systems. Instead, we created Evil Cooks—a mix of our love for metal music and our refusal to conform.

We’re both from Mexico, but we grew up in LA, surrounded by a mashup of flavors—Chinese, Persian, Korean. A Chinese taco didn’t just make sense; it felt natural. For seven years, we sold food in bars and breweries, just doing what we loved.

Then came the call. A friend told us we’d been nominated for @beardfoundation . We couldn’t believe it—still a pop-up, suddenly in the spotlight. We never went looking for it, but sometimes life works like that. You just keep doing the things that truly move you, and things fall into place.