Chef Chat: Enrique Olvera On Cuba, DJ’ing, & His Telenovela Alter-Ego

Enrique Olvera. If you know food – frankly, even if you don’t – you know Enrique Olvera‘s name. His Mexico City restaurant, Pujol, is currently No. 16 on the World’s Best Restaurants list, and Cosme, his first stateside outpost, has driven New Yorkers and its visitors to reservation-hawking new heights. (Remember when Adele played Madison Square Garden last month and tickets sold out in five seconds? A Cosme reservation is kind of like that, only every night for the last +/- 460 nights.) 

Renowned for cosmopolitan  cuisine that is modern in approach but anchored by Mexican tradition,  Olvera is liberating Americans from their preconceived notions of Mexican food one plate at a time.

Olvera is also collaborating with chefs Andoni Luis Aduriz and Massimo Bottura on a new project in Cuba. The trio have been working on opening a restaurant in Havana since late 2014, when President Obama, following 56 years of economic isolation, reopened Cuba to American travelers. It’s still at the early stages, however, with no definitive opening date.  

But while chef-ey stuff like the fact that Olvera graduated from New York’s Culinary Institute of America and credits his grandparents and their bakery in Mexico with introducing him to the joy of cooking is the kind of required reading you’ll need to complete if you want to play in the foodie big leagues, what you really want to know – be honest – is who he parties with at South Beach Wine and Food, where he’s cooking alongside Gaston Acurio and Diego Oka next month, and what he listens to while doing the XX (use your imagination), and what his superpower would be if he were a telenovela star.

This is the fun stuff, the stuff that will make you the sought after dinner guest at your foodie friends’ next gathering. It’s also the stuff we asked Olvera when we chatted with him last. Click through for his sporting answers, and if you really want to know the chef-ey stuff, there’s a cheat sheet at the end of the story for all of you food trivia nerds. (We get it, really.) [pagebreak]

You’re hosting a dinner with La Mar’s Gaston Acurio and Diego Oka at this year’s SOBEWFF.  What’s happening behind the scenes at these kitchen collaboration dinners? Is it total chaos – like, plates flying and expeditors shouting; the kind of thing we’d see on a Top Chef challenge – or a big party with you and the other chefs telling jokes and high-fiving? 

Absolutely high-fiving. We all have been in chaos when we were younger but now that we are getting a little bit older, we realized that these occasions should be a time for celebration, chilling, catching up, talking about what we’ve been through and kind of comparing our experiences.

Do you party with the other chefs at the festival after your events or do you go back to your hotel, watch TV, and pass out? If the latter, what TV show are you watching?

I love partying with the rest of the chefs. I also have a thing about playing music, so I always end up being the DJ at most of the parties. I like to have fun and make others have fun all the time, not only from the kitchen.

Where did you go on your last vacation? Any travel mishaps that turned into funny legends/stories?

Massimo, Andoni, and I went with our families to Havana, Cuba. As you may know, we are working on a project so we went there to keep the score. We found ourselves amazed to see the importance of culture and art for the Cuban people. What we all liked the most was the realization that, in a place like Cuba, something like cooking can be much more democratic compared to other parts of the world.

New Yorkers went bananas when you opened Cosme. What’s your explanation for the Big Apple’s love affair with you?  

The thing with Cosme is that it is not Mexican cuisine. It’s just food made by Mexicans with unconventional ideas, the best way possible. People in the United States were used to Tex-Mex food for so long and had a much simpler notion of Mexican cuisine. I think for them Cosme is a way of rediscovering Mexican flavors from a totally different perspective.

What does your family think of your success? Any jealous primos or long lost relatives that magically appeared after you became famous? 

Ahaha, no. Mexicans are not like that. We’ve been close since forever. I had their support from the first day and now more than ever. They actually have worked with me as partners since the beginning. [pagebreak]