like you to invite them to your party next year for the

40th.

For the 40th and say, you remember when you said that to us? No, I will say that, no, people were not ready for Mexican.

They thought they all knew what Mexican food was.

And it was nachos and burritos and crispy shell tacos and fajitas and stuff like that.

And we had none of that on the menu because we were doing the food of Mexico's regions, not of the southwestern part of the United States.

But we call that Mexican food.

There's

Mexican cuisine, restaurant, and also Chicago?

Well, a lot of the students that were taking my French cooking classes and French pastry classes said you had gone to school in Mexico, so why- don't you teach us about Mexican food? And at first I didn't really want to, but then I started doing it a little bit at a time, doing a bunch of research and so forth.

And I felt like a fish out of water when I was teaching it because I just didn't grow up like cooking it.

And the flavors in some cases were foreign to me, even though I had tasted a lot of that stuff in Mexico.

And I came to it sort of kicking and screaming.

And people said, oh, that was a great class.

Can you teach us another and another? And then wherever I was teaching, people started gravitating to those classes more than they did my French classes.

How did you come up with this specific idea? What turned into Frontera Grill?

Yeah.

And you don't really think of it in big chunks.

You think about it as like, okay, we gotta get ready for service tonight.

[laughs] And we hopefully are going to be as good as, if not better than we were yesterday, and we're constantly striving for, for doing the best that we can at any given moment.

And I like that part of it.

When I was growing up, the one thing that I learned from my father that I have never forgotten is that every day before the restaurant opens, stand at the front door and see what your guests are going to see when they walk in the door.

Where does that come from?

from?You know, I grew up in the '60s where it was the back to the land movement and all that.

So how do you spend your time in Mexico

and in Chicago? When I was living in Mexico during the 80s.

there was not one chef-owned restaurant that I knew, okay? And when people talked about traditional food, they talked about these restaurants that had been around for a long time, and the kitchens were run by mayoress.

Those are the older women that have done their internships from very young age and now direct these kitchens that were very classic.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And we're upholding the traditions.

So I work with this