Ad Age is marking Hispanic Heritage Month 2024 with our Honoring Creative Excellence package, in which members of the Hispanic community revisit pivotal projects or turning points in their careers. (Read the introduction and all the essays here.) Today, guest editor Daisy Exposito turns the spotlight to Fermin Nunez, chef and partner at Suerte in Austin, Texas, who writes about the twists and turns of a cooking career that eventually led back to his homeland.
Chef Fermin Nunez on the good fortune of a career in Mexican cuisine
When I started training in professional kitchens here in the U.S., the only place I really spotted the tortillas and off-cuts that I had grown up eating in Torréon, Mexico, where I was born, was in the back of the house. Cheap and filling, that’s the stuff that the Mexicans who prepared most of the European dishes being served in the dining room ate for staff meal.
This was in the early aughts. By then, I had already internalized what felt like an absolute truth: If I wanted to have any chance of being considered a “serious” chef, cooking chilaquiles was probably not the best path for me.
Of course, that didn’t stop me from eating the food of my childhood whenever I craved it. It most certainly didn’t keep me, as the years went by, from trying to navigate being an undocumented immigrant with a growing interest in a home country he had no way of visiting. Before long, and almost without even noticing, I had reconnected with Mexico and its culinary culture without being able to travel there.
I decided to apply to work at a restaurant in Austin called La Condesa. In charge was a chef named René Ortiz. His career trajectory seemed like the kind of thing I could aspire to. René had cut his teeth at some of the toughest, most revered restaurants in the world and now was going all-in on Mexican food. He had managed to make what I thought were conflicting ideas work in harmony. To give you just one example, he could use French technique to ensure that the chicken in grandma’s molé never got dry.
I was very lucky to meet Chef Ortiz. Even luckier, you could say, to find myself in his kitchen at the precise moment when it felt like everything around us was changing. Chefs were becoming stars, many of them by embracing food that had always been relegated to the “cheap eats” category and shattering the dining public’s preconceptions with their creativity and skill.
Could I maybe do that, too?
I started to wonder in earnest in 2016. I looked around and noticed a few things. In Mexico, leading chefs like Enrique Olvera, who had been programmed to cook European cuisine even in their own country, were no longer looking abroad for inspiration. People around the world were intrigued by the traditions they represented, including a Danish chef named René Redzepi. He announced that his restaurant’s second-ever international pop-up, following a stay at the Mandarin Oriental in Tokyo, would be in the Yucatán jungle.
Also, all those off-cuts were now more expensive, because demand had suddenly climbed.
I was ready to move to New York to further hone my chops—until Sam Hellman-Mass approached me to be the chef/partner of a restaurant in East Austin. He was obsessed with making tortillas using masa from Texan corn. With that, I decided to skip New York and take a gamble.
We opened Suerte together. That’s the word for “luck” in Spanish. I always considered the name a reference to the good fortune that allowed me to get to the point where I could run my own restaurant, a place serving dishes that (hopefully) seamlessly express the worlds that made me.
Lately, I have also started to consider a slightly different meaning: I wish anyone who tries to fit this cooking into a neat and tidy box the best of luck.