Tu Casa Mi Casa co-author wins World's Best Female Chef
The Mexican-born swimmer turned culinary protégée Daniela Soto-Innes just won the World’s 50 Best Award
It takes more than a great chef to create a great restaurant. While we may associate places such as elBulli with titans of modern gastronomy such as Ferran Adrià, many other important talents – including René Redzepi and Massimo Bottura – worked long and hard in that kitchen to help create such incredible gastronomy.
The same is true for the acclaimed Mexican chef, Enrique Olvera. As Peter Meehan explains in the foreword to Olvera’s new book, Tu Casa Mi Casa, the Mexican-born US-based chef Daniela Soto-Innes “runs the show at the Olvera-affiliated New York restaurants Cosme and Atla,” and also serves as Tu Casa Mi Casa’s co-author.
And now, just as with Redzepi and Bottura a decade or so ago, this 28-year-old protégée is beginning to gain a little notoriety of her own. Soto-Innes has just been awarded the elit™ Vodka World’s Best Female Chef award for 2019; this prize, which is overseen by The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, has been running for the past nine years, and Soto-Innes is the youngest winner ever.
She can add this trophy to her Rising Star Award, which she received from the James Beard Foundation back in 2016, alongside some, perhaps slightly dustier sports medals from her teenage years. Born in Mexico City, Soto-Innes moved to the US at the age of 12, and devoted her attention to competitive swimming. However, she took her first first restaurant job in Houston, at the age of 15, and went on to train at Le Cordon Bleu in Austin, and held positions at Brennan’s and Underbelly in Houston, before coming to Olvera’s prestigious places in NYC, back in 2014.
Far from being a flashy, technique-heavy chef, Soto-Innes, says in Tu Casa Mi Casa that she “believes the simplest food can inspire the most imagination" and makes her dishes meaningful "by finding the secret life in each ingredient”.
Want to find out more about all that simplicity and secrecy? Then order a copy of Tu Casa Mi Casa here.