SOUTHERN SMOKE: Catching up with super-chef Daniela Soto-Innes.
The super-chef returns to Houston as high-profile guest for Southern Smoke fundraiser
The last time I saw Daniela Soto-Innes, the young cook stopped by my table on her way out of the original La Fisheria on a sunny Sunday afternoon.
It was 2012. She was 21, a budding talent who’d been working the line at Brennan’s, Triniti and Underbelly. She told me she was about to leave Houston to stage at Pujol, chef Enrique Olvera’s highly ranked contemporary Mexican restaurant in Mexico City, where she was born.
“Wow,” I remember exclaiming. “That is so exciting! You’re going to learn so much.”
That turned out to be the understatement of the decade. This week, Soto-Innes returns to Houston as one of the highprofile guest chefs for Southern Smoke, the fourth edition of Chris Shepherd’s annual fundraiser that draws more culinary star power every year.
She comes as founding chef de cuisine and partner of Olvera’s two New York restaurants, Cosme and the more casual Atla, an all-day cafe. She also comes as the winner of the James Beard Foundation’s prestigious Rising Star Chef of the Year Award for 2016, and with Cosme’s breakthrough on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list for 2017 to her credit.
By any measure, hers has been a meteoric rise. I caught up with Soto-Innes by phone in advance of her visit, and it wasn’t easy to get her on the line.
She’s been traveling during the slower summer season for events surrounding the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list and for the opening of Olvera’s new Los Angeles restaurant, Cosme LA, all while superintending two busy New York kitchens. These days, she has a publicist to schedule media appointments and to stay on the line, monitoring, when she’s interviewed. It’s a long way from an impromptu tableside chat.
Soto-Innes says she’ll be making pastor-style grilled octopus for Southern Smoke, complete with pineapple skewers. Plunging into her native Mexican cuisine when she arrived for her unpaid apprenticeship at Pujol was pivotal for her, she says. “I found myself as a cook. I was working for free, for 16 hours a day. If you can work that hard and wake up every day being the happiest you’ve ever been, you’ve found your career.”
She wasn’t looking for a job, Soto-Innes says. “I’d promised Chris Shepherd I’d come back (to Underbelly),” she recalls. “I really wanted to make Chris proud.” When she returned to Houston after six months, “I felt like I love Mexican cuisine, that it’s my heart.”
She and Olvera stayed in touch. Six months later she returned to Pujol in a paying position. Six months “exactly” after that, he offered her the job as chef de cuisine of his New York project, Cosme, his first venture outside Mexico.
“Were you shocked?” I wonder. No, she answers. “It was more like, I’m looking at someone I’ve admired my whole life … I don’t know what was in his mind. But the chef de cuisine at Pujol at the time was also very supportive (of the move),” she remembers, sounding grateful.
The rest is history. At 27, she has lived in New York for five years. She misses driving. She misses the Houston ease of meeting and connecting with “everyone in the chef community.” The culinary world here seemed “more like a neighborhood” compared to the vast scale of New York.
Too, she finds New York “a lot more critical than Houston” as a restaurant market. “It’s more pressured,” she says. “There are so many critics.” She’s talking about professional critics as well as the dining public. “Here it’s tough for me, maybe because I’m young, but I felt it was more stressful. People are more laid back in Texas.”
That’s sure to be the case this coming Sunday, when Southern Smoke welcomes Soto-Innes back, along with such culinary talents as Austin brisket guru Aaron Franklin; pizzaiolo extraordinaire Chris Bianco of Phoenix; and Eduardo Jordan of Seattle’s super-hot June Baby and Salare.