Bad hombre gone good
The rough, border-crossing road that led Eduardo Garcia from migrant work in the fields to culinary superstardom
Deported Mexican’s incredible road to redemption,
MEXICO CITY— As bad hombre tales go, Eduardo Garcia’s is classic.
A border-crossing Mexican immigrant, he moved around the United States through the better part a decade, harvesting the produce that most North Americans take for granted throughout what might be thought of as a stolen childhood.
Starting at age 5, the unschooled Garcia embarked on a journey that drew on native intelligence, natural gift and a willingness to take on backbreaking work to make something of himself — in his case, a chef.
Like many of the immigrants keeping U.S. farming alive and restaurant kitchens humming, his true citizenship was in a shadow economy. And like so many young men with more ambition than sense, he made mistakes that would send him first to jail and eventually home as a deportee to a country he knew less well than the one in which he was raised.
As fate would have it, it was at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Mexico and later at an establishment of his own that Garcia transformed himself into a superstar of a thriving food scene.
In less than a decade at the celebrated Pujol and later at Maximo Bistrot, the restaurant he operates with his wife, Gabriela, in a corner of the Colonia Roma section of this vibrant capital, Garcia has garnered awards and plaudits for the bright clarity of the flavours his kitchen conjures and the subtly layered elegance of his efforts fusing classic French technique with traditional Mexican preparations and ingredients.
On a recent springlike morning before Maximo Bistrot opened for lunch, Garcia, known as Lalo, talked about his complicated journey from there to here.
“We started Maximo Bistrot in 2011 with four employees. We now have three restaurants in the city, Maximo Bistrot, Lalo! and Havre 77. Overall, the cuisine is French-Mexican. We also have 130 employees with six partnerships in Mexico, two in London and one in Dubai.
“The thing is, I’m not ashamed to say it, but I’m a convicted felon in the United States: deported two times, in 2000 and 2007. My entire family still lives there and I love the country — it gave me everything I have — but I’m banned from going there now.
“My family was all migrant workers and I grew up in the fields. I started at the age of 5. I never went to school. My parents were illiterate and I’m illiterate, too. I can read and write a little, but my grammar is horrible.
“I stopped that work when I turned 14. We’d been going up and going down the country and always through Atlanta until one year, in 1991, we stopped to visit an aunt there and my father found a job at a country club cutting grass. So we decided to stay for a while. I got a job washing dishes at the Georgia Grille.
“Within six months of getting that dishwasher job, I was promoted to the salad station. I worked in those days with illegal documents. A guy above me at the Georgia Grille was from Puerto Rico. He watched how I learned and he said, ‘You’re very talented.’ Whatever task anybody gave me, I picked it up right away.
“The Puerto Rican guy went on to work as a butcher in Brasserie Le Coze, a restaurant Eric Ripert (the chef and an owner of Le Bernardin) was opening. He said I should try for a job there. After months of yes, no, yes, I got hired, and it was the best job I ever had. I wanted eventually to become a sous chef, so I took another kitchen job, which paid $29,000 a year, as a cook at a restaurant in Alpharetta, Georgia.
“My father was very ill and I needed the money. It was there that I began to wonder, ‘How else do I learn to be a real chef?’ And that was when I really began to think about cooking seriously, constantly studying Charlie Palmer or Charlie Trotter and what they were doing. I studied and I mimicked what they had done and realized that most cookbooks are not ever accurate. So then I started to experiment. My training for this life is different from chefs who went to culinary schools. My entire education took place in kitchens.
“After six months, the owners of that restaurant said, ‘Now we can make you a sous chef.’ ”
“Unfortunately for me, as well as I was doing, I met some bad hombres along the way.
“My life started to go sideways. I began to sell drugs for the dishwashers. I never want to run from this, but it is true that all through my working life I had always given my father any money I made; he was my bank. Suddenly I realized then that I didn’t need to ask him for money. I could just make money on the side.
“I never got caught selling drugs, and to this day I can say I never tasted what I was selling. But what got me in trouble was when a cousin of mine asked me to drive him and a friend to a liquor store they were going to rob. I knew this.
“We got away, but I told myself I needed to face the consequences, so I turned myself in. I was charged with aggravated assault, convicted and spent one year in county jail and three years in maximum security prison in South Georgia. Immigration put a hold on me and transferred me to one of the hardest jails in the system. Then, at the end of 2000, I came to Mexico, deported for the first time.
“I was only back in Mexico for two weeks when my mother called and gave me the news that my father was dying of cancer.
“It was a big risk, but I had to take a chance to try to see him in the United States before he died. So I bought fake Social Security documents and crossed a bridge at Nuevo Laredo like everybody else. I had spent a lot of time in kitchens by then and applied for a job as a chef.
“One day in 2007, immigration went to the restaurant and talked to the manager, who came to me crying and said, ‘They’re here for you.’ I said, ‘Don’t worry, I knew this day was going to come.’ I was arrested again and spent four months in federal prison in South Georgia. I was deported again, and I really didn’t know what was next for me.
“I don’t hide from any of this, because I want people around me to know who I am. But these are mistakes any human being can make. I want to encourage Mexicans who are in the same situation to know they’ll be welcome to come back and be in their own country.
“From 2007-11, I worked as chef de cuisine at Pujol, and then at the end of 2010, the beginning of 2011, with a loan from an uncle of mine, I opened Maximo Bistrot. The dream by then was not to become a well-known chef.
“It was to become a good chef. And, well, here we are.”