There have been many, but I think about three periods in particular.
My time at Aura and then REEF really built my foundation. Aura was the first time I worked for what, at that age, I thought of as a real “Chef Chef.” Frédéric Perrier was a Master French Chef and ran a kitchen rooted in a very classical European tradition. There was hierarchy, discipline, repetition, organization, and very clear standards. I also worked closely with the adjoining butcher shop, so from very early on I was learning that understanding ingredients and how they are handled is just as important as what eventually happens on the plate.
REEF took that foundation and accelerated everything. I started as a cook and eventually became Executive Sous Chef, learning how to lead a large team, manage costs and labor, solve problems during service, and take responsibility for much more than my own station.
That traditional kitchen model has evolved tremendously during my career, and some parts needed to. But its discipline, standards, respect for craft, and sense of responsibility remain fundamental to the way I work today.
Camerata changed me in a completely different way. Learning wine from the ground up and going through the Court of Master Sommeliers process forced me to slow down. You taste something, stop, think about what you are experiencing, rationalize it, and begin connecting the dots between geography, climate, farming, production, history, and flavor. Kitchens rarely give you that kind of space because they are so fast and chaotic. That process had an enormous influence on the way I research and tell stories through food today.
Camerata also put me in much closer contact with guests. Understanding wine service and hospitality from the dining room side changed my ethos in the kitchen. Making technically good food is only one piece of the experience. How it reaches someone and how you make them feel matter just as much.
I realized that part of understanding your audience is knowing which part of your own experience has the most to offer them.
Then there was my time in Europe. I saw an enormous amount in a relatively short period, and every kitchen gave me something different. One memory I return to often is making staff meal at Osteria Francescana. I made cochinita pibil, which is not something I would normally cook professionally since most of my work has focused on Europe and the Mediterranean. They genuinely loved it, and it helped me realize something very simple. The audience you cook for matters. Those cooks did not need me to impress them with flavors they already understood. In that moment, I realized that part of understanding your audience is knowing which part of your own experience has the most to offer them.
All of those experiences taught me that cooking goes far beyond technique. It is discipline and knowledge, but it is also context, communication, and understanding the people you are cooking with and for.
I have never really known what it is like to belong to only one culture.
Christmas dinner is probably the easiest way to explain it. We could have romeritos con mole, bacalao a la vizcaína, and a Neapolitan lasagna on the same table. Nobody was trying to make some kind of multicultural statement. That was simply dinner.
I was enamored with my father being Italian and with the Spanish side of my mother’s family, but never in rejection of being Mexican. If anything, those things enriched my understanding of being Mexican and made my world feel bigger. Food made those connections incredibly tangible from a very young age.
I think that is why I have always been more interested in connections than borders. At MARCH, we look at the Mediterranean through migration, trade, religion, language, agriculture, conquest, and geography. The political borders we recognize today rarely explain the full story of how a cuisine came to exist.
I have never not lived between cultures, so the idea that food can belong very deeply to one place while also carrying evidence of everywhere it has been feels completely natural to me. That is a large part of what interests us at MARCH.
I usually describe the process as a funnel.
At the very top is everything that could possibly help us understand a place: history, migration, agriculture, climate, religion, trade, language, ingredients, techniques, books, academic papers, old recipes, contemporary cooking, and, when possible, travel. As we move through the process, that information keeps narrowing. Some makes the research guide, some inspires ideas, fewer ideas ever get cooked, and fewer still survive R&D until eventually all of that work becomes the menu.
A MARCH season runs for about 23 weeks, and we usually begin working on the next one only three weeks after a new menu opens. I spend about three and a half to four weeks researching and writing the guide. The culinary team then gets roughly three weeks to absorb it, conduct their own research, and meet weekly to ideate. We intentionally do not cook during that period. We want to understand what we are looking at before immediately trying to turn it into a dish.
Then we begin about eight weeks of R&D with two tastings a week, moving only a few savory and pastry ideas forward at a time. We first taste with the culinary team, then bring in front of house leadership and the wine team for another perspective. The final weeks are spent revisiting dishes that still need work.
Before we close, we taste the entire experience over two days with the culinary team, front of house leadership, wine team, and captains. Then the team gets two weeks completely off. That rest matters. We come back for about a week and a half of training, the entire front of house team tastes the menu, and we finish with a Friends & Family service before reopening.
Travel is incredibly valuable, although it is not possible before every season. I look for those opportunities whenever I can, both for myself and for our team. We recently traveled to Georgia (in the Caucasus). Geographically it falls outside the Mediterranean, but the Caucasus is another extraordinary crossroads, sitting between the Black and Caspian Seas and shaped by centuries of movement and encounter. The trip reinforced how much you can learn by looking beyond modern borders and understanding what happens in the spaces between them.
Travel also reinforces something I believe very strongly: food is circumstantial. Where you are, who you are with, what you are celebrating, even what happened earlier that day can change how something tastes. Eating a dish in its place of origin can make it feel incredibly vivid because you are experiencing the landscape and culture that produced it at the same time.
We cannot recreate those circumstances in Houston, and I do not think we should pretend that we can. What we can do is try to understand them.
The funnel continues all the way through training. Our team usually knows far more about each dish than we would ever communicate to a guest. That is intentional. We do this much research not to prove how much we know, but to give ourselves enough understanding to make better decisions and, ultimately, more delicious food.
After twelve seasons, this question immediately makes me think about both where we have been and how much is still left to explore. We have talked about doing a kind of MARCH greatest hits menu one day, but we have never quite committed to it because I still feel like we have barely scratched the surface of the Mediterranean. I find it hard to just pin point one dish so my ideal meal would be:
España Verde
A table overflowing with pintxos. Very seafood heavy, with whatever shellfish and fish are best that day, great seasonal vegetables, salumi, cheeses, anchovies, and a lot of little things to share. Straightforward food, but obsessive about quality. I would want this part of the meal to stretch out for a while, with everyone reaching across the table and finding one more bite to try.
Campania, still unexplored at MARCH
Pasta e patate alla Napoletana. Campania is a region we have not explored at MARCH yet, but it is deeply personal to me because of my family heritage and enormously important to the larger story of the Mediterranean. Pasta e patate is such a simple, comforting dish, and one I would happily build a meal around. There would definitely be mozzarella di bufala somewhere on the table too, probably with great olive oil and bread. Spaghetti alla Nerano would be a very close second.
The Mediterranean Coast
For the main, I would move around the coast of Southern Spain, Southern France, Greece, and North Africa. Whole fish cooked over fire, a few simply grilled meats, beautiful vegetables, olive oil, herbs, and a handful of sauces or condiments. Nothing overly composed. Just exceptional ingredients, fire, seasoning, and enough restraint to let everything taste like itself.
The Levant
I would finish with the knafeh from our Levant menu. Akawi cheese, limon omani, pistachio, followed by a platter of beautiful fruit. I love the combination of warm cheese, sweetness, acidity, perfume, and texture, and fruit feels like the right way to let a meal like this slowly come to an end.
To Drink
Vermouth to begin, then wine moving with us around the Mediterranean as the meal progresses. An old Madeira toward the end, followed by an amaro after dessert. So I suppose my ultimate four course meal is actually a very long lunch with far too much food on the table.
And now that I have said all of this out loud, June, one of my business partners, is probably going to make me do the greatest hits menu sooner rather than later.
Spices.
That sounds almost too obvious because they are in every kitchen, but I think we have forgotten how extraordinary they can be. So much of ancient trade revolved around spices. They moved across continents, shaped economies, and changed the way people cooked, yet today we often treat them as commodities.
We obsess over the provenance of coffee, vegetables, meat, wine, and olive oil, then reach for a generic jar of black pepper without thinking twice. The world of pepper alone is enormous. Kampot pepper does not taste like Sarawak. Fresh green peppercorns are completely different from dried black or red ones. The differences can be floral, fruity, resinous, spicy, or almost citrusy depending on where and how they are grown and processed.
There is a huge opportunity for cooks to approach spices with the same attention we already give wine, olive oil, cheese, or meat.
The same thing happens with ingredients we think we already know. Taste really beautiful turmeric from a producer like Diaspora Co. and it can completely change your understanding of what turmeric tastes like. Their Dhania coriander is incredibly floral. We also work with La Boîte and Rare Tea Cellar, suppliers that constantly remind us how much complexity can exist in ingredients we often think of as background seasoning.
I think there is a huge opportunity for cooks to approach spices with the same attention we already give wine, olive oil, cheese, or meat. Think about provenance, variety, harvest, freshness, and how you treat them in the kitchen. A spice should not always disappear into a dish. Sometimes it deserves to be the thing you are actually tasting.
The dish has to be delicious even if the guest never hears the story.
We do an enormous amount of research, but very little of it should ever arrive at the table as information. By the time a dish reaches a guest, months of research, R&D, discussion, and training have already been distilled into a few bites and perhaps a few sentences.
Our service team is incredibly curious and often knows far more about a dish than they could reasonably say during service. The challenge is deciding what piece of information will actually make the next bite more meaningful. Sometimes that might be history. Sometimes it is a technique or an ingredient. Sometimes the right thing is to say almost nothing.
