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Chef Horacio Rivadero has won Food & Wine's Best Gulf Coast Chef!

OLA/Dining Room Chef Horacio Rivadero has won Food & Wine's Best Gulf Coast Chef!

Click here to view the Best New Chef results on FoodandWine.com and a congratulatory post from Eater.com here and a one from TheFood-e.com here.

RESTAURANT The Dining Room (Read a review)

LOCATION Miami Beach, FL

WHY HE’S AMAZING Because he’s making exquisite, gimmick-free Latin food with passion and precision.

BACKGROUND Ola (Miami Beach)

MUST-TRY DISH Braised pork with white bean puree, radishes and green mustard sauce.

HOMETOWN DESSERT Rivadero was born in Argentina; his playful take on baked Alaska is called baked Patagonia: pistachio cake with dulce de leche ice cream, passion fruit sauce and gorgeous meringue.

DOUBLE DUTY Rivadero also oversees the kitchen at Ola for his mentor, Nuevo Latin cuisine pioneer Douglas Rodriguez.

OLA Chef Horacio Rivadero on NBC Miami

Chef Horacio Rivadero and owner Zach Lieberman of OLA and The Dining Room Restaurants on NBC Channel 6 in Miami

A Mango Gangster grows up

A quarter-century on, Douglas Rodriguez’s fusion fervor has given way to a focus on ingredients — and a disdain for ‘molecular’ cooking

By Liz Balmaseda Palm Beach Post
When I first met chef Douglas Rodríguez, he was doing improv at a Lincoln Road spot called the Wet Paint Café. Of course, instead of making jokes he made yuca, and instead of serving up punch lines he served up plantains. Gussied-up yuca and plantains, that is.

This was 1988, and the 20-something Cuban-American kid with a culinary degree from Johnson & Wales in Providence, R.I., was concocting some crazy dishes for the day, pairing ingredients foreign to the Cuban vernacular.

Green plantain linguini with bacon-sherry-shallot cream sauce? If you closed your eyes, you might find it tasted as comforting and rich as a traditional Cuban fufú of mashed green plantains and pork rinds. But I guarantee that no shallot had dared to venture into the kitchens of Little Havana. And no self-respecting Cuban black bean would have been caught dead as a flavoring agent in pasta.
v But Rodríguez, part of the Mango Gang that put Miami on the culinary map in the 1980s, forged ahead with his “nouvelle Cuban” ways along a hairpin-curve route that landed him in high-profile Miami and New York restaurants, earned him a coveted James Beard Rising Star Chef award in 1996, turned him into a cookbook author and restaurateur and ordained him America’s godfather of “Nuevo Latino” cuisine.

“He understood the cooking of his parents and all of the Cuban émigrés. … Then he did what chefs do if they have the mad chops — he turned it on its head,” says fellow Mango Gangster Norman Van Aken, another pivotal figure in Miami’s fusion cuisine.

Like a pop artist, Rodríguez fused “the common with the classic in a kind of street cred way,” Van Aken says.

Now at 46, “DRod” is downright mainstream. That’s due in part to the fact that Miami’s culinary scene has exploded in eclectic ways and in part to the chef’s refocused approach to food.

“When you get older you mature in a lot of different ways,” says Rodríguez. “My cooking, I think, is a little more mature. I’m trying to source better ingredients, use local ingredients, do more traditional dishes. I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel anymore.”

The enthusiasm he once displayed for new-wave flavor combos is now lavished on his selection of ingredients — the local cobia coming in this day for his raved-about ceviche, the 60 pounds of heirloom tomatoes he bought from a local farmer, the beef he buys from a farm in Clewiston and the suckling pigs he just scored for a weeknight roast.

What shifted is Rodríguez’s sense of who he is as a chef in the larger world.

“The big thing that changed the way I think about food is this molecular cooking,” he says. “I tried it, tried eating it — and never wanted to do it. I’m not crazy about that stuff. I don’t get the meat glue thing.

“I have these young cooks who come into the kitchen and go, ‘Are you doing molecular gastronomy?’ They’re interviewing me. I say, ‘If you want to learn to cook, you’ve got to start from the bottom. You’ve got to learn the basics before you can glue food together.’ ”

Some notable chefs have blossomed under his tutelage. Iron Chef José Garcés’ star rose after Rodríguez tapped him to lead the kitchens of two Latino-concept restaurants in Philadelphia, Alma de Cuba and El Vez. And Food Network favorite Aarón Sánchez ( Chopped, Heat Seekers), with whom he hosted a Brunch at Sea Sunday for the South Beach Wine & Food Festival, calls Rodríguez “my great mentor.”

Now Rodríguez hopes to inspire the incoming generation of chefs at Miami-Dade College’s new Miami Culinary Institute, where he sits on the advisory chefs’ council.

“I want to put together a laboratory for them on Latin foods and Latin cooking. There’s no culinary school out there that will teach you about ceviche and mole and arepas,” says the chef, whose four restaurants are Ola Miami and De Rodríguez Cuba on Ocean on South Beach, Alma de Cuba in Philly and Deseo in Scottsdale, Ariz. “I want to take a plantain and take it through the cuisines of Latin America — how do they cook that plantain in the different countries?”