From Selling Tacos on the Street

Twelve years ago, I started out selling tacos de canasta on the street. I didn’t have my own kitchen, employees, or a business plan in place; I had the drive to make something of my own and the discipline to work every day without making excuses. Over time, that business grew. What began as a single basket became something bigger, and before long I had a team of eight people working with me. I learned, as I went, how to run a business: how to manage, how to solve problems, and how to sustain something that depended entirely on me.

But at that point, I still wasn’t a cook. I was the manager of my own business. And it was precisely that restlessness that led me to travel to Mexico for the first time, with a modest goal: to learn how to cook a little better so I could improve my own tacos. I wasn’t looking for anything more than that. But on that trip I discovered something I didn’t know existed: fine dining. I saw cooks who didn’t just combine ingredients, but created flavors from scratch, with intention and technique. That discovery changed everything. I knew almost immediately that this was what I wanted to do with my life, even though I had no idea what that path meant.

I made a decision that seemed crazy at the time: I sold the business I had built and set off across Mexico to learn how to cook, with no guarantees. I started at the bottom, literally as a storeroom attendant, working alongside Chef Roberto Solís, and two years later I was a chef de partie at Nectar restaurant. That was my first major leap: going from managing a taco business to becoming part of a serious kitchen, learning the craft for real.

Then I had the opportunity to work with Chef Eduardo García at Máximo Bistro, one of Mexico’s most renowned chefs, and working alongside him demanded an entirely different level. I spent a long stretch there, absorbing technique, discipline, and a way of understanding cooking that can only be learned by being close to someone like that. When I felt the time had come, I kept moving: I traveled around Mexico for another stretch, adding kitchens, adding hands-on experience, never staying in one place for too long, and with every stop I refined my techniques and my own style of cooking.

That same curiosity that wouldn’t let me stand still took me even farther: to Toronto, Canada. There I joined Canoe, a restaurant that at the time was pursuing its first Michelin star. We won it, and I was there as chef de cuisine. It was an enormous achievement, but also a time of great loneliness: being in another country, speaking another language, far from my people, and maintaining an extremely high standard every day. Months after that achievement, I went through a severe depression and decided to move somewhere different, somewhere warmer. And so, almost by chance, I arrived in Vancouver.

There I came across Bravo, a small seafood restaurant. It was the place where, for the first time, I had the freedom to bring everything I had learned over the years to the table: I joined as the restaurant’s R&D chef, creating the menus and a small tasting menu where I could express, dish by dish, everything I had learned in each kitchen I had passed through. That was where I began researching and fermenting, looking for ways to take each flavor to another level, and over time, that pursuit became my personal signature: fermentation stopped being just another technique and became the way I understand flavor. That work paid off quickly: in our first year, we established Bravo as the best seafood restaurant, and maintained that position for two consecutive years.

In 2024, news arrived that I still have a hard time fully taking in: we made it into the Michelin Guide. That same year, Air Canada’s magazine named us a must-visit for anyone visiting Vancouver, and in 2025 we retained that recognition. As a fermenter and researcher, I continued breaking new ground in the kitchen, and together with my team developed a zero-waste program that is now a fundamental part of how I work—not just cooking well, but cooking responsibly, making the most of every ingredient.

When I look back, I don’t see a straight line. I see a taco business on the street, journeys without certainty, new cities, new languages, difficult moments, and major decisions made with little information but a great deal of conviction. Every step, from the basket of tacos to the Michelin star, I took for the same reasons: the need to learn and the stubborn refusal to settle for what I had already achieved.

And this story isn’t over. Today I’m still moving toward my next goal: opening my first restaurant of my own, with the same ambition that took me off the street twelve years ago—not to remain in one place, but to keep building and expanding. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned along the way, it’s that success isn’t a fixed destination. It’s a series of decisions you keep making, one after another, even when you don’t have the complete map.

Erick Iñiguez / Saltillo, Coahuila, México