About Emmanuel Chavez
Emmanuel Chavez is the Mexico City-born, Houston-raised chef-owner of Tatemó, the Michelin-starred Mexican restaurant in Spring Branch that has become one of the most celebrated in the country. Chavez immigrated to Houston with his family around age nine and spent his formative years working in his parents’ Tex-Mex restaurant, washing dishes at thirteen and absorbing the rhythm of professional kitchens long before he ever considered cooking as a career. By eighteen he committed to the craft, staging at River Oaks Country Club before working through a series of hotel and country club kitchens in Houston. He launched a supper club called Brink Dining, building a following through social media and sold-out dinners out of his home, which eventually led to a sous chef position at Houston’s Hotel Granduca and then a move to Seattle to work at the Thompson Hotel under chef Eric Rivera, an Alinea alum, and Derek Simcik.
It was in Seattle that Chavez’s culinary identity was fundamentally transformed. A chance confrontation over his use of Maseca instead of nixtamalized corn became the turning point that sent him deep into the study of traditional Mexican masa-making. He returned to Houston during the pandemic, began selling house-nixtamalized tortillas at the Urban Harvest Farmers Market, and in 2021 opened Tatemó with just sixteen seats. Every dish on the tasting menu contains corn in some form, sourced directly from small farmers across Mexico and nixtamalized in-house. In 2022 Tatemó was named one of Esquire’s Best New Restaurants in America. In 2023 it was a James Beard Foundation finalist for Best New Restaurant, and Chavez was named to Food & Wine’s Best New Chef class. In 2024 he was a James Beard finalist for Best Chef: Texas, and Tatemó received its first Michelin star. In 2025 Chavez was named CultureMap Houston Chef of the Year.
Episode Overview
In this episode, André Natera sits down with Emmanuel Chavez to talk about what it actually takes to build a serious restaurant under the kind of pressure that most operators never experience. Chavez’s path to Tatemó was not a straight line: it ran through his parents’ Tex-Mex kitchen, years of hotel and country club work, a supper club, a move to Seattle, a pandemic, a farmers market tortilla stand, and a restaurant that opened with sixteen seats and no sign on the building. The conversation covers how Chavez thinks about the relationship between cultural identity and culinary ambition, what nixtamalization means as both a technical practice and a philosophical commitment, and what it requires to build something that earns recognition at the highest levels without losing what made it worth building in the first place.
He talks about the real cost of running a small, reservation-only tasting menu restaurant, how he thinks about staffing and team culture at Tatemó, and what the Michelin star and the James Beard nominations actually mean to him and to the broader project of elevating Mexican cuisine in the American fine dining conversation. It is a sharp, personal, and technically rich episode with one of the most compelling chefs working in the country right now.
Topics covered in this episode:
- Building Tatemó from a farmers market tortilla stand to a Michelin-starred restaurant
- The transformative moment in Seattle that sent Chavez back to the roots of traditional Mexican corn
- Nixtamalization as a cultural practice and what it means to center a tasting menu entirely around maize
- What it takes to build and sustain a sixteen-seat reservation-only restaurant without marketing or signage
- How Chavez thinks about team culture, hiring migrant cooks with no kitchen experience, and building from the ground up
- The James Beard nominations and the Michelin star and what they represent for Mexican cuisine in fine dining
- The pressure of building something under intense public scrutiny and how to stay grounded through it
Guest
Subscribe to Chef’s PSA on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/@ChefsPSA?sub_confirmation=1
Shop Chef’s PSA Merch
https://shop.chefspsa.com/
Chef’s PSA Website
https://chefspsa.com/
Listen on Spotify
https://open.spotify.com/show/5KSFsCD3tLUPNSRi6Bcomu
Sponsor: Rational USA
https://rationalusa.com
Listen on Apple Podcasts
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/chefs-psa/id1451691585
Watch on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/@ChefsPSA
Listen on Audible
https://www.audible.com/pd/Chefs-PSA-Podcast/B08JJNXJ4K