CURRENT HOMETOWN: New York City
RESTAURANT THAT MADE HIS NAME: Empellón, New York City
SIGNATURE STYLE: Mexican-inspired food
BEST KNOWN FOR: His creative desserts at Alinea and wd~50; making the James Beard Best Chef semifinalist list since 2013; and being named Best New Chef by Food & Wine (2013)
FRIDGE: Avanti
Alex Stupak has come a long way from his Old El Paso eating roots. Sure, the thirty-something chef was cooking from an early age, but he ate Mexican food the way most people from the suburbs of Massachusetts did—out of boxes and cans. Now of course he’s a groundbreaking iconoclast who’s changed people’s perceptions of what Mexican and American cooking can be.
He’s from a family of cooks: his grandfather was a chef and his dad was the head of the kitchen at home. After having gone through a recipe book when he was eight, he made his mother red cabbage salad with Russian dressing. At twelve, he lied about his age to get a dishwashing job as a way to break into food prep, and at fourteen he was cooking Thanksgiving dinner for his entire family. By the time he won a scholarship to the Culinary Institute of America, he had “worked every food industry job you can imagine,” he says.
His professional life started at the Boston restaurant Clio, where chef Ken Oringer offered him a pastry chef position. Stupak, who had never been interested in pastry before, resisted, until Oringer basically threw Albert Adrià’s cookbook Los Postres de el Bulli at him. Stupak was fascinated by Adrià’s creativity and embraced the possibilities of pastry.
From there, Stupak went to Chicago as the head pastry chef at Alinea. In Chicago, he met the two loves of his life: his (now) wife, originally from California, and Mexican food. “I was cooking Mexican food in secret for over seven years, checking out the humongous Mexican population in Chicago, flying off to Mexico any chance I got, studying masa corn. I fell in love with Mexican cooking in my spare time,” he recalls.
Next up were a few years as the pastry chef at Wiley Dufresne’s wd~50. With that kind of background, Stupak could have easily created a modern fine-dining place: “I was pedigreed to be the fucking third coming of molecular gastronomy, but nothing could have interested me less. You could watch some asshole on Top Chef make liquid nitrogen ice cream, and I didn’t want to be a part of it,” he says.
And so he opened a taco place in the East Village, Empellón Cocina, and from that restaurant, four more. The dish that first turned him on at East L.A.’s La Parrilla became the vehicle for luxurious high-end products and high-brow mishmashes like A5 Wagyu beef fajitas with black pepper mole, and crab nachos with Hokkaido sea urchin “queso.” “Empellón means ‘push out of the way,’ and I’m always pushing to the next level,” Stupak explains. “The name is a constant reminder. What is Mexican food anyway? It’s always been changing, influenced by outside forces. What I do is not authentic and not traditional. It’s cultural exchange.”
On the day of this interview, Stupak was at the front door, whispering a greeting because his youngest son was down for a nap. His kitchen looked like a typical one belonging to a family with young kids—there were bottles drying on the counter—except for the Food & Wine Best New Chef of the Year Award hanging on the wall next to the sink. Over some homemade Mexican pasta and a little tequila, he talked about the last thing he bought on a whim and the virtues of using his home as a test kitchen.
- WHITE SAUCE—“It is my favorite condiment and I always have some in my fridge.”
- YUZU MARMALADE—“The last time I used the marmalade was to give some sweet potatoes some edge at Thanksgiving.”
- PICKLED TURNIPS, for any Middle Eastern–inspired sandwich
- PARMESAN CHEESE RINDS, to infuse in a soup or sauce
- PICKLED HABANEROS
- AMERICAN CHEESE
- WHITE MISO
- CHIPOTLE PEPPERS IN VINEGAR
- MEXICAN CHORIZO
- KASHKAVAL CHEESE—“Super mild and melty. What’s not to love?”
- CORN TORTILLAS—“I always prefer to take these from my restaurants. I never buy them elsewhere. Once you have had fresh masa it is hard to go back.”
- STRING CHEESE AND YOGURT POUCHES, for the kids
- YUZU JUICE—“Use it in the same way you would use lemon juice. My wife, Lauren, puts it in her vodka soda.”
- KEFIR CHEESE LABNE—“I add raw garlic to it and use it as a spread.”
- GEORGE WATKINS MUSHROOM KETCHUP
- KEWPIE MAYONNAISE
- TONIC WATER
- VERMOUTH
- WHOLE MILK
Q & A
What are we going to find in your fridge? You will always find a lot of convenient, highly preservable flavor bombs, such as pickled chilies. I buy fresh chilies, put them in a jar, and drench them in vinegar to preserve them. They will last a lifetime. That way you can buy more than one chili, because if you buy ten chilies and you don’t use them right away, they will rot. I hydrate chipotles in vinegar too; it increases their shelf life. I also use some of those chipotles in the Mexican pasta I make (see here). It’s very homey but intriguing.
Is this something you learned from your wife’s family? That’s a misconception about me—people don’t get it because it’s not a neat little package. My wife is actually American. The same ingredients in the hands of a Mexican chef taste different than they would in any other culture. The first time I heard about the Mexican pasta dish I was fascinated, it sounded odd to me. When you see it, you start to understand. Spaghetti gets broken, and then toasted. Tomatoes are blackened and burned and so is the garlic, and that gets pureed with chilies and gets absorbed into it. The topping is crema, coriander, and avocado.
What do you do with all that mayo?! I have a very unhealthy relationship with it. I think mayo is the only mother sauce. Well, okay, Duke’s is king, but other than that if I see interesting mayo in a store I pick it up or I shop for it on Amazon. I’m not a health nut—I will always have American cheese, yellow mustard, and four to five different types of mayonnaise. When you get life insurance you get a blood test—they were like, ‘You’re only 150 pounds but. . . .’ I still got the life insurance but with a slight risk assessed. At home, we are really comfort-food driven: We like carbs, we like fried egg sandwiches at three in the morning, that type of thing.
Ok, let’s say it’s 3 a.m. and you’re going to make an egg sandwich. What goes in it? It’s a sunny-side-up egg cooked hard on the bottom so it’s really crispy. I’m a fan of Martin’s potato rolls, so it would be on one of those, with mayo, American cheese, and then anything to further embellish, whatever I have around, maybe a can of Spam or some ham. I’m also obsessed with shawarma from halal carts. Ordering a gyro from a street cart was something I never did until I moved to New York City. Now it is a regular habit in my life.
They always ask if you want white or red sauce—whatever the friggin’ white sauce is—it’s my favorite thing on earth! I’m experimenting with my own white sauce.
It sounds like your home kitchen is a test kitchen. It is. I’m not cooking as much at the restaurant but I’ve never cooked more, I’ve never created more. I test either at home or downstairs in the smaller restaurant where I can hide in the basement. The problem with being a creative person is that when you get known for something it’s part of the success but it also is when boredom sets in, the idea of grinding the same thing out in perpetuity.
Do you make pastry at home? Never.
What is it you are testing? Persian food.
What did you last buy on a whim? Kashk, a fermented dehydrated milk. It tastes like nutritional yeast. I bought it at Kalustyan’s, which is such a fun place to shop. Kashk adds its own Parmesan-like funk to things. I found it to be particularly great in a light tomato sauce.