Cooking is my best language. It is the way I tell who I am, where I come from, and everything I have lived. I was born in Sinaloa, but Baja California adopted me and transformed the way I understand gastronomy.

Over the years my cooking has become more conscious, simpler, and more honest. Today I want every dish to have technique, but above all identity, memory, and emotion.

I consider myself a champion of Mexican gastronomy, a cuisine that is soul and lives in every corner of our country and of the world.

Baja California has something extraordinary: in just a few miles you can go from the Pacific to the desert and then find yourself surrounded by vineyards. My cooking starts from that diversity. The products of the sea, the vegetables, the wines, the seasonal ingredients, and our producers build a language of their own. For me, cooking Baja means respecting the product and letting the territory express itself on the plate.

The products of the sea are fundamental for me: fish, tuna, clams, oysters, and shellfish. So are chiles, citrus, olive oil, and the fresh products of our region. I like ingredients that don’t need too much explanation; when the product is extraordinary, our responsibility as cooks is to respect it and enhance it, not hide it.

Technique comes first. Technique gives you discipline, structure, and knowledge; freedom comes afterward. When you master a process, you can allow yourself to create from intuition. Many of my ideas begin with an emotion, a memory, an ingredient, or even a trip, but it is technique that makes it possible to turn that inspiration into a consistent dish.

In Baja California, wine is part of our gastronomic identity. For me, wine and food should be in conversation; neither should compete with the other. I think about acidity, fat, temperature, intensity, and texture, but also about the moment and the experience. The best pairing happens when, after tasting both, you no longer know whether the wine improved the dish or the dish improved the wine.

Valle de Guadalupe has managed to build an identity that can hardly be replicated. Its strength lies precisely in not trying to resemble any other region. We have wine, landscape, product, great cooks, and a very particular culture of hospitality. The challenge now is to grow responsibly, to keep professionalizing our industry, and to protect what made the Valle special from the beginning.

For me, the new luxury is feeling genuinely cared for. It is not necessarily in the most expensive tableware or the most exclusive ingredient. It is in the time, the service, the product, the details, and in making a person feel special. An exceptional experience is one that ends at the table but stays in your memory long afterward.

Sustainability also means consuming responsibly, respecting the seasons, using products in their entirety, reducing waste, and working with producers and suppliers from our region. But for me there is also a human sustainability: building teams, creating dignified jobs, teaching, and building gastronomic businesses capable of lasting. A restaurant must also be sustainable for the people who make their living from it.

Travel has profoundly transformed the way I cook. Spain taught me technique, France made me understand the importance of precision, and Japan reinforced in me an absolute respect for the product, seasonality, and details. Yet traveling has also made me value Baja California even more. I don’t seek to reproduce what I see abroad; I come back, interpret it, and ask myself how it can be in dialogue with our product and our identity.

Beyond trends, what kind of legacy do you hope to build—and how do you envision the future of Baja’s cuisine on the global stage?

I would not want my greatest legacy to be only a restaurant or a dish; I want it to be in people. Today a fundamental part of my life is devoted to culinary education, because I am convinced that training new generations is one of the most powerful ways to transform a region.

I want to train professionals who not only know how to cook, but who have the ability to launch ventures, lead, innovate, create jobs, and contribute to the economic development of Baja California. I aspire for my work as a chef, entrepreneur, and educator to contribute to an increasingly professional gastronomic industry and to a new generation that carries the name of Baja California to the world. If I can help those young people have more opportunities than we had, that will be the most important legacy of my career.