Cantú was raised in Brownwood, a small town in the heart of Texas, where his father owned a Mexican restaurant and tortilleria. Despite growing up in that world, Cantú did not always plan to be a chef, choosing instead to study Business and English Literature at the University of Texas in Austin. But by 2009, three years after graduating, his passion for cooking had taken hold. He got a job at sushi restaurant Uchi in Austin, before stints in San Francisco at Benu, Saison, and Sons & Daughters. While there, Cantú noticed that Mexican cooking was not represented in the city’s fine-dining restaurants, and he felt a strong desire to satisfy this urgent need. Hence his next move to Mexico City to work at Enrique Olvera’s two-Michelin-star restaurant Pujol and immerse himself in the history of Mexican cuisine. On his return to the Bay Area, Cantú began to develop his concept for a Mexican fine-dining restaurant, which would eventually open in 2015 under the name Californios. Cantú was named a Rising Star Chef by both StarChefs and the San Francisco Chronicle in 2016, and included as one of America’s Best New Chefs in Food & Wine magazine in 2018.
Restaurants
Starting in 2013, Cantú opened several pop-ups in San Francisco while looking for a permanent location for his restaurant. He finally found a small space in the Mission District, where he opened the first incarnation of Californios at the start of 2015. It seated just 18 guests in the dining room and six more at the chef’s counter. Designed by his wife, Carolyn, and managed by his sister-in-law, Charlotte Randolph, the restaurant showcased a menu of Mexican classics, revisited to take advantage of the wealth of ingredients offered by the Bay Area. The restaurant closed during the pandemic in 2020 and reopened at its current, much larger premises in the SoMa neighborhood of San Francisco. Now seating around 50 guests per sitting, the second version is if anything even more ambitious than its predecessor in terms of elevating Latin American cuisine to new heights.
Californios was awarded its first Michelin star in October 2015, within its first year of operation. In 2017, it received an impeccable four-star review from Michael Bauer in the San Francisco Chronicle. A second Michelin star followed soon after, making Californios the first Mexican restaurant in the US to be recognized with two stars from the prestigious gastronomic Guide.
Recipes and dishes
The cuisine at Californios is a contemporary interpretation of Mexican cooking that highlights seasonal Bay Area ingredients. On the constantly evolving tasting menus, Cantú blends tradition and innovation, and Mexican and Northern Californian influences, in fanciful, flavorful ways. He takes the building blocks of Mexican cuisine and elevates them through his skill, imagination, and insistence on using products of the highest quality, transforming familiar favorites into complex original creations. It seems almost unfair to attempt to condense the fruits of this copious creativity into a set of signature dishes, but such a list might include tres frejoles of aerated royal corona bean mousse with golden osetra caviar, Monterrey abalone in Mexican rice, and Two Tacos: tortillas filled with succulent slices of rockfish or squab breast.
Leaving aside all the training, technique, and sophistication, Cantú claims that tortillas are in fact his favorite thing to cook, for the deep sense of connection they give him with Mexican cuisine and with his childhood memories of preparing them with his grandmother Rosa. Whatever his inspiration, Cantù is now widely seen as having fulfilled his vision of redefining what Mexican cooking can be in the world of fine dining.
