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The awards just keep coming for chefs at Mexican restaurants nationwide — this one from the prestigious Food and Wine magazine, which named Lawrence "LT" Smith of Chilte in downtown Phoenix one of the 13 Best New Chefs in the country. According to the publication, Smith’s “playful ‘new-wave’ Mexican-inspired menu” landed him on the list. “The food at Chilte is courageous, ambitious, playful, and bold. It's Mexican at heart and global in its imagination,” the magazine said.
Smith and his now wife, Aseret Arroyo, debuted Chilte as a 10x10-foot street food pop up tent, transitioned into a food truck, and became a brick-and-mortar restaurant at Phoenix’s Egyptian Motor Hotel in February 2023. “We come from street beginnings, with off-the-cuff new wave riffs, and somewhat xperimental Mexican cuisine,” the restaurant’s website explains. “Finding common threads through food, time and place we bring inspirations from our childhoods, the southwest, and shared cultures to the plate.”
It’s an approach that impressed the Food & Wine judges, who included Editor in Chief Hunter Lewis and the 2021 Best New Chef Paola Velez, a culinary diplomat for the United States of America and author of the soon-to-be released Bodega Bakes cookbook set to publish this fall.
“Smith draws influences from seemingly everywhere: the Mexican and Latin flavors all around him, his life experiences, nostalgia for the soul food he grew up eating, his travels, and beyond,” the publication said. “Unfettered by tradition, he puts three moles on a plate. He makes jet-black tortillas using squid ink. On his menu, you’ll find Mexican “banchan” (including electric cucumbers dressed in a sweet and spicy salsa macha) and a Thai-inspired riff on carne apache that’s all funk and fire.”
Smith’s response to winning the award: “What Chilte does is pull from a tradition and experiment with it. We make it our own and push where Chilte is headed.”
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