Iliana De La Vega
NBCLATINO.COM ・ AUGUST 2012
“A self-taught chef who learned by reading books and teaching her friends to cook, de le Vega flirted with college in her early years, studying communications first, then pedagogy, then switching to hospitality administration. “But all I really wanted to do was cook,” she says. She opened her first restaurant, also called El Naranjo, in Oaxaca in the mid 1990s with virtually no professional experience and no formal culinary education. And it was a hit, instantly grabbing the attention of important restaurant critics around the world and shining a new spotlight on Oaxacan cuisine. The restaurant closed in 2006 when social and political unrest devastated the region's economy. In need of work and opportunity, she and Torrealba uprooted the family and moved to the U.S. Shortly thereafter, she was recruited to join the CIA’s San Antonio, TX campus to teach Mexican cuisine. And just three months ago she and Torrealba finally reopened El Naranjo—now on this side of the border.”