Chef Victor Parra Gonzalez
Victor Parra Gonzalez didn’t know much about Mexican food when he left his hometown of Acapulco for culinary school in Montreal at age 17. It wasn’t a huge concern for the aspiring chef, keen to learn classical French techniques so he could helm hotel kitchens throughout the world and fulfill his dream of globetrotting.
Instead of cooking in far-flung places with a dogeared passport to show for it, Parra Gonzalez wound up in Buffalo, making the food that eluded him growing up, and earning two consecutive James Beard Award nominations for Best Chef Northeast.
It was family that brought him to the Queen City, and the intimacy born of kith and kin connections that catapulted the 31-year-old and his Las Puertas restaurant on Buffalo’s west side to acclaim not typically seen in the corporate kitchens that originally drew him to cooking.
“Buffalo is really great for people who want to take opportunities to do things differently,” Parra Gonzalez says. “If you’re good, they’ll keep you open. If not, you’ll close for sure. I appreciate that, and the well-educated diners I see nowadays.”
But in 2010, Parra Gonzalez, who was earning his chops in Montreal’s galleys, including at the revered Au Pied de Cochon, saw only his mother Olivia’s survival. The family matriarch and her Lewiston, NY-born husband were visiting Buffalo from Acapulco when Olivia was admitted to hospital. Doctors discovered she had cancer.
Without hesitation, Parra Gonzalez left one of North America’s greatest food cities to support his mom in one that was in a culinary rut, riding the coattails of chicken wings and beef on weck.
“I got the call. It was a very simple scenario. Pack up everything in a backpack and move it along,” he recalls.
He would go a year without stepping behind the burner, instead focusing on Olivia and her three rounds of cancer treatment at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center. As she healed, the kitchen—albeit makeshift versions—beckoned.
Parra Gonzalez started doing pop-ups in the city, operating on shoestring budgets and pushing himself to create memorable dining experiences in bare-bones setups, sometimes with little more than electric burners and coffee thermoses.
Like many young culinarians, Parra Gonzalez aspired to have a restaurant of his own, so he opened a dining room in Youngstown, the food rooted in his classical French training. But Olivia, who once ran her own eatery in Mexico, would have something to say about that.
“She came in one night and was extremely disappointed with the food, that we weren’t cooking Mexican food,” he says. “She gave me the mom talk. I stayed up all night rewriting the menu. We went from being full and busy to completely empty.”
Parra Gonzalez never begrudged the decision to cook the cuisine of his birth nation. Ultimately, he determined he was on the right track with his food but in the wrong location. So, he would search for the ideal spot while doing R&D back in Mexico where he and Olivia opened a short-lived outdoor restaurant in Tulum. There, he learned about the nuances of Mexican cooking. He also grasped the importance of work-life balance. Both discoveries would help him fine-tune his plans for Las Puertas, which he worked on simultaneously.
He had little money to invest in his venture in Buffalo, where he intended to showcase the exquisiteness of regional Mexican fare. Still, Parra Gonzalez began building an intimate 30-seat restaurant on Rhode Island Street, in a neighborhood being reinvented by new Americans and millennials, and trying hard to rebuke the poor reputation that plagued it for decades.
He knew the challenges of the city’s west side and Las Puertas’ location on the wrong end of its Five Points intersection. But it was all he could afford at the time so he ran with it.
Parra Gonzalez opened Las Puertas in February 2018 with a spare kitchen equipped with only two induction burners, a sous vide, and a coffee thermos that he, his sous chef—a role sometimes played by his sister Diana—and a pastry chef used to turn out shareable plates of tuna ceviche, mole verde, lechon con frijoles and pork pibil. These days, though, he and his staff do eight- to 10-course tasting menus in a conventional kitchen mandated by the local fire department, which frowned upon the original setup.
With the help of a beverage manager, the kitchen staff double as servers at Las Puertas. It’s an approach to hospitality that came out of financial necessity—Parra Gonzalez couldn’t afford to hire more people when the restaurant opened. It also challenges convention by creating a unique dining experience that enables guests to interact with the people making their food.
“It adds a whole value to the meal. I think the reason we’re still existing today, why guests keep coming back, they’re able to hear from the cook what they liked about making that dish,” he explains. “It helps the diner relate to that person better. In this industry, you have 30 seconds to make an impression. If you don’t seal it in 30 seconds, you’re going to see technology at the table, texting. We’re seeing a lot of talking between guests. It’s a small setting. If you can’t loosen up, it’s going to be a complicated dining experience for the next 45 minutes. Bringing the plates to you, to discuss, it makes it a lot of fun.”
Such an intimate, familial approach ensures fair and equitable pay for the Las Puertas crew, who divide the tips at the end of the night. Parra Gonzalez has been able to attract the best talent as a result, he says. In turn, his staff can afford to invest in themselves, travelling during vacations, for example, to learn what’s happening elsewhere in the industry and use that knowledge to enhance the guest experience at Las Puertas.
And ultimately turn heads at the James Beard Foundation and national media outlets wowed by a rarity among restaurants, not just in Buffalo but throughout much of America.
The accolades are rewarding, Parra Gonzalez says, especially considering the naysayers who doubted he could graduate from pop-up chef to restaurant owner without major financial backing. But such prestigious attention isn’t the greatest honor bestowed upon him, he notes.
The highest praise is that people seek out his food.
“To me, that was the greatest success—to find diners who supported what I was doing,” Parra Gonzalez says. “They wanted to travel with me through Mexico. If you get the support from the clientele, that’s the biggest reward of all.”
