How Claudette Zepeda Found Common Ground Between Mexican and Italian Cooking

Chef Claudette Zepeda grew up in the border town of Tijuana, Mexico, but some of her most formative food memories center around Italian cuisine. 

One of her father’s closest friends, Tony, was a Roman immigrant who ran a restaurant in Tijuana called Victorio’s, where they served red-sauce classics in a dining room filled with checkered tablecloths.

“My dad would go hang out with Tony at the restaurant,” Zepeda recalls. “Tony was drinking red wine, my dad was drinking tequila … I was the curious kid filling up the cheese shakers.” 

Chef Claudette Zepeda

“Whenever I look at different cultures, I think, Where is the core nucleus? In both Italian and Mexican culture, it’s at home, with the mama or the nonna, the mother or grandmother.”

— Chef Claudette Zepeda

Today, Zepeda is a beloved Top Chef competitor, restaurateur, and executive chef at Leu Leu, the latest concept from her company, Chispa Hospitality. This weekend, she’ll draw upon her unique culinary background to lead a seminar on “Mex-Italian” food at the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen. The menu was inspired by a brunch she co-hosted with Italian chefs Antonia Lofaso and Gabe Bertaccini, at Scopa in Los Angeles last year.

“My favorite pasta is carbonara,” says Zepeda. “It’s fatty, it’s rich. So I said to them, ‘How about we bring Mexico into carbonara?’” Zepeda made fresh chorizo to swap in for the traditional guanciale, then added texture with a chicharrón crumble on top, along with queso cotija, cilantro and lime.

“It just made all that fat sing,” she says. “Carbonara is supposed to be a really rich dish, but you don’t get the highlight of citrus in it, so it was freaking delicious. Antonia just looked at me and she was like, ‘Fuck yes.’”

A culinary marriage

The connections between Mexican and Italian cooking go beyond simple ingredient swaps, according to Zepeda. 

She eschews the concept of fusion, an idea she says has been tainted by white chefs who swapped ingredients back and forth without learning about their history or cultural importance. Instead, she refers to the combination of cuisines as a “culinary marriage.”

“Whenever I look at different cultures, I think, Where is the core nucleus?” says Zepeda. “In both Italian and Mexican culture, it’s at home, with the mama or the nonna, the mother or grandmother. At an Italian family dinner, there might be talking that feels like fighting. In Mexico, we hate as hard as we love, and you don’t know the difference.” 

There are also historical connections. Both cuisines are regionally specific, and they share several key ingredients. Tomatoes, for example, are core to Italian cooking, but originated in the Americas, as Zepeda points out. Beans, essential to both cuisines, are also believed to have originated in the Americas.

“So many of these things, like the slave route and the spice route, caused ingredients and seeds to move around the world,” says Zepeda. “And we’re better for it, right? Like when the Italian immigrants started coming into Mexico, our food diaspora started changing.”

What ‘Mex-Italian’ food can look like

For home cooks looking to experiment with these flavors, Zepeda points to beans as an affordable, easy option.

“Stewed beans with chiles and a really crusty, delicious ciabatta — that’s the essence of country Italian cooking,” Zepeda says. “And frijoles de la olla with tortillas and chiles in Mexico? It’s the same dish. We’re the same human beings, just in different geographical locations.”

In some cases, shared dishes go by the same name. 

The Caesar salad, a dish now often considered a staple of Italian-American red sauce restaurants, was invented in Tijuana, in the 1920s. Although exact accounts of its origins vary, it’s generally accepted that the dish was created by Italian immigrants at the Hotel Caesar. Zepeda even worked for chef Javier Plascencia, whose family owned the hotel, early in her career.

“The story of Italian immigrants in Tijuana is one that never gets old for me,” says Zepeda. “I hope we can all use that frame of mind to learn about what we’re eating — to lead with a curious mind, not a judgmental one.”