- Liza: Welcome everyone to "food.

curated.

", a show that takes you behind the scenes to meet today's most inspiring food makers.

Stick around to see big transformations happening within the LGBTQIA+ food community.

I'm Liza de Guia, documentary filmmaker and food lover.

I invite you to discover the people and passion behind good food in New York City.

This is "food.

curated."

Funding for food.

curated.

is made possible by: Stele is a globally curated collection of artisanal and independent perfumes.

Hand-picked olfactory experiences that tell a story.

Available online and at two New York locations.

For more info we're at Stele (dot) NYC.

Support for food.

curated.

comes from CMD Psych.

Bringing holistic approach to child wellness and women's mental healthcare.

Helping patients find balance and harmony in their lives.

For more info, head to CMD Psych (dot) com.

Additional funding provided by Showing up for each other, living and loving openly and defending equal rights have always been core values in the LGBTQIA community.

But in the food world, toxic kitchen culture has been slow to change with many of these marginalized voices only now being heard.

Let's look at a few stories about finding your way, building supportive kitchens and the importance of self-expression.

(upbeat music) -Chef Surbi: I had an astrologer read my chart one time who said 2020 onwards your time is going to change completely.

The the most important thing, will you be ready for the change?

Are you gonna be ready to run with it?

So right now I am hearing this on hard work and trying to run as fast as I can.

(thoughtful music) Hi, my name is Surbhi Sahni.

I'm chef and owner, Tagmo NYC.

We are a Indian home style restaurant located in South Street Seaport.

We also have a sweet shop in the front where we do artisanal Indian Mithai.

For me right now, like the mithai aspect of is the most important aspect which I'd like to really grow and I would like, if anyone thinks of mithai in the US, they think of our company first.

(upbeat music) So mithai is Indian confections that are made with nuts, they're made with reduced milk.

I'm using a product called khoa.

I've also done my own take on most of the mithai.

My god, it's fantastic.

I like the sugar.

There's a lot of vegan sweets that we have.

We have a lot of nut-free sweets and a lot of it is regionally sort of different.

They're kind of like Indian chocolates if you want to call it that way.

But there's really no chocolate in it.

Before Diwali, we've started doing our production in Long Island City and here we are in our kitchen with all my amazing staff behind me.

We have about 16 varieties of sweets ranging from doing a lentil-based sweets to a carrot-based sweet to like something that's made with chickpea flowers, using pistachios and almonds and lots of ghee and lots of sugar.

And so the space smells sugary and nice.

That concept didn't exist before I started it.

So like no one was doing confections like in the same way the sweets were larger, they were very sweet.

It's an old style of presentation.

I wanted to do more something that was beautiful to look like.

Like sort of when you open the box you're like, “oh my god, this is so pretty.” Can I eat all of them?

- I am Amy.

I am Chef Surbhi's assistant.

This is Raju who joined our team this Diwali season.

Right now we have the flavors rose, coconut, besan ladoo and caramel.

These trays will also get chocolate burfi and that's our nut-free collection.

- Surbhi: It's also I feel like we eat so much with our eyes and so I wanted the box and the packaging to be really beautiful and like really stand out.

(upbeat music) I wanna be that company that brings this product and everyone in the US knows what's mithai because of me.

Yeah, the Godiva of mithai will be good.

I'm a hippie who's like believes in free love.

I love my staff here is super queer, very friendly.

They're part of my extended family.

I see them all the time.

I joke with them, I talk to them.

I think like a few years, I like 10 years back, I started thinking what is it that I wanna be doing?

And at one point I knew that I wanted to be working mostly with women.

Then I started thinking about my immediate community and what that would take.

But also we are a queer friendly restaurant and we very, very intentionally put out that message so that we can have those partnerships.

- Our entire head management is actually all female.

So we wanna be able to create sort of a loving environment and open environment, a really welcoming environment.

- If you are not connecting with people that are working with us and not making them feel safe, not making them feel like, oh yeah, I definitely want to go into work here.

Then there's something sort of amiss.

(upbeat music) The whole idea of Tagmo has been about community building.

Its people have thrived, they have grown as human beings and they all say like, oh you know, one of the great things about this restaurant is that we love coming to work.

And I always wanted to create that space that you like coming to work.

This is my finding as an artist for the kind of work I wanna be producing for the next whatever, 20 years.

Eventually I'll retire, I hope, at some point.

(upbeat music) - Billie: I wanna say that I think I'm doing something new with cake decorating.

Something about the cakes is they have a very layered aesthetic, you know, many different colors and textures all piled up on top of itself.

That comes from the process of making the cake, which is my process of just pushing it as far as it can go.

So I definitely learned not to hold back because there's something that you trust in yourself and I think that's something artistic in you that says, okay, this, this is done.

I'm walking away now I feel like this cake has spoken.

You know?

So I'm pushing it to its maximum.

(upbeat music) Hi, my name's Billie Belo, pastry chef and owner of Cakes for No Occasion based out of New York City.

I don't know many people who make the kind of cakes that I make.

I feel very like unique in this line of art.

So that's looking kind of cute like that.

They're all different, but they tend to have a certain look, which is the chaotic look.

Yeah, I, I definitely think I'm sought out for the cake explosion experience and that's what they get.

Just time and again.

(upbeat music) (whirring of cake mixer) So this guy's ready to go.

He has a tuxedo on.

The black and white stripe is something I do a lot 'cause it gets so crazy the design that you kind of need a stripe to like have order, you know, 'cause it gets chaotic Even the cake I did last weekend which was a wedding cake, they don't know what they're gonna get and they're putting a lot of trust into me.

You know, it's their wedding.

Later when I got feedback from them, just how much they loved it mattered a lot to me.

I think things look really cool when they pile up, you know?

And so I just leave it unless it looks really bad.

I think part of how the cakes have gotten to where they are is like this pressure I made in my mind to like impress, you know, like, ah, I love, they probably want a colorful cake, so I better make it really, really colorful.

So Cakes for No Occasion is an abstract expressionist cake experience, experimenting with color and structure and texture, all on an edible sculpture, which is made out of cake and buttercream.

So the cakes are abstract because they draw from a lot of the abstract expressionist movement, like free wheeling, throwing paint, splatter, Jackson Pollock, actually letting the buttercream or in this case I'll call it the paint, be itself and do what it wants to do.

Then just for fun, sometimes I just go like that, you know?

-[Liza:Oh yeah.]

- You can just like get it.

Just kind of- [-Liza: Have splatters?]

- Yeah, fall down this side.

So you really have to get to know your buttercream 'cause it's like the cement between your bricks in your building.

So it drips, it's splatters, it, you know, globs around.

It doesn't look like, you know, a pretty designed thing with flowers piped, you know, it looks like its own weird self So it's like I don't get it as m because something that looks so clean and perfect, it doesn't look that edible to me.

Yeah, especially with buttercreams and stuff like the goofiness or something is what you want.

All right.

So I'm gonna let that sit and I'm gonna think about it.

So I don't know, I'm having like writer's block or something.

(dreamy music) Wait, so this is an edible glitter and I put this on everything.

Yeah, I usually start with a color and then go to its contrast.

So when I'm thinking about what I do, it is almost impossible to imagine the whole cake done in my head.

It's very much something that I'm responding to as it's happening.

- Oh cool.

- Yeah.

So if I have one color direction, I'll then switch to the opposite color direction and then I'll switch all the way to like something deeper or something more pastel.

So color is an easy thing I think to add, you know, when you're trying to make something be very loud.

I like to have like an asymmetric flow, so I just wanna spray this a little bit down here and then after that there's so much you can play with on the outside.

So I really got into exploring how to make things look and taste good on the outside and on the inside.

- [Liza: Do people have misconceptions about your cake?

[I don't know that it's like, doesn't taste good,] - Billie: That's a big, so one of the top questions is like, does it taste good?

And you put so much work into it, like it would be so embarrassing if like no one wanted to eat it in the end after you've tried so hard to make it look, you know, nice.

- [Liza: Does it, does that question annoy you?]

- Yeah, I mean it's just like, that's kind of pretty, it feels like it's sort of like, of course it tastes good, look how much hard I worked on it.

You know?

Sometimes I like to be funny and like do some funny piping, but it let make it look really bad.

Ta-da.

Piping but bad.

I use a lot of guava, passion fruit, coconut, chocolate, coffee.

Those are also all flavors that my family on my Brazilian side, we use those flavors in our baking.

My mom was a really good cook.

She was very meticulous and I learned from watching her.

- Like this side being like the destruction zone, you know, and this side being the clean si - [Liza] Ah, got it.

- So I've always enjoyed those flavors, you know, those are what feel like happy, comfort, sweet foods to me, especially guava.

So I try to, you know, hang out in that area.

Citrus, lime, you're taking in the color, tasting it, you know, you're tasting the rainbow.

(upbeat music) I think I've made about 300 or so cakes, big sculptural cakes.

And when I was originally getting started, I didn't want to be limited in any way.

Like I didn't wanna be associated with wedding cakes or gender reveal cakes or like birthday cakes or like a certain aesthetic, you know, I don't pipe happy birthday, I don't do any of that stuff.

So the title had to say like, leave me alone.

Like I'm a cake and I don't care what you want.

- [Liza: It's kind of you being a brat.]

- Yeah, yeah.

An artist, you know?

(laughs) Everything can be beautiful, you know, just has the right amount in the type of painting and the world that I was involved in was starting to feel stifling to me.

The cakes offered an, an outlet for creativity and a respite from the classical painting world.

And more and more I worked in cakes and felt my own expression coming through.

Yeah, I discovered that I have an artistic voice inside of me that is loud and wants out.

(upbeat music) It's like cakes gave me a new confidence to think about myself as an artist and a painter.

Whatever goes wrong in the end you just eat it and it's gone.

- [Liza: Oh my god,] Pretty.

- So cool.

- [Liza: It is so cool.]

- No one's gonna turn down a piece of cake 'cause it is colorful like, or has splatter or buttercream on it.

Not that I know of.

No one has yet to turn a slice down, so.

(laughter & upbeat music) It's good.

- Delicious.

[-Liza: Delicious.]

You know, when you bake a lot, you know how to bake over time and you put so much work into the whole process that eating it is, and it tasting good is so important.

(upbeat music) - Chef Tony: I designed the plate to kind of like give like a monochromatic feel.

When it comes to my food, I try not to limit myself.

When somebody says that I make Mexican food, that I'm a, that have a chef who cooks Mexican food, it already limits what I can do because most of America has a certain idea of Mexican food.

And even Mexicans within the US have their own narrow idea of what Mexican food is and can be.

And I think that that never really applied to me.

So we're at OStudio in Bed-stuy slash Bushwick and every month they've been featuring different chefs and kind of highlighting our stories within cooking.

(sound of oven opening) I understand Mexican food in the terms of like a Chicano culture, just like typical like northern California, Mexican American culture.

And then I understand it in the terms of like living in rural Mexico and growing your own ingredients It's like classic corn cake, beautiful grandma's recipe.

And then you have like this like weird passion fruit looking thing, which you probably would never really see.

- It's almost like a yolk spilling over.

- Exactly.

Yeah.

And so Chile Con Miel is sort of a space in which I express almost like the marriage of those two experiences.

Hi, my name is Tony Ortiz.

I am a chef and artist and the founder of Chile Con Miel which is a culinary platform based in Brooklyn, New York.

(dreamy music) Yeah, so for this dish, I thought about this snack that my grandma always used to make, and it's basically green apples with fresh lemon juice and salt sprinkled over it.

And so I thought of making an aguachile with green apple to kind of like showcase those similar flavors.

It's just a flavor that reminds me of childhood.

I think growing up I just knew that there was something in me that really wanted to like express itself, and I'm not sure that I knew how to exactly do that.

Once I started cooking, I think that kind of showed me that that was the correct way for me to go about it.

- [Liza: Would your grandma like this dish?]

- I think she would love it.

[Liza: laughs sweetly] Chile Con Miel started as me kind of just expressing my cultural interest in generational, ancestral knowledge.

I have done a lot of work around letting feminine and masculine energy kind of exist within me in a harmonious way.

And the name actually comes from the idea of this aggressive sort of like flavor, chiles kind of like being balanced with honey, which is to me romantic and almost like feminine.

I see it as bringing this part of the past in which queerness was not really a thing.

I mean it was, but you know, it wasn't accepted at all.

But for me as a queer person, I am sort of translating these generational recipes and techniques into the present day through my lens, through my experience.

(dreamy music) I grew up like in between my mom and my dad's family.

I lived with my mom until I was about 18, and then I moved with my grandparents.

A lot of my cooking also comes from trauma.

It came from necessity.

Like I, when I lived with my mom, we were very poor and I grew up with like barely food in the pantry, nothing really in the fridge, but like a gallon of milk and cheese and I had to make dishes out of nothing.

The reason why I am, I think so passionate about food, but also like so deep is because I experienced a time in my life where like food was, is, it was not a thing.

(thoughtful music) (Tony speaking faintly) Like for the dinner at the James Beard house, I made like those little pinwheels and those are called duralitos and duralitos are like the cheapest Mexican street you can find in California, and probably in New York as well.

And I intentionally put those on a tasting menu in the James Beard House because I was like, this is a part of my Chicano culture.

And so I really wanted to just like throw it in people's faces.

I want people who relate to those ingredients and those dishes to see what I'm doing and to see where I'm doing it at, because I know that they will understand why I am doing it.

This is also who I am.

-[Liza: This made you scrappy.]

- It made me very scrappy.

I mean, it's, it's the reason why I can tolerate a lot of stress, you know, and I, I can take care of myself.

- [Yeah... The Dollhouse.]

(laughter) - When I went to my grandparents and I tasted the food that they made, there was so much soul and like so many memory and stories behind these recipes that they were cooking.

A lot of like slow cooked sauces, like really beautiful, like chili sauces, moles and stuff like this.

And that's kind of where the idea started.

(people applauding) I'm really happy that everybody is here.

This menu is kind of like a translation of how I see Mexican cuisine, but it also embodies the core of my culinary talent, which comes from my grandmother and my grandfather.

(people applauding) What called me to New York was the idea of radical change.

New York is teaching me to thrive.

(dreamy music) My experience here around food has been understanding how to make food edgy.

When it comes to my plating, I feel like I, I like to be dramatic.

I like for people to get a plate for them to be like, oh my God, like what is this?

Like, what's going on?

And it's very colorful.

I'm huge on textures.

I'm huge on height.

That's the vibe here.

(upbeat music) It's a very important moment for me as a queer, third generation Mexican Americans be in this house that was owned by an iconic queer chef.

I remember the first couple of popups, somebody was like, I've never tasted Mexican food that tasted like that.

It wasn't a burn.

It was like, that was amazing.

And I had never tasted Mexican food in that way that you're presenting it.

And so I think that that's something that's been really special about being here.

(upbeat music) So it feels great.

When people use the word like rising chef or stars and things like that, it feels amazing because I've been working very hard to feel seen in those ways.

Salud.

- [Group Together] Salud.

- But at the same time, I want to make sure that what I'm building is sustainable.

That's the most important thing for me, is how am I going to make long-term impact with the time that I have in this world.

(upbeat music) -Liza: The LGBTQIA+ community is responsible for some of the biggest shifts happening in food today.

With all the new faces, popups, outreach and connection taking place, our kitchens are finally ready to embrace change.

That's it for this episode of "food.

curated.".

I'm Liza de Guia.

Be sure to connect with us on social media and eat more stories.

I'll see you next week.

(upbeat music) Funding for food.

curated.

is made possible by: Stele is a globally curated collection of artisanal and independent perfumes.

Hand-picked olfactory experiences that tell a story.

Available online and at two New York locations.

For more info we're at Stele (dot) NYC.

Support for food.

curated.

comes from CMD Psych.

Bringing holistic approach to child wellness and women's mental healthcare Helping patients find balance and harmony in their lives.

For more info, head to CMD Psych (dot) com.

Additional funding provided by (bright music) Craving more about the stories behind the craft?

Dive deeper into the makers we care about, on our social pages, and at food.

curated.

dot com (bright music) (music) (music)