Chef Iliana de la Vega reflects on her journey as El Naranjo celebrates its 12th anniversary.

By Janaye Barabin.

Chef Iliana de la Vega opened her first restaurant, El Naranjo, in Oaxaca, Mexico, and operated it for almost 10 years. Due to social unrest in the area, her family made the difficult choice to close and leave their home. Despite this setback, de la Vega kept her dream alive and opened a restaurant in Austin in 2012 with the same name. In the years that followed, she has won the James Beard Award for Best Chef in 2022, one of the most prestigious awards for chefs in the U.S.; was a semifinalist for Best Chef Southwest in 2019 and Best Chef Texas in 2020; and worked as a chef instructor and cuisine specialist at the world-renowned Culinary Institute of America. Now, de la Vega and her family are celebrating the revered restuarant’s 12th anniversary.

It’s clear how important family is to her. Though she admits that working with family isn’t always easy, she smiles as she talks about them. She opened the restaurant with her husband and her two daughters, and her first memories of cooking come from watching her mother. There wasn’t a cooking school in Mexico when de la Vega grew up, so her mother was her teacher. “I loved [going]to the market with my mom and [learning]about things,” says de la Vega. “Asking questions—‘Why [did]you do that? How did you do this?’ I was looking at her doing things and learning from her.”

Although de la Vega showed an interest in cooking at an early age, her family was skeptical. “I wanted to cook, but it was not well regarded in my family. Not because they didn’t like to cook. My mom was an excellent cook, [and]she was a chemist. So for her, she was a step forward with [having]a degree, but then her daughter wanted to be a cook. It was like, ‘That’s wrong; you should go to university.’ I tried, but I didn’t like it. Eventually I just decided to go into cooking.”

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Photo by Tanya Chávez