This Austin Chef Moved From Oaxaca, but Oaxaca Never Left Her

When Austin chef Iliana de la Vega was growing up in Mexico City in the 1960s and ’70s, she and her family often traveled into Oaxaca on a long, narrow, and twisty road. “It would take 10, 12 hours to get there on this road that was all curves,” the chef recalls about those trips to visit her extended family. These journeys down a dangerous road to visit her extended family in Oaxaca shaped her life for decades to come as she made her way to Texas, where in 2012 she opened one of the premier Mexican restaurants in the country, El Naranjo, to showcase the heritage flavors of her ancestral homeland.

In Austin the fall of 2023 fall, de la Vega’s business went through many changes as she hands the reins of her restaurant to her daughter, Ana Torrealba, and expands her culinary tourism company into new Mexican cities. Throughout this, Oaxaca continues to drive de la Vega’s culinary inspiration. When she brings back groups of people to the same Oaxacan markets her great-grandmothers would have shopped, it’s full circle.

Oaxaca was considered a far-off place in the 1960s and ’70s, even to her friends in Mexico City, as it was cut off from the rest of the country by mountains and rivers. It wasn’t until 1994 that the Mexican government built a highway that connected Oaxaca, “rich in culture, poor in economy,” she says, to the rest of the country — and eventually the world.

In the Mexican tradition, culinary know-how is passed down through the maternal line. During de la Vega’s family trips to Oaxaca, she’d spend time with her grandmother, Justa, and her dozens of cousins and relatives. For her, it was where life revolved around food. Her grandmother had 12 children, and only three girls. Of those, de la Vega’s mother was the only one to have children, so the chef was perhaps destined to be the keeper of her family’s cooking knowledge.

After she graduated from high school in Mexico City, de la Vega tried six different majors in college, including literature, communication, pedagogy, and tourism management, but never graduated. “I had very good grades, but I got bored at school and I just wanted to cook,” she says. To her mother’s initial disappointment, she started selling baked goods and cookies while teaching small cooking classes that people found out about through word-of-mouth. “My mother was a chemist, and for her, cooking was a step back,” she says. “But I couldn’t resist it. I was just teaching them what I knew.”

After meeting Ernesto during high school, getting married, and having their two daughters, the family eventually moved to the city that shaped her culinary path. They opened the original El Naranjo restaurant — named after the Spanish word for “orange tree” — in Oaxaca City in 1997. Political unrest in the early 2000s forced the couple to close the business and move to the U.S. She landed in San Antonio at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA), where she taught Latin American foodways for five years. In 2012, the couple moved to Austin to reopen El Naranjo.

During de la Vega’s time at the CIA, she started getting requests from clients to take them on private culinary trips to Oaxaca. Eventually, she decided to start a side business to fill that niche called Mexican Culinary Traditions, which now operates more than a dozen culinary trips a year to four destinations in Mexico. During these weeklong trips, she teaches cooking classes and hosts walking tours exploring aspects of the culinary culture. Her daughter, Isabel Torrealba, an anthropologist and journalist, teaches attendees about the history, architecture, and culture of the destinations. The trips originally focused on Oaxaca and, fueled by her desire to showcase the diversity of Mexican cuisine, expanded to Morelia in 2021 and Mérida earlier in 2023.

De la Vega spends a lot of time writing recipes for her consulting clients — such as Stanford and the University of Massachusetts, which hire her to reboot campus dining halls — but draws inspiration from what’s in season during the trips. “We go to the market and we look around and see what is fresh,” she says. “I don’t even know what I am cooking that day until we go to the market.” Her approach reflects the Mexican approach to cooking, she says. “This is the way we cook in Mexico. It’s ‘What do I have and what can I do with what I have?’”

Many of her tour guests have never cooked without a recipe and often stress if they don’t have all the ingredients, but de la Vega relishes the opportunity to experiment outside of her restaurant. “I think that is more stressful than to go with the flow,” she says.

Through these trips, de la Vega has met hundreds of people from all over the world — India, Singapore, England, Spain — as well as Mexican tourists and Mexican Americans exploring their own country or heritage. “Some people will say, ‘Oh, my mom used to do that,’” she says as they point to a technique or way of serving a dish. “In a way, we open the door for them, so they feel they are taken care of.”

El Naranjo has transformed in Austin too, starting off as a food truck in 2012, growing into a physical restaurant on Rainey Street, and then relocating onto South Lamar. Then there was the pandemic and what de la Vega considers one of the biggest moments of her career with both pride and humility: her James Beard Award win in the first-ever Best Chef: Texas category in 2022, a feat for an Austin restaurant that focuses on interior Mexican food.

The medal is the kind of nod that most chefs only dream of but wasn’t one that kept her up at night. “I have never been a prize-seeker, but it felt good,” she says, “because you work hard and are trying to do something that makes a difference, so to get recognition makes me feel proud, but it didn’t change much in my daily life.”

After the award, she saw new faces in the restaurant and new interest in her culinary trips, but in many ways, she still feels like she is in survival mode with increased competition from new restaurants and diners’ hesitant to spend money due to economic uncertainties, not to mention rising food costs. “The pandemic was so, so hard,” she says. “We had just moved into the new location when COVID hit after seven years on Rainey. It’s a big step to still be here and be able to count on the people who still work with us.”

With her James Beard recognition, de la Vega is shifting from one chapter to the next. Earlier in 2023, her 35-year-old daughter officially took over the day-to-day management of the staff and the culinary operations at El Naranjo as chef de cuisine, giving de la Vega time to focus on her tours and consulting projects. De la Vega is now traveling more than ever, with 14 culinary trips a year scheduled.

Much like her mother, Ana Torrealba grew up surrounded by food, spending time at the family’s restaurants in Oaxaca and Austin. She studied baking and pastry at the CIA in Hyde Park before working at restaurants in New York and studying food engineering in Mexico City.

De la Vega didn’t dissuade her daughter from getting into the food world like her own mother did, “but I did tell her that it was a hard life,” she says. When Torrealba moved to Austin, she worked nights at Central Market’s bakery, and still made the decision that, even with the long hours, she wanted her hands covered in flour and masa, just like her mom.

De la Vega’s journey from Mexico City to Oaxaca to Texas while raising her daughters and building a community around one of the most lauded restaurants in the city, has been satisfying, but she’s not finished yet. The chef still does extensive consulting work. She also speaks on panels about women and diversity in the culinary industry, and is constantly researching to improve and expand her culinary trips. She also wants to take some time for herself. “My main goal now is to see my girls doing well. I’d like to retire and go back and forth between Oaxaca and here and travel with my husband.”

But semi-retirement won’t look like resting on her laurels.

“I don’t know how to sit still,” she says, noting that she has over 10 culinary trips scheduled already, many of which are already sold out.

It’s a lot easier to get to Oaxaca than it used to be, but in some ways, it’s harder to remember what it was like before it became one of the top tourism destinations in Mexico. But that’s the Oaxaca she tries to remember when she’s on the road, teaching chefs and tour guests about her culinary heritage. It’s a legacy she’s building one trip at a time.