Jonathan Magallanes
Title: Owner, chef, manager of Las Tortugas Deli Mexicana.
Age: 36.
Hometown: Memphis.
Who or what was your first cooking influence? Growing up as a child watching how much fun my father had cooking for friends.
What was the first thing you ever cooked or baked? I took a cooking class at St. George's. I think I was in the fifth grade. We got to make little pizzas on rye toast with sausage and tomatoes on top.
What made you decide to become a chef, and when was that? When I moved back from Florida six years ago I started helping out my dad. ... The main responsibility there was shopping every morning for everything. And the power and the ability to go source your own food and come back and make it immediately was really sort of a revelation to me. From there, just to be able to create any dish that occurred to you and to serve it ... felt like a privilege. I fell in love with the ability to have creative control over what I was doing and to feed people.
What was your first food-related job? My first job was at McDonald's. What's awesome was I got to work my way up from the fries to the grill, grilling burgers and eventually made it up to ... the checkout window. That's the cushiest gig there 'cause you get to just sit and take orders over a microphone and (you're) not sweating over a stove.
What was something important that a fellow chef taught you? One of my best friends is Kelly English (chef, owner of Restaurant Iris). He's really taught me the importance of pushing yourself creatively in the kitchen and the need to constantly be evolving as a chef.
What is the Jonathan Magallanes style? The classic, sort of ingredient-driven, colorful light, fresh food that people in Mexico live on and eat every day.
Describe a dish you created. Toast dried chilies and then rehydrate them in water that's infused with bay leaf, avocado leaf and then mash the re-hydrated toasted chilies into the black beans. Then we finish it with pickled carrot, the Mexican creme fraiche, crumbled cheese, shredded lettuce and pico de gallo salsa.
What do you cook or bake at home, if anything? I'm a huge fan of quinoa because it can be done savory and sweet.
What's your favorite food? I love fatty tuna -- toro.
What's your least favorite food? Probably cabbage.
Las Tortugas Deli Mexicana is at 1215 South Germantown Road; (901) 751-1200.
Michael Donahue: (901) 529-2797; donahue@commercialappeal.com
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