Chef Diego Garcia: I Had Nothing to Fall Back On

At 14 years old, Chef Diego Garcia left his family in Mexico and returned to New York alone.

He barely spoke English. He wasn't going to school. He worked wherever he could, and for a period of time, he had nowhere to live. Diego slept in the New York City subway, cleaned himself up in restaurant bathrooms and helped people carry groceries while trying to save enough money to rent a room.

His parents back in Mexico had no idea.

But Diego's story didn't begin there.

Growing up in Puebla, he worked alongside his family in street markets, unloaded trucks filled with produce and learned to slaughter goats and prepare barbacoa with his father and grandfather. Food wasn't a career yet. It was simply part of life.

New York changed that.

Restaurants became Diego's education. He learned English by reading newspapers on the train and learned his craft inside kitchens. French technique, Italian cooking, sustainable seafood and years of working alongside chefs from different cultures eventually gave him a language of his own.

The road wasn't clean.

As a teenager in Florida, Diego found himself selling drugs, stealing cars and dangerously close to a future he knew he didn't want. He left, returned to New York and made a decision that would alter the direction of his life: he was going all in on cooking.

Today, Diego is approaching 200 events through his own private-chef business while working toward his ultimate goal of opening a restaurant built around seafood, Mexican heritage and the many cultures and techniques that shaped him along the way.

But this conversation goes much deeper than food.

Diego talks about homelessness, poverty, pride, family violence, bad decisions, abusive kitchen culture, leadership, fatherhood, healing from childhood trauma and finally learning to be proud of himself.