Chefsteban, aka, Chef Esteban Beas

Chefsteban

Chef Esteban Beas is a queer Latino chef and butcher who grew up on the border, splitting his time between San Diego and Tijuana. It was in this intersection that his vision began to take shape—where flavors, people, and cultures collided. He found inspiration in Mexico’s ingredients, the creativity born from limitation, and the opportunities that crossed north.

ROOTS AND CRAFT

Raised in his grandmother’s kitchen, Esteban developed a deep respect for tradition, flavor, and the kind of cooking that comes from love and survival. That passion eventually led him to Le Cordon Bleu, where he refined his technique and disciplined approach to the craft.

During this formative years in the kitchen, he balanced high-level culinary training with deeply human work. While cooking at Mille Fleurs, one of Southern California’s most acclaimed fine dining restaurants, he also spent two years working in a women’s immigration holding facility, where material witnesses to crimes were detained.

In that unlikely kitchen, Esteban found community and purpose. Some of the women—eager to fill their limited free time—volunteered beside him, helping prep meals the staff and residents. In return, they shared their time, recipes, and stories from across Mexico and Central America. Those exchanges became as formative as any fine dining experience, shaping his understanding of food as heritage, resilience, and memory.

After his time at Mille Fleurs, Esteban joined the team at The Lodge at Torrey Pines, a Five-Diamond resort where butchery became more than a skill—it became passion, and purpose. There, he learned to respect the whole animal, finding artistry in precision and healing in repetition. Butchery became a language: one of focus, care, love and intent.

He later advanced his craft through stages at Michelin-level restaurants in San Francisco, refining his technical edge and deepening his respect for discipline and detail.

These experiences together—luxury, lineage, and lived experience—became the backbone of his culinary identity.

TECHNIQUE AND STYLE

Over the years, he mastered a wide range of styles and cuisines, yet found his truest voice in butchery and sauce work. Butchery taught him precision, resourcefulness, and reverence for the ingredient. Sauce work taught him balance, intuition, and the quiet patience to wait until a flavor tells you it’s ready.

Through these disciplines, Esteban developed a style that is technical yet soulful, structured yet instinctive. His food draws from Mexican soul, Northern California seasonality, and classical French discipline, but transcends category—he cooks from a place of memory, emotion, and control.

For him, every dish carries a story: one of craft, ancestry, and the modern kitchen. His approach is raw, emotional, and deeply considered—no ego, no shortcuts, just honesty through flavor.

BAJA AND BAY

For Chefsteban, cooking isn’t performance — it’s preservation and protest.

Every dish he creates lives between Baja and the Bay, between memory and mastery, between where he started and what he’s building now. His food speaks of migration and motion — of stories that refuse to fade and flavors that demand to be remembered.

He cooks to connect. To bridge cultures, reclaim stories, and feed people like they matter. Butchery taught him discipline. Sauce work taught him patience. History taught him that every recipe is a living archive. Through Del Norte Kitchen, he carries that lineage forward — blending heritage with edge, craft with soul, and tradition with defiance.

This is border-born cuisine — bold, unapologetic, and deeply human. Food that brings people together — to the table, to each other, to Del Norte.