FOOD By Michael Donahue
Mountain Out of a Mole
J
Of motorcycles and mole sauces — Jonathan Magallanes shakes up the menu at Las Tortugas.
onathan Magallanes is a big dog rider in the kitchen. With warp speed he can whip up a mole or a salsa. Instead of roosting in crash padding on a superslab, Magallanes is in a chef ’s jacket working at breakneck speed at the stove. An avid motorcyclist (hence the lingo), Magallanes, 42, who got his first motorcycle when he was five years old, is chef/owner with his dad, Pepe Magallanes, of Las Tortugas restaurant. Born in Memphis but living for a while in Mexico City, Jonathan rode his little yellow 50-cylinder Yamaha, participated in Boy Scouts, practiced piano, and took karate. Cooking sparked his interest after he made a pizza in an extracurricular cooking class at St. George’s Independent School. He remembered “preparing food being this exciting, really creative thing” when he lived in Mexico. “My dad was in the kitchen doing a million things at once and preparing food for a lot of different people. The kitchen was a fun place to be.”
MICHAEL DONAHUE
Jonathan Magallanes: Making those flavors work.
Jonathan thought, “I can do this. This is something I have complete creative liberty with.” He didn’t pursue cooking. “With so many things going on, I think it sort of went on the back burner — no pun intended — for a long time.” He went to Mexico for a year of school when he was at Kenyon College. “We went to Africa and Greece and Western Europe. I think that trip was really where I sort of discovered this exciting world of food and exotic food. I really think I developed a love of food in a new way.”
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