Profiles: South Florida Chefs at Work

Sookram found her way back to Miami and started working for Urban Oasis Project, running the Monday night farmers market at the Arsht Center. Her routine now includes going to Homestead every Friday to pick up eggs and produce from Redland farms, and explaining tropical fruits like wax jambu and longans to market visitors. To keep her hand in cooking, she is part of the monthly series of pop-up vegan dinners called Love and Vegetables at Earth N Us Farm. And she’s putting all those experiences to work with a fresh perspective. “Fresh food should be available for all,” she says. “I want to get people woke and keep cooking my food, reaching more people.”

Find out about Love and Vegetables pop-ups here. 

Feeding the Multitudes: Karla Hoyos

If you want to see a young chef leading the world into the future, look into the level gaze of Karla Hoyos.

As chef de cuisine at South Beach's chic The Bazaar by José Andrés, the 30-year-old Hoyos oversees the kitchen and dishes like Cuban coffee-rubbed churrasco and secreto iberico de bellota. She works with four sous chefs and a pastry chef, all male. Every morning, she gives her prep ladies a hug.  

Her career path was paved early on in an unwavering path to the professional kitchen at stratospheric levels. As a high school student in Veracruz, Mexico, Hoyos baked pastries and sold them to restaurants. After culinary school, she staged at the three-Michelin-star restaurant, Martin Berastegui in San Sebastian, Spain, the only woman in a kitchen of 70 men. She worked at a trattoria in Florence, Italy; then at El Rekondo in San Sebastian; and came back to the US to open a Spanish and Latin American restaurant in Indiana. From there, she went to Bon Appetit Management Company, a huge firm that does foodservice management for businesses, universities, museums and specialty venues, and worked her way up to an executive chef position.  

“I was doing everything – budgeting, recruiting, creating systems, food costs,” she recalls. Then, one year ago, company CEO Fedele Bauccio got a call from his friend, José Andrés. He needed chefs to send to Puerto Rico and feed people who were reeling after Hurricane Maria tore through the island, completely destroying its power grid and leveling neighborhoods.

Immediately, Hoyos was on a flight to the storm-ravaged island, where she got to work: “I started setting up systems, remote kitchens and ordering up 140,000 meals a day. There was a 7pm curfew. No clean water. No electricity.” The mission was to feed everyone a good meal: “José was very thoughtful about what he wanted: substantial protein, starch, vegetables. We made pastelón, a kind of shepherd’s pie with plantain, yuca, pork and rice, plus fruit. We ran out of ham on the island, so we had to be creative. Then we were out of cheese, but we had canned [cheese] that was actually very good. To José, it was very important that the sandwiches not be dry.”

Hoyos was supposed to be in Puerto Rico for six days. She stayed for a month and a half, returning because her sister was getting married. The experience on the island was life-changing. “It humbled me. How can I adapt after this?” she says. Helping Andrés also opened her eyes to her professional path. “I need to work with him,” she says. The feeling was mutual – a job offer for the position at The Bazaar came shortly afterward. She began work at February’s South Beach Wine and Food Festival. Since then, she has joined a group of local chefs, Recipes for Change, providing meals every month at Camillus House.

A charismatic performer, Bilsky is corporate chef for ElectriChef and, with fellow Les Dames d’Escoffier South Florida, cooked at Aegean Secrets at the James Beard House in New York City earlier this year (above). “The future is about diversity in the kitchen,” she says. “When you get a woman, you get the full package. We are the culinary world of tomorrow.”