This is Good Taste, a fun menu for Bay Area eating. This week, we highlight three local chefs who create videos that inspire with tips and techniques to help step up the art of home cooking for celebrations, recovery from illnesses, and more. If you’re looking for some free kitchen game, here it is in full splendor!
VICTORIANO LOPEZ
As the longtime executive chef at the San Francisco outpost of the waterfront Peruvian restaurant La Mar (Pier 1 ½ The Embarcadero N, SF), Lopez is one of the city’s culinary treasures. He has almost 49,000 followers on Instagram and millions of YouTube views, but I still think he deserves much more attention and offline support than he has in the Bay Area.
He shared his exact recipe for empanada dough in the first video above, so you can learn how to make them at home. Remix the contents with your own ideas, or watch the second video to learn how he prepares artichokes to use in a filling. We love seeing his super smiley dog by his side, offering to help by having a taste.
Lopez also has a fantastic YouTube channel called La Cocina de Victoriano with several approachable cooking videos in Spanish, with bilingual text information.
The most popular instructional to date is his Cebiche Peruano video, which has 4.4 million views. Make it at home or belly up to the bar at La Mar to try his work.
Kathy Fang
Even before Fang Restaurant (660 Howard Street, SF) and House of Nanking’s (919 Kearny Street, SF), Chef Kathy Fang starred in her own Food Network show called Chef Dynasty: House of Fang with her father Peter Fang, she regularly shared techniques and ideas that she uses when cooking at home for her family on social media.
Just like watching Lopez has helped me with ideas and general prep skills in the kitchen, I’ve personally learned a lot from seeing Fang post about how she cooks at home on Instagram. Recent inspiration has come from her videos about making soups and congee to use as body boosters when you’re trying to bound back from feeling under the weather. A good social follow for parents especially, Fang also often pokes fun at how her young kids basically turn her into a “short-order cook” and how she often subsists off of their leftovers.
Unlike some executive chefs and chef/owners, these are chefs who actually can be found as the heartbeat of the kitchen all of the time. So you might actually see or meet your new cooking mentors when dining with them.
Tamara is the publisher of California Eating and the founder of the new online Music Book Club.
