About face

Michael Toscano is of Mexican descent.

Of course, that’s not news to his mother, who raised the future chef on carne guisada and homemade tortillas in Houston. Or to his four aunts, whose San Antonio childhoods were warmed by menudo made according to methods their great-great-grandmother carried from Guadalajara. Or to his uncles, no strangers to cooking cow’s heads in the ground.

Yet Toscano frequently corrects colleagues and customers who assume he’s Italian. They put together the last name his father’s family brought to Mexico two centuries ago; his skin tone, roughly the shade of fish consommé, and his work history—top jobs at New York City’s Babbo and Eataly and ownership of Le Farfalle and da Toscano Porchetta Shop in Charleston—and come up with Italian ancestry.

“I became a student of Italy because I was fascinated with it,” said Toscano, who started his career at Pinehurst Resort in North Carolina. “I didn’t grow up eating Italian food.”

Now, after more than 20 years in restaurants, Toscano is serving Mexican food for the first time. In November 2024, after his Le Farfalle landlord asked if he wanted to take over an adjoining space vacated by The UPS Store, he opened a pop-up taco shop named after his mother. At Blanca Estrada, a former packaging station functions as a dining table for carne asada and cochinita pibil.

“This may not be its final resting place, but it’s an opportunity to let people know we can make delicious, beautiful, homemade tacos,” said Toscano, one of several well-known Southern chefs who’ve lately opened restaurants showcasing lesser-known aspects of their cultural identities.

Some eaters were taken aback by Lagasse rhapsodizing over salt cod and Gillespie wearing a kilt. That’s in part because of a tendency to confine people to one ethnic group or another—sometimes wrongly, as in Toscano’s case. But the new restaurants demonstrate that the complex story of immigration doesn’t end upon arrival. The notion of a melting pot may be passé, but America was built on the commingling of diverse influences, and the freedom to choose among them.

“We are a land of mostly immigrants, and all of our cultures are mashed together,” said Kelly Lear, a genealogist based in Atlanta. “We are a product of our ancestors, and some of them are going to resonate with us more than others.”

Before he thought of himself as Southern, Gillespie knew he was Scottish. All four of his grandparents were born in Scotland, and his maternal grandparents still owned land there when he was born. Even though his immediate family didn’t travel back and forth between the two countries, they made up for missed trips by honoring Scottish customs and celebrating Scottish holidays with more gusto than their relatives across the Atlantic.

As a kid, Gillespie was best known for the caber toss, the highland game that involves hurling a 17-foot-long log.

Still, among the most Scottish traits that Gillespie inherited was a reticence to publicly discuss his roots.

“There’s a self-deprecation from generations of being told you’re shit,” he said. “You’re proud of being Scottish, but quietly proud: When I told my grandmother that I was going to open a Scottish restaurant, she was like, ‘Why in the world would you do that?’”

She wasn’t the only skeptic. Gillespie’s father and uncle had been supportive when he’d batted around the idea over the years, but largely because they thought he meant he wanted to open a rowdy pub: They weren’t necessarily keen on tasting menus studded with blood sausage and scallops.

Gillespie’s father didn’t live to see Nàdair, or “naturally” in Scottish Gaelic. Fifteen minutes after Gillespie signed the lease for the former Floataway Café he learned his 62-year-old father had taken a fatal fall in his workshop. In the fog of grief, Gillespie took a few months to formulate the Scottish statement he intended to make in the space.

“My business partner was not on board,” Gillespie said. “Frankly, he thought it was a bad decision. A lot of people thought it was insane. But I’ve heard people mock my culture my whole life: This is the most authentic version of me I’ve been able to put forward.”

That ability comes from the confidence and financial footing it takes decades to achieve in the hospitality industry. It’s not coincidental that Southern chefs are pursuing intensely personal projects approximately a quarter century after food television vaulted culinarians such as Lagasse and Gillespie to stardom. As a younger chef, Gillespie said, he would have felt compelled to conceal his vulnerabilities and scale back his vision for the sake of sales.

Toscano cited a similar dynamic, saying he might have made painful concessions at an earlier point in his career. “With Mexican food, I’ve stayed away for so long because those are my memories,” he said. “Sometimes in this business, you get frustrated, and I didn’t want that to happen with my sacred space, but I’m ready now.”

For Toscano, the decision to create Blanca Estrada was entirely apolitical. Asked whether there was any significance to the pop-up opening weeks after the election of Donald Trump, who promised mass deportations of Latin American immigrants, he said, “I feel for those people; I support those people, but I also see there are many sides of this story.”

By contrast, Gillespie was intensely aware of the current climate when he engaged with immigration at Nàdair. He didn’t want to shy away from the realities of discrimination, inequality, and fear, but putting his personal history at the forefront “was a struggle, because I have to embrace my whiteness, and I hope that’s not going to hurt anyone.”

He continued, “My business partner, who is Black, asked, ‘How am I supposed to connect with this?’ I don’t really connect with Talat Market (an award-winning Thai restaurant), but I’m a member of their community and they’re members of mine. We’re allowed to traverse boundaries.”

Lear, the genealogist, lives just a few blocks from Nàdair. She hasn’t yet traversed its tartan carpet or hoisted a fork from Gillespie’s family collection, but she has an idea of what’s going on there. Last August, her brothers opened Good Company Pizza in Swannanoa, North Carolina. 

“Our mother passed away 10 years ago, and the place is based on our mom and the pizza night she used to do for us,” said Lear, who helped her brothers hang family photographs at the restaurant. After it was flooded by Hurricane Helene, she started driving up every other weekend to help them rebuild. “There’s something about family connections that’s real and solid and tangible; there’s something really beautiful right now about honoring the people who we wouldn’t be here without.”

At Nàdair, Gillespie’s mother is the ultimate regular. Gillespie calls her the restaurant’s mayor because she’s quick to show guests around the dining room, explaining the significance of this tartan and recounting legends about that clan. Many of them are likewise children of Scottish immigrants.

“I never expected how many people would come in and say, ‘I have a place to go and embrace who I am’,” Gillespie said. “The men wear kilts and the women wear tartans, and they get to do that without going to the Highland Games.”

Nàdair marked Gillespie’s return to full-time cheffing following his renal cancer diagnosis in 2017.

“The reality is Nàdair is more than likely my last restaurant, and if it’s going to be my last one, I owe it to myself and my colleagues and my dining community to show you my real life. And if it goes out of business, I think I’ll be able to live with that because I won’t live with the regret of not knowing.”

He also doesn’t have to worry about what his grandparents would have thought of Nàdair. On her deathbed, Gillespie’s paternal grandmother told him she was proud she’d lived long enough to admit she was Scottish.