Laura Tillman in Person

Join us on Wednesday November 13 at 7 PM as Laura Tillman talks about her James Beard Award-winning book, The Migrant Chef: The Life and Times of Lalo García.

Winner of the 2024 James Beard Foundation's Award for Literary Writing
A New Yorker Best Book of 2023 • An NPR 2023 "Books We Love" Pick
A chef’s gripping quest to reconcile his childhood experiences as a migrant farmworker with the rarefied world of fine dining.

Born in rural Mexico, Eduardo “Lalo” García Guzmán and his family left for the United States when he was a child, picking fruits and vegetables on the migrant route from Florida to Michigan. He worked in Atlanta restaurants as a teenager before being convicted of a robbery, incarcerated, and eventually deported. Lalo landed in Mexico City as a new generation of chefs was questioning the hierarchies that had historically privileged European cuisine in elite spaces. At his acclaimed restaurant, Máximo Bistrot, he began to craft food that narrated his memories and hopes.

Mexico City–based journalist Laura Tillman spent five years immersively reporting on Lalo’s story: from Máximo’s kitchen to the onion fields of Vidalia, Georgia, to Dubai’s first high-end Mexican restaurant, to Lalo’s hometown of San José de las Pilas. What emerges is a moving portrait of Lalo’s struggle to find authenticity in an industry built on the very inequalities that drove his family to leave their home, and of the artistic process as Lalo calls on the experiences of his life to create transcendent cuisine. The Migrant Chef offers an unforgettable window into a family’s border-eclipsing dreams, Mexico’s culinary heritage, and the making of a chef.

Laura Tillman is a journalist and the author of The Migrant Chef: The Life and Times of Lalo García (W.W. Norton, 2023), which won the 2024 James Beard Award for Literary Writing, and The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts: M**der and Memory in an American City (Scribner, 2016). She began her career as a newspaper reporter at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2007, before moving to Mexico City in 2014. Her work, which focuses principally on migration, justice, and food, has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Nation. She graduated from Vassar College with a degree in International Studies and Goucher College with an MFA in Nonfiction Writing. She recently moved to Connecticut to join the staff of the CT Mirror, where she covers mental health, addiction, disability services, food insecurity, and children's issues.

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