Eating off the Las Vegas strip with ‘world’s best female chef’ Elena Reygadas of Mexico City

Ongoing Series Columnist Jenn Harris joins your favorite celebrities to explore their go-to cuisines and restaurants in Los Angeles. And despite a persistent debate about whether a separate “female chef” category is needed at all, Reygadas said she sees the title as an acknowledgment that women “are the ones that have preserved the food culture for generations and generations.” The afternoon before the ceremony, we drove off the Strip for a short crawl that started at Grand Yunnan Tea, a shop that sources dozens of teas from a single factory in China’s Yunnan province. “I didn’t really want to go to a restaurant of a big-name chef from another part of the country,” Reygadas said. When San San Francisco chef Dominique Crenn was named the best female chef in 2016, she famously called the award “stupid,” noting, “A chef is a chef.” “I think in an ideal world, of course it shouldn’t be this division, but I do feel that the fact of having it, it’s a way to encourage more leadership of female chefs, at least in Mexico,” Reygadas said. “I think a chef’s purpose is beyond making delicious plates and we should be like transmitters of many things that go through food,” Reygadas said.