Hector Santiago from Top Chef comes to the Village Kitchen

A year ago, Hector Santiago was competing with 16 other chefs on Bravo’s “Top Chef: Las Vegas.”

Season Six was notable because three Atlanta chefs were featured: Santiago, Kevin Gillespie and Eli Kirshstein.

“It was a lot of fun,” Santiago said. “I wanted to go and enjoy it.”

He was eliminated on the fourth show and regretted not being able to do the “cowboy challenge” where the chefs cooked outdoors. Santiago said he had plenty of experience cooking outdoors when he was in the Boy Scouts in his native Puerto Rico.

Santiago will be the guest chef at the Village Kitchen of Lewis Jones Thursday as it celebrates its first anniversary.

Bravo recently sent Santiago its new recipe book from the “Top Chef” series.

“It was fun,” he said about receiving the book. “I got to relive my experience on the show. It actually had my recipe for tofu ceviche. I did it on that bachelorette party. They wanted something vegetarian.”

For the past nine years, Santiago has been the owner and executive chef of Pura Vida in Atlanta’s North Highlands area.

He came to Atlanta just before the 1996 Summer Olympics. “I was in New York five years before coming to Atlanta,” he said. “I was looking South. The Olympics was coming there. And there were a lot of restaurants opening; a lot of development. That was attractive to me. It was something lively; very international.

“I’ve grown a lot with Atlanta. I love the South. It’s so green here. And it’s almost as hot as Puerto Rico.”

Growing up in Puerto Rico

As a child, he and his sister would watch cooking shows on television. They would also watch their mother and grandmother cook in the family kitchen.

“We would be cooking all the time. The kids from the neighborhood would come and eat. Our parents would want us to do our homework. We would be cooking instead.”

Living in the highlands of Puerto Rico, he said their backyard was filled with fruit, herbs and an occasional chicken.

“We had a creek and we had something like Tarzan vines. We always had a group of kids.”

When he was in high school, Santiago went to work at the first Ponderosa Steakhouse on Puerto Rico.

“It was different from anything else,” he said. “So it was very, very busy. But it was a fun experience.”

While he was in college in Puerto Rico, he went to work for Giovanna Huyke at the El San Juan Hotel & Casino.

“I interviewed with the chef (Huyke), and she took me on as an apprentice. They also call that the dishwasher,” he said with a laugh.

Eventually, he began cooking. “She taught me basic cooking; good cooking with good ingredients. I consider her to be very much of the Alice Waters of Puerto Rico.”

He took what he learned from her, and after graduating from college, he went to New York to attend the Culinary Institute of America.

His own restaurant

Santiago opened Pura Vida (pure life) in 2001 as a tapas (small plate) restaurant.

“When we started, we didn’t have Spanish food per se in Atlanta,” Santiago said.

He explained that people think they know Mexican food, so they think they know Spanish food, too.

“It’s very, very different,” he said.

So for the past nine years, he’s been educating Atlanta diners about Latino food.

“I think I’ve made a really big distinction,” he said. “I brought Spanish food here. I love it. It’s from our motherland basically.”

But now, he’s venturing into cuisines from South American countries.

At the Village Kitchen

Santiago is going to set up the Village Kitchen as a tapas party Thursday night.

“I’ll be making some ceviche, which is a very, very Latino-American dish,” he said. “I’ll use Georgia trout, which is the freshest fish I can find. They come from the Blue Ridge Mountains.”

He said what he’ll make is “delicious, simple food.”

Santiago has learned that to have a successful cooking demonstration, simplicity is important.