Becoming a chef
“I’ve been cooking for a very long time,” says Alex Stupak. “I grew up in kitchens.” Born in Leominster, Massachusetts, Stupak started working in professional kitchens at age 12, competed in national-level culinary competitions by his senior year of high school, and won a full scholarship to the Culinary Institute of America, after which he completed an externship at Clio in Boston, where he later returned as its first pastry chef following a stretch at the Federalist. In 2005, Stupak was approached by Grant Achatz to become the pastry chef at his now-acclaimed Alinea in Chicago. Two years later, he moved to New York to be the pastry chef for another leading molecular gastronomy chef Wylie Dufresne at wd-50. Stupak triumphed on Iron Chef America in 2008 and was named one of Food & Wine magazine’s Best New Chefs in 2013.
But he took a turn from pastry in 2011, opening his own restaurant—Empellón Taqueria in Manhattan’s West Village. Empellón Cocina followed in 2012 in the East Village, and a third location (also in the East Village), Empellón Al Pastor, opened last October. “My most important core emotions are creativity and rebellion, and that manifests in my restaurants,” he says. (In fact, the word empellón means push or shove in Spanish.) “So many restaurants are very commoditized, safe, very boring, and very agreeable. I would rather be provocative and even divisive with my restaurants than a boring, catchall thing. That ties into the food or the drink, the service itself, and the way it looks.”
On creating his restaurants
“It starts with a few things. I firmly believe you have to take into account the neighborhood and try to figure out aesthetically and philosophically what it represents or is about. You also have to factor in the product, and ultimately, the experience and what you want that to be. Those two massive factors begin to inform the project and what it’s going to look and feel like.”
Empellón Al Pastor, designed by Glen & Co.
Explaining the different Empellón spaces
The various Empellóns are represented by different primary colors—red for Taqueria, blue for Cocina, and yellow for Al Pastor—that manifest in the logo and subtly through the venue. “They’re all called Empellón, so there has to be some sort of thread that ties them all together,” he says. All three restaurants feature a painting by Sylvia Ji, a painted portrait of one of Stupak’s three cats, and “an inspirational quote from a writer or thinker that I think is applicable to that specific restaurant,” he says, though “each one is different in terms of its specific ambitions, price point, etc.” Guests can see those “differences in everything—the plateware, size and distance of the tables, color, tone, and feel.”
Intersection of elements
“A lot of it is about touch and feel and subconscious things. At the end of the day, arguably the frame is just as important as the picture. Metaphorically, the picture is the project and the frame is what informs how you’re going to experience that product. If you’re serving a 22-course tasting menu, the dining room has to feel a certain way. If you’re serving things on paper plates for $4, that space has to feel a different way. Because the look of the space informs the behavior, and human behavior needs to be predicated so that people’s expectations line up with what you’re actually doing.”
Empellón Al Pastor, designed by Glen & Co.
On bucking trends
Stupak’s long-term goal is to change the perception of a genre of cooking. “I have a very odd background for having Mexican restaurants,” he points out. “But that’s what’s going to differentiate me because I’m going to approach it a different way. If I were someone who had only worked in Mexican restaurants my entire life, you’d probably have a very different product than what we’ve done. We’re always going to push ourselves to do things in counterintuitive ways than the restaurant mainstream.”
