Story by Jain Lemos for Local Flavor magazine
Born in the remote village of La Huacana in the western state of Michoacán, Mexico, Sllin Cruz travelled some 2,700 miles by land when he was only 13 to make a name for himself. Twenty-two years later, he celebrates the recent announcement of his appointment to executive chef at Geronimo and reflects on the perserverance and patience that brought him here.
“I was really young when I decided to come to the United States,” he begins. “My family stayed down there and I have lived on my own since then. So it’s been hard.” Chef Sllin admits he feels nervous having an interview. He shifts in his seat before turning his sweet eyes serious, setting his mind on dismissing his uneasiness. “I’m going to be really honest with you,” he starts to explain. “A lot of chefs can say, ‘Oh, my mom and my grandma gave me the love of cooking.’ I don’t have that.”
Michoacán honors its traditional ways of food preparation, and UNESCO devotes resources to preserving its cultural heritage. Aware of it or not, Sllin has that culinary legacy in his DNA. His native land is one of beautiful, natural diversity. Still, poverty is a real threat there, and one of the most common reasons for emigration. With 12 children to feed and clothe, Sllin’s mother was always cooking. The wearisome, yet rewarding labor involved in making the dishes of his childhood has impacted Sllin on an intuitive level. His work in America’s sophisticated eateries is no doubt shadowed by memories of women stone-grinding cilantro and mint by hand in his tiny hometown.
1994, Oregon was the destination, as a young Sllin set out on his own to embrace the land of opportunity. “I just remember, it rained a lot and we drove through a lot of trees,” he says, laughing at the thought. “Coming from such a very small village, my brain was awed by everything. I was full of dreams.” One such dream was to have his own bicycle, and his older cousin helped him find work at a restaurant so he could buy one. Working in kitchens also provided Sllin with plenty to eat—another problem solved. By the time he was 16, he started paying attention to the chefs, and then he became excited about the possibilities of a career in culinary arts. He is the first to confess he didn’t know exactly what that would entail at the time.
Still very young, Sllin moved to Park City, Utah, where he found work in an Italian restaurant. There, alla bolognese cooking taught him the mad science of saucemaking. “I love making sauces,” he says, leaning forward and making a stirring motion with his finger. “The thing with baking is you have to measure. I like the freedom of sauces. I can make good sauces.” Clearly, this is a talent Sllin’s completely mastered—as evidenced in his to-die-for creamy garlic chile sauce that backdrops a bowl of mesquite-grilled Maine lobster tails.
There was another path the budding chef took along the way to develop his cooking acumen. “I was really good at martial arts; I was really intense in that, and I felt like that’s what I wanted to do before,” he shares. His instructor knew he had the tenacity to excel, and urged him to compete nationally. “I get really focused because I don’t drink or smoke, but you need something to get addicted to.” He got hooked enough to achieve black-belt rank in tae kwon do, and brown-belt status in Chinese boxing—so yes, he can break a three-inch board with a kick and his hand. “But then the big jobs starting consuming me, and I didn’t have time to continue,” Sllin recalls.
His knowledge grew working resort events and running large catering jobs, adding Asian and French influences to his repertoire of flavor profiles. After Utah, Sllin made his way to New York, landing coveted back-of-the-house positions at several award-winning restaurants owned by French Chef Daniel Boulud, including his flagship Daniel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and DB Bistro Moderne in Times Square. Sllin says he’s blessed to have had such opportunities. “I never had a chance to go to culinary school, and I knew that I wasn’t going to have that chance. So my way to learn all this was to work with great chefs.”
geronimo_05_klSllin admits there were times when applying for jobs was out of the question without formal culinary training. “They want to see that school name,” he says, but finding his way to New Mexico was the tipping point in overcoming his lack of formal school training. Celebrity chef John Cox, who spent his childhood here, gave Sllin a break, hiring him as sous chef in Taos. From there, a combination of industry connections, timing and crazy life circumstances brought Sllin to Santa Fe. He had met Charles Dale—a high-profile French-trained chef who had also worked with Daniel Boulud—years before. Chef Charles wanted to hire Sllin away from Las Campanas, but at the time, Sllin had just been given the chance to become The Club’s chef de cuisine.
In early 2013, Charles finally snagged Sllin, and he was there for the opening of the small and intimate Bouche Bistro on West Alameda. “The time was right for me,” Sllin says. “I told him, ‘Yes, I want to do it.’” The chefs’ success was widely reported, and Sllin’s mentorship under Charles gave him another needed leap in achieving the name recognition he sought as a wide-eyed teen.
Sllin proudly recounts his life-changing appointment as Geronimo’s chef. “While I was at Bouche, I was ready to do something else, and Eric DiStefano—I knew him from before—met me outside one night and said, ‘I have a position at Geronimo, are you interested?’ And I said yes, so here I am.”
Chris Harvey, Geronimo’s anchor partner and general manager, says Sllin had been on their radar for some time. “Chef DiStefano found Sllin,” he clarifies, speaking of the restaurant’s former executive chef and partner who passed away in February of this year. “Actually, Sllin has been running the kitchen for the past two years as chef de cuisine and really took over all the responsibilities of the position,” Chris adds. “So diners have been experiencing his incredible food for some time now.”
With his characteristic honesty, Sllin reveals that, along with his new job, he still fills his former role. “We’re trying to find the right person for chef de cuisine. It has to be someone that loves it the same way that I do,” he confirms. Up at 7 am, he works out, has his coffee and heads to work. At the kitchen by 9:30 am, Sllin’s in attack mode, jumping into the prep work while directing and supervising his staff of 15. “I’m a control freak. I have to put my hands into everything,” Sllin says. He oversees all fish selections and meat butchering, then makes sure every sauce meets his high standards. Soon enough, it’s time for service, which means hours of precisely choreographed moves amid dozens of moving parts.
The pace is frantic, and the small, super-efficient, two-level kitchen often churns out as many as 220 meals in one night. “I’d like to level it all and open it up, but that isn’t going to happen,” exclaims Chris, a Santa Fe native who worked at Geronimo as a server during the summer of 1992 while he was finishing management school.
“I love the kitchen layout the way it is,” Sllin counters. “It’s just an old house and we make such good food out of that space. Great things come out of there. It’s like dancing.” The menu changes four times a year, along with occasional specials, but four Geronimo classics never change. It’s no surprise that the Durham Ranch Pan Roasted Organic Chicken is not just an obligatory poultry offering. Sllin’s secret to mega-moist meat is a long brining finished with Sherry Au Jus. “People think the chicken just has to be there,” he notes, “but this is a fantastic rendition everybody should try.”
Geronimo arguably yields the best cuisine New Mexico has to offer. While Sllin brings with him a unique background, little has changed in the way of the favorites patrons expect, specifically the Telicherry Rubbed Elk Tenderloin and the aforementioned lobster tails. Indeed, the qualification for the position might be pure stamina, and in that, Sllin wins, hands down.
Sllin looks at his watch wondering if he can escape the unaccustomed attention and get back to a saucepan or something. But a question remains about his unusual name. Could it be derived from an ancient Tarascan warrior? “Nobody knows this story,” he reveals, back in the chat for another minute. “A lot of people ask me, and I usually say ‘I don’t know.’ But I do know.” His dad loved to read Wild West books, those thin paperback novellas of great courage and adventure. Sllin was a character in one of them, a man admired by his father, and he was determined to use it for a future son. “You can imagine in Mexico how it was,” Sllin grins. “The other kids would ask me, ‘What’s your name?’ and I wouldn’t want to say it.”
With refreshing sincerity, Sllin says the name pronouncement at his birth caused a big fight with his mom. “But my dad said that’s how it’s going to be.” He vowed he would change it given the chance, which came in his early twenties. In the process of correcting a clerical error on his birth certificate, a judge in Mexico told him if he wanted to select a new name, he could do it right then. “Ultimately, I said, no because that is what my dad wanted, so I decided not to do it.”
Although he didn’t set out as a lad from Mexico to become notable in the culinary world, Sllin knew he would become a man of skill and accomplishment. Instinctively, he draws on the tests of his childhood by finding inspiration and personal satisfaction in the demanding task of executing complex dishes for the high-end and demanding Geronimo clientele.
At the end of the interview Sllin shyly offers another heartfelt comment. “What makes me happy here are the people I am working around. We’re having a great time.” Only fate knows if Geronimo is the last stop on Chef Sllin’s culinary path, but the next time you dress up and stop in for dinner, perhaps you’ll recall the fearless soul who’s gratefully dishing up your pleasures in an artful dance behind the scenes.
Geronimo is open for dinner nightly. 505.982.1500. geronimorestaurant.com.