Californios in San Francisco has become the first Mexican restaurant in the world to earn three Michelin stars, shattering long-standing assumptions about whose cuisine deserves elite recognition and what price points Mexican food can command.
Chef and co-owner Val Cantú says the milestone has given his 40-person staff more swagger after an eight-year wait for the third star. "It's been just really rewarding to see the team kind of like, carry a little bit more confidence in their step," Cantú said. "Maybe I've got some new confidence too."
Breaking Through Culinary Hierarchies
The restaurant opened in 2015 and got its first Michelin star right away, then a second in 2018. At a June ceremony in San Diego, Cantú, with his wife Carolyn by his side, received the third star and a crisp white Michelin chef's jacket. Michelin said Californios rose because it has never been "afraid to cross borders" on the plate.
Cantú said the recognition validates Mexican food as an elevated dining experience in Mexico and across the diaspora. He said Mexican American restaurants have faced criticism for charging more and offering tasting menus, while French and Japanese restaurants at similar prices draw less scrutiny. Michelin, started in 1889 by French brothers Andre and Edouard Michelin, created its star-ranking system in the 1920s and now rates more than 40,000 restaurants. Inspectors dine anonymously.
The Texas-born chef said Californios begins a meal with a sope, a small hand-formed masa cake made with white corn and beans from a farm in nearby Santa Rosa, and then caviar made in partnership with a Sacramento sturgeon farm is placed on top. "It's just really, really delicious and kind of feels like a warm hug. It feels comforting," he said. Michelin inspectors said Californios deserved a three-star promotion for dishes consistently "executed with such precision, refinement and clarity without losing the Mexican identity — things like kombu or the matsukasa yaki fish taco."
Immigrants and the Kitchens They Build
Cantú said he and his team sometimes tried to guess whether a diner was an inspector, and that it reminded them that "every guest gets the same quality of presentation and hospitality." He said he doesn't seek to inject politics into food, but he couldn't ignore headlines about federal immigration operations, including deaths involving a Mexican man in Houston and a Colombian man in Maine earlier this month.
"Immigrants are the backbone of all these dish pits and kitchens," Cantú said. "The culinary world is like a huge supporter of immigrants and the need for immigrants and the need to treat people with respect. It's hard for me to say much more." He added that, being in a blue state, he's certain most Californios diners share that sentiment.
Food writer and journalist Gustavo Arellano said Mexican cuisine's popularity helps humanize the immigration debate. "You see this especially like in small Southern towns where the rhetoric is 'I'm against illegal immigrants. I don't want too many Mexicans,'" he said, "and then people look at the Mexican restaurant in town and say, 'Well, not them.'"
Challenging Classist Assumptions
Cantú grew up watching his father and uncle run a Mexican restaurant and tortilleria in Texas. As a chef in high-end establishments in Austin and San Francisco, he asked, "Why is no one doing Mexican cuisine and treating it with like extreme care?" He chose the name Californios as a nod to descendants of Spanish and Mexican settlers who settled in the 1700s and 1800s in what would become California.
Californios started with a $57 four-course tasting menu, and the pushback was immediate. "There was ton of like, 'This is not Mexican cuisine,'" Cantú said, "and even from our families, you know, trying to explain a contemporary cuisine to a lot of people is totally foreign because people kind of think that cuisine exists in a cookbook and that it doesn't change."
Californios is at the forefront of what some call "alta California" cuisine, where the children of Mexican immigrants or immigrants themselves use classical chef training with Mexican flavors. Arellano described the term as an "ideology" that originated in California and has spread across the U.S. He said people often try to keep Mexican food in a box. "There's always going to be a knee-jerk reaction. It goes to this myth that Mexican food should be cheap because Mexicans, all of us are supposedly working class that cannot afford higher-end stuff. That's classist."
Cantú said a cookbook is in the works and added, "Mexican cuisine is one of the most diverse and complex cuisines in the world, and there's countless Mexican immigrants in the United States and Latin immigrants who have their own ideas and concepts of what things can be."
Why This Matters:
Californios's three Michelin stars challenge deeply embedded assumptions about whose cultural contributions deserve elite recognition and economic reward. The restaurant's success confronts the classist expectation that Mexican food should remain inexpensive, a bias rooted in stereotypes about working-class communities rather than culinary merit. By achieving the highest recognition in fine dining, Cantú and his team validate the sophistication of Mexican cuisine while creating economic opportunity for immigrant workers who form the backbone of America's restaurant industry. The achievement arrives amid heightened immigration enforcement and anti-immigrant rhetoric, underscoring how cultural contributions from immigrant communities enrich American life even as those same communities face increased marginalization. Californios demonstrates that culinary excellence has no ethnic boundaries and that Mexican food, like the people who create it, deserves respect, fair compensation, and recognition on equal terms with European culinary traditions.