Alfredo Villanueva was born in Mexico City, grew up in Monterrey, and eventually moved to Baja California. Trained as a visual artist at the Visual Arts Faculty of the Autonomous University of Nuevo León, Villanueva is an entirely self-taught chef. He opened his first restaurant, Botanero Santa Lucía, in 1998. This establishment already gestured at certain traits that remain part of this chef’s signature style: a rugged cuisine with challenging textures, unafraid of acidity and bold spiciness; a cuisine that never forgets its popular roots nor its dual northeastern heritage influenced by Middle Eastern migrations. In Monterrey, he also opened Xbox Pizza Bar, and years later, Romero y Azahar, where he matured as a chef, blending old influences with clear original inspiration.
Villanueva later opened Villa Torél at the Santo Tomás vineyard in Valle de Guadalupe, Baja California. It is an open-air restaurant and a “proximity” restaurant, with immediate access to resources from the Pacific waters, local orchards and farms of all kinds, and, of course, the entire range of Baja Californian wines. In 2022, Villa Torél was declared number 18 among the Latin America’s 50 Best Restaurants by S. Pellegrino.
Villanueva has been invited to cook at the National Gastronomy Program in London (2014), at Mallory Court (2015), in Paris (2015, 2016, 2018), as well as at events by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs since 2013. He was a co-founder of Foro Paralelo, an international gastronomy congress held in Monterrey. He has been a member of the Mexican Cooking Collective since 2012; a brand ambassador for Weber Grill Mexico since 2012 and for Del Fuerte since 2021. Alongside SOPA (a consulting company), he has influenced menus and created new concepts in Mexico City, Tampico, London, and Barcelona. His most recent project is Museo Cantina de Vinos in Ensenada, Baja California; where he proposes a vinicultural exploration and an adventurous, nomadic, and refined cuisine.