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Meet Edwin Sandoval of Xatrucho in Downtown

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Edwin Sandoval.

Edwin, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
My cooking career started 13 years ago while attending high school in Colorado Springs, Colorado. My vision of becoming a dentist quickly changed when the love for food started taking over. My family came from Honduras and I wanted to make sure I did something grand to showcase my Latin heritage and make my parents proud of seeing how far their sacrifices had come. When I was 21 years old, I decided to move to Denver to improve my cooking skills and take on more challenging jobs within the kitchen. Fortunately enough after an extensive hiring process, I was fortunate to show off my skills and impress the chef and landed my first sous chef gig in my career. For the next five years, I found myself going through different kitchens and cooking styles and the last two years has been about developing the cooking style for Xatrucho.

Has it been a smooth road?
The struggles have been real and came very close to completely stop cooking and changing career. There were points where I felt lost and wasn’t really sure where my life and career were heading to, I felt that I was losing my passion for cooking and knew that I wasn’t ready to give it up. At that time I decided to leave kitchen management behind and finally made the moves to launch Xatrucho which had been in the planning stage for two years. Learning the process to open a business has been very challenging but rewarding at the same time, I feel that any time I am faced by a challenge I try to make the best out of it. Now that I run my own small operation I realized that cooking is the fun and easy part, business logistics are my new challenge.

We’d love to hear more about your business.
Xatrucho was created by chef Sandoval with the vision to become one of the premier private cooking concepts in Denver. We focus on curating menus that bring together the essence of classical, old-school cooking techniques and blending in Latin flavor profiles. The XATRUCHO mentality behind food is simple: cook with the seasons, source your products consciously, and above all have fun while creating beautiful and delicious food. Our biggest joy comes from working with as many local farms and small businesses as possible and paying attention to the way we exercise our purchasing power. We work closely with the Latino community to find ways to generate fair-wage jobs and give the community the tools to grow through food. The XATRUCHO team takes pride in what we allow to come out of our kitchen. Our cuisine is clear – cook 100% from scratch, taste as you go, and never allow quality and flavor lose out to trends and fads. We make our cuisine accessible by having an eclectic list of partners in the food and beverage industry, partnering with breweries, venues, and chefs to create events that range from exclusive dining experiences to relaxed pop-up events.

Is our city a good place to do what you do?
Denver is definitely a city to start a business, there are so many people who are coming from all over the nation due to the legalization of cannabis. Denver supports artist and new businesses quite a bit and it’s super exciting to see people venture into self-employment.

Pricing:

  • 200$/person for a high end dinner experienced curated by the Xatrucho food and beverage team
  • 3.25$ per oyster for our oyster pop up which is not ticketed and open to the public

Contact Info:


Image Credit:
Brent Thelen

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