He’s Never Worked in a Tasting Menu Restaurant. Now He’s Launching His Own.
Spending time with Johnny Curiel at his hyper-ambitious, corn-obsessed ode to Mexican cuisine.
Hi everyone,
When I recently surveyed you about what type of coverage you wanted to see more of, nearly 60 percent of you gave the same answer: more stories about the people behind the restaurants, from the chefs to the bartenders.
I’ve always wanted to do more long-form profile pieces, so I used your feedback to push myself out of my comfort zone and finally give it a try.
Today, I’m excited to share a deep dive into the world of chef Johnny Curiel, who opened his most ambitious restaurant yet, Milpero, last week on May 13, 2026.
Give it a read, and hit reply to let me know what you think. And please let me know if you’d like to see me tackle more of these profiles in the future.
Thank you!
Laura
He’s Never Worked in a Tasting Menu Restaurant. Now He’s Launching His Own.
Spending time with Johnny Curiel at his hyper-ambitious, corn-obsessed ode to Mexican cuisine.
On a gray day in Denver, I’m standing outside Milpero – the soon-to-be crown jewel of chef Johnny Curiel’s burgeoning restaurant empire. Located in RiNo on a sliver of land sandwiched between the South Platte River and a cat’s cradle of railway lines, it’s a desolate pocket of town that no one casually stumbles upon, but it makes a great spot for destination dining.
Although the Mexican tasting menu concept won’t open to paying guests for another two weeks – with reservations already booked solid for the next couple of months – Curiel is expecting me. The front door is unlocked, so I let myself in and toss out a sing-songy “hello?” to no reply. I take a wrong turn past what looks like a monochrome tapestry – actually a Huichol-style mosaic crafted from corn kernels grown by the restaurant – before backtracking and pushing through an unmarked door.
There I find Curiel, alone at one of the chef’s counters, his face illuminated by the cold glow of his phone. It’s 10:40 in the morning, but it feels much later since the dining room is pitched in shades of darkness thanks to all the windows being hidden behind tan and brown Western-style buffalo check print curtains. Designer Agatha Strompolos of Agatha Jane Interiors later shares that the lack of natural light was entirely Curiel’s choice. He wanted a distraction-free zone – not unlike a casino – where guests could lose themselves completely in the $225 experience he’s crafted.
He stands up to greet me, stylishly dressed in an all-black uniform of jeans, a t-shirt, and a bomber jacket. Swiveling on his heel, he begins giving me the grand tour. Milpero is tiny, an intimate space that only fits 16 diners a night, split into two seatings of eight. It’s also Curiel’s most ambitious project to date: a culinary playground designed to showcase the vast nuances of traditional Mexican cuisine, guided by a simple principle: there is still so much to love about Mexican food that people don’t yet know or understand. Guests spend their three-hour meal divided between two chef’s counters (for cold and hot food), including a stopover in a glass-enclosed room lined with wine and vinegars that’s wedged into the back corner like a museum diorama.
Looking around, Curiel admits an aversion to sleek and sterile Mexican restaurants, telling me they don’t feel like home. Instead, he worked with Strompolos, a frequent collaborator, on a sharp yet rustic look. They layered texture upon texture with distressed penny-colored accents, commissioned ceramic pieces, reclaimed-wood walls, and imported Mexican copper pendants, trying to recreate the feel of an old (but very nice) cabin.
When we sit down to chat, Curiel peels off his jacket and ties on a crisp apron, already loaded with a pen and a pair of tweezers peeking from the chest pocket. He won’t actually be in the kitchen for another hour – when the rest of his team arrives – but I suspect this is his natural response to my suggestion that we get ready. It’s on brand for the chef, a seemingly no-nonsense guy with neatly styled dark brown hair whose intensity is tempered by a warm earnestness. Speaking with the gravelly rasp of a benevolent drill sergeant, his words have a tendency to rattle out with the steady cadence of a fast-moving train.
“This is the first time ever I’m going to do a tasting menu,” Curiel says of Milpero, a passion project he hopes will push his team to execute at the highest level. The goal is to be “perfect over perfect” every night as they deliver an intricate, 18-course tour of Mexican regional specialties to every diner. It’s a new approach for the chef, who has zero experience working at tasting menu restaurants. It’s also a giant leap from how he grew up cooking, when simply dishing out “good food” was the only concern.
But a lot has changed since the early days. In the span of just two and a half years, he and his wife and business partner, Kasie Curiel, have gone from opening their first spot in late 2023 to heading Fonda Fina Hospitality – a six-concept portfolio across Denver and Boulder anchored by this latest venture.
The rapid expansion follows Curiel’s rising star. At 35, he’s already stacked up Michelin stars for two of his first restaurants, Alma Fonda Fina (a charming love letter to homestyle Mexican cooking) and Mezcaleria Alma (its snappier sibling inspired by the food of Mexico City). Consecutive James Beard nominations and a spot on the World’s 50 Best North America list have also come his way. With a pair of outposts of his Jaliscan grill house, Alteño, opening this summer in Austin and Charleston, his reach is expanding beyond Colorado. He has quickly become a chef other chefs watch – and with that level of attention brings a lot more pressure.
So while Milpero was always a dream he’d had, it took time to get there. He feared that if he came out of the gate with a concept this bold, people wouldn’t understand his vision. Curiel determined he first needed to work his way through earning the respect of his peers, his staff, and the public. “I think it took so long to earn trust from the guests,” Curiel says. “To be like, Oh, Johnny’s doing this? I’ll eat anything that Johnny puts on a plate.” Now he hopes he’s there.
Yet even with that loyal following, Curiel still finds himself fighting against the industry’s built-in biases – comparisons that light a fire in him to prove people wrong. “It’s always like, if you want to have some badass food and a good time, go to Alma. But if you want the true fine dining experience, go to Brutø or Wolf’s Tailor or Margot,” he says, namechecking other award-winning restaurants in town. “And it’s almost like, Why? Because we’re not doing a tasting menu? Or because it’s Mexican food?”
He pauses, his voice cutting through the quiet of the empty room. “That’s when it started to feed more into us, like, could we do a tasting menu? I think it became a lot more attractive because of some negativity… I care about what people think of Mexican food.”
Mexican cuisine has surrounded Curiel his entire life. Raised in Guadalajara, as the third of four kids, his childhood ran on a tight familial loop. An uncle shuttled him and a pack of cousins to school each morning, picking them up in the afternoon to drop them at the family’s fonda – a casual, family-run restaurant – where he hung out until it was time to go home. Started by his grandparents (“my grandma was a great cook”) and eventually taken over by his mother, the neighborhood eatery has been in business for over 40 years.
He moved with his family to the US at age 12, eventually landing in Summit County, Colorado, where his dad became chef-partner at a restaurant group specializing in Tex-Mex food with a traditional slant. At 14, Curiel started as a dishwasher at one of the restaurants – a job he thinks his father gave him to try putting him off working in the industry and to push him to become a lawyer or doctor. The plan backfired; he loved it, drawn to the rush of being part of a team. (“I felt like I belong, this is cool. Like, I’m the dishwasher, but if I don’t wash dishes, we don’t serve food.”)
But by 16, he was alone in the US after both his parents moved back to Mexico. Juggling the responsibilities of school and financial survival became too much to handle. He dropped out of high school and at one point worked in construction (”just enough to mess up my knees”) before making his way back to the kitchen.
When I ask what his parents think of his career, Curiel lets out a big laugh. “They love it now. Now I’m in all of their Facebooks and Instagrams.” While his mother came around to his career choice earlier on, it wasn’t until he reached executive roles in his late twenties that his father finally came around to the idea. “At that point, it was not just like I was going in and making a paycheck – I was making an impact. I was in Mexican cuisine, and that’s when my dad was like, Alright, yeah, that’s cool.“
There’s an art to making people fall in love with something you hold dear. It’s a trick Curiel hopes to pull off with Milpero’s debut menu, built from the ideas and “crazy stories” that flood his mind right before bed. He envisions the space as a vehicle for a type of gastronomic evangelism, a place to convert mole skeptics into believers (there are at least five varieties on the menu) while expanding both the understanding and acceptance of Mexican cuisine. Ultimately, he wants to cook food so compelling it inspires his guests to pack a bag. “If I do it right,” he says, “I think we’ll make an impact to where people from Denver will be like, Man, you know what? I really want to go to Mexico.”
And while the new spot champions what Curiel considers the underrated heroes of Mexican cuisine – like bluefin tuna, oysters, and rich stews – its foundation rests on a single, essential ingredient. “There’s no Mexican cooking without corn,” the chef says. For him, the crop has been synonymous with Mexico since childhood; he laughs describing a local billboard that advised pregnant women to eat four tortillas a day for their health. (He tells me to look it up later: It’s all about consuming enough masa products fortified with folic acid.)
Curiel began planning the restaurant around two years ago, when he partnered with restaurateur Kelly Whitaker’s Id Est and the Masa Seed Foundation to plant 20 acres of heirloom varieties in Boulder. Cultivating crops like Oaxaca green, Chihuahua blue, and Concha white pozole, the project’s inaugural fall 2025 harvest yielded 2,500 pounds for Fonda Fina Hospitality. Some of that bounty was immediately distilled into a custom, vegan corn pechuga-style mezcal exclusively served at Milpero, and the team aims to expand the plot to 50 acres next year.
Unsurprisingly, more than half of the menu revolves around the grain. “We have all these different shapes of corn: flauta, raspada, tetela, tostada, tlayuda,” Curiel says, running down the list. “We’re going to have to go through a thousand menus before I can showcase every single little thing. But it’s a start.”
His insistence on building the entire concept around corn, right down to the name, briefly resulted in a bit of controversy. When the restaurant was initially announced in late 2025, it was slated to be called Maize, a variation on the Spanish word for the crop. Then on April 8, Maria Rangel took to social media. As the owner of Maíz – a five-year-old local food truck and market stall – she was concerned the similarity in names could confuse customers and pose a major threat to her business. It sparked a fierce online debate, with others defending each side. (Both Curiel and Rangel confirm the two had a conversation about the name prior to Rangel going public.)
Curiel and his hospitality group responded by rebranding twice – first to Fonda Maize, then finally, on April 27, to Milpero, a word meaning “corn farmer,” just a couple of weeks before opening. When I ask him to walk me through the decision to change the name, Curiel frames it as part of ending a public conversation he saw going “off-topic” and towards “people talking poorly about Mexico or about Mexicans going at other Mexicans.”
It also dodged a potential infringement lawsuit. Public records show Rangel filed a trademark for her brand in the state of Colorado on April 15. Rangel says her lawyers issued a cease and desist to Fonda Fina Hospitality shortly after. Taylor Tieman, a trademark lawyer and founder of Legalmiga Law who was not involved in the case, points out that litigation can be financially “devastating,” win or lose, so “getting ahead of these issues before launch is always the smarter play.”
But for his part, Curiel is ready to move on. “I think everything happens for a reason,” he philosophizes, adding that Milpero is a great name that encapsulates the ethos of what they are trying to do with corn. “I think it might be a better name. I don’t know,” he says, before taking a breath. “We will never know.”
As more of the team trickles in – including the group’s culinary director, Rico Carbajal, who guides his young daughter past the kitchen with a quiet nod from Curiel – our conversation shifts to this newest turning point in his career. Deep down, the kitchen remains his “happy place”; if his only job was to focus on one plate at a time, “it would be amazing.” But he no longer has that luxury. He’s not just a chef, but now a restaurateur and mentor who needs to trust the team he and Kasie have built.
“When it was Alma and Mezcaleria, I could see everything. Right now, I can’t. It’s like you have a baby and you have to let it go,” he says, sounding a bit wistful. He credits his staff as the engine behind the group’s lightning-speed expansion. “From the moment we started growing, I told them: I’ll stop running the day you guys say, Hey, Chef, we’re good,” he says. “But everybody wants to grow.” Now it’s his responsibility to build a pipeline of opportunity, ensuring that whenever they eventually leave his kitchens, they step out in a far better position than when they arrived.
It’s a mentorship cycle he knows well. He credits Richard Sandoval – who remembers Curiel as “driven, curious, and deeply respectful of the craft” – with gambling on his talent and introducing him to the world of large restaurant groups. Originally hired as a young sous chef cranking out 600 covers a night (“I was a kid; they shouldn’t have done that,” he chuckles), Curiel suddenly found himself promoted to head chef just three months later, at age 21, when his boss was let go. He cites it as the moment where everything changed. Food was still the priority, but now he was staring down budgets, labor costs, and the operational systems required to keep a massive operation afloat. The experience rewired him to view restaurants as a business. “If I would have gone the route of just working in small restaurants… I don’t know if I would be the businessperson that I am today and would have the same vision.”
He found another influential mentor when he started working for Troy Guard at TAG Restaurant Group, who taught him you could run a successful business but still take risks with the food. “His food was out of this world,” Curiel remembers. “We were making rattlesnake chorizo, we had pig ear nachos – things you’ve never seen before.” The two remain close, with Guard viewing his former protégé’s work as a necessary evolution for the local scene. “Denver needed what Johnny is doing,” Guard says over email. “There’s technique, purpose, and a seriousness that puts it on the same level as the top restaurants in this city.”
It still strikes Curiel that just two days earlier, Guard was so inspired by a look at the new space that he immediately rounded up his staff to come see it – a full-circle moment Curiel hopes to one day replicate with his own team. “I always tell people that I hope in five years they don’t work for me, and they’re more successful than I am,” he says. For Curiel, success isn’t about accolades or making money; it’s about seeing someone like Milpero’s pastry chef, Yna Zuniga, finally open her dream ice cream shop.
For now, the team is still learning. Curiel remains heavily involved in menu development across his restaurants, editing and nurturing his chefs’ ideas and passing down recipes from his personal archive. When I ask if he envisions a day when his team writes a menu without his fingerprints on it, he nods. It would mean he’s done his job as a mentor, he says, but he quickly adds a caveat. “I don’t think we could ever change the camote asado,” he says wryly, referencing Alma’s signature sweet potato dish. “But the sky’s the limit.”
With the team now laying sheet pans onto the counter and prepping for the day, I know it’s time to leave. But a few days before the official May 13 opening, I come back for a preview to see the restaurant in full swing.
When I walk through the front door again, my fellow diners are gathered in the antechamber, sipping a spicy, salty housemade tejuino — a fermented corn drink — waiting to be seated. Once the dining room is ready, like creatures boarding Noah’s ark, we’re called inside two by two and guided to chairs marked with our names spelled out in Scrabble tiles.
I see Curiel again and he’s already in a jovial mood, dressed in a pristine white chef’s jacket with a notched officer collar. Some of the stoicness I’d noticed on his face a week and a half before has faded. He brightens in front of a crowd – a trait Kasie confirms when she tells me that if he hadn’t become a chef, he could have been a mariachi singer. He proves her point by happily singing along to himself as huapango, a traditional Mexican music style, jangles through the dining room. Rounding the inside of the L-shaped chef’s counter, he welcomes the group, insisting he’s just there to assist James Gnizak, Milpero’s bearded, bespectacled chef de cuisine, who is the one running the show.
At the cold counter, we’re treated to a stream of small bites delivered by Curiel, Gnizak, and the team, the most beautiful of which is a sliver of uni balanced atop a pale-green hoja santa tamal, paired with a dollop of a silky, labneh-like dairy product called jocoque. An ultra-thin tostada raspada, a variation native to Jalisco, is slightly smaller than a silver dollar pancake. Piled with precisely cut cubes of bluefin tuna and crowned by contrasting dots of aguachile cenizo and black-bean miso mayonesa, it crackles loudly on the first bite. We chase it all down with a warm shot of spicy, carrot-twinged seafood soup, or chilpachole, which Curiel notes is a favorite hangover cure in Mexico that should help us feel relaxed before moving on to the next part of the meal.
Swinging by the fermentation room, Charles Ferrigno (head of fermentation at FFH) gives us an overview of the shelves of jars and pots of brewing misos and vinegars that get used in some of the dishes – some with the same shocking luminescence as bottles of Gatorade. He pours a sample of a weeks-old sweet potato vinegar for us to sip before we’re brought back to the main dining room.
Making it over to the hot counter, I think back on Curiel’s description of the beginning of Alma Fonda Fina, when he was on the line every single day; If he wasn’t, he told me, he was on top of the team overseeing every little touch. Here he’s the same way, even when he’s chit-chatting with guests, he’s got one eye on the kitchen. Spotting something, he hustles over to confer with three young cooks. They shoot a quick glance up as he tweaks a nasturtium leaf with his tweezers, gives the plate a final wipe, and hands it over to be served.
The courses keep coming, including a wagyu served over mole amarillo, named after the peppers used in the sauce and thickened with masa, served with beefy ayocote beans. The savory dishes culminate with a mole manchamanteles – a deeply flavored Puebla specialty made slightly sweet with pineapple, apple, and plantains. The plate resembles an abstract artwork, its vibrant pool of orange sauce set against the deep browns and grays of a burnt cauliflower and charred onion puree that appear beside a slice of seven-day dry-aged California squab.
Zuniga, the pastry chef, arrives to close the night with a trio of desserts. The finale is a comforting play on atole: traditionally a hot, vanilla-laced masa drink, but here reimagined as a cold mousse molded into the shape of a corn cob. It’s surrounded by spiced Mexican hot chocolate that she encourages us to slurp down like a bowl of ramen.
At the end of the meal, a printed menu arrives tucked into a take-home bag that also holds a wrapped burrito norteño for tomorrow morning. I open up the menu and scan it, mentally tracing the path the dishes took us across Mexico: from coastal towns touching the Gulf of California and the arid plains of Sonora, over to the balmy coastline of Veracruz, and down through the valleys of Oaxaca. When the check finally comes, even though I’m stuffed, I’m just not ready for it all to end. It’s time to go home and do as Curiel hopes for: look up flights to start exploring.
we went to Milpero last Friday night and it was every bit as magical as you describe here. still thinking about the flauta + asada + the amazing desserts by Yna. loved this long-form piece!
If onlyI could get a reservation! What a contribution to Denver's culinary choices!