Pase los chimichurri.

• Author: Poole, Claire
• Position: Due

Meet Churrascos' Michael Cordúa, one of the pioneers of the Nuevo Latino culinary movement that is taking the U.S. by fork.

In the mid-1980s, Michael Cordúa, A 26-year-old native of Nicaragua, was working for a shipping company in Houston when the bottom fell out of the oil industry. Cordúa had always loved to cook, so he took his severance package and in 1988 started a restaurant called Churrascos in a dumpy neighborhood in Houston. Much as its name implies, it was like a traditional Argentine steakhouse, but with a contemporary flair.

Despite good reviews, including a crowd-bringing boost from Texas Monthly, the restaurant was losing money, and Cordúa was ready to throw in his apron after only four months. But then fate intervened. The wife of a prominent banker in Houston, Fred Smith of First National Bank happened to eat at his restaurant and encouraged her husband to try it. Smith was so impressed that after his meal he gave Cordúa his card. "'If you're thinking of expanding, call me," Cordúa remembers him saying.

Cash-strapped Cordúa did and he's never looked back. He now has two Churrascos in Houston and a more elaborate eatery near the ritzy Galleria called Américas. He's planning to open another Churrascos in San Antonio sometime this rail and perhaps one in Phoenix after that. His plan is to eventually roll out the concept nationwide.

Cordúa was one of the early pioneers of so-called "Nuevo Latino" cuisine, which is taking the U.S. by fork Restaurants serving this Latin American-food-with-an-attitude are popping up all over the country, from New York (Orinoco, Sonora and Calle Ocho) to Chicago (Brio, Mas and Nacional) to the West Coast (Vinga in San Francisco and ¡Oba! in Portland).

"It's a bonafide trend," says John F. Mariani, a noted restaurant critic at Esquire magazine and author of The Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink: More Than 2,000 Definitions and Descriptions of American Classics (Lebhar-Friedman Books, November 1999). "Some of it has to do solely with the fact that the Hispanic population of the United States is increasing enormously. You've [also] got some real smart Latinos who are doing it."

Mariani says Nuevo Latino cuisine actually grew out of a movement started in Miami in the late 1980s called New Caribbean, or Floribbean, which featured meats and fish sunnied up with citrus and exotic Caribbean fruits like mangoes, passion fruit and guava and served with rice and beans. Its originators were mostly...