Hispanic Entrepreneur Founds Hispanic Kitchen

Jorge Bravo, Hispanic Businessman, Satisfies A Key Epicurean Niche

For three years now, I have been developing Hispanic Kitchen, the web’s first English-language social network focused exclusively on Latin food.

First things first: I’m not a chef. I’m an entrepreneur. Because of that, being here on Latin Business Today feels more at home to me than being on Epicurious. For many years I worked as an editor at The Miami Herald and as an editing consultant for a number of publications. Print media is where I began my career, right before the birth of the Web as we know it. Fast forward to 2008, when I attended a presentation by a couple of young guys (one of them Hispanic) who had started up a social networking site for young moms. I left quite intrigued.

As a longtime viewer of Food Network, I could not help but notice that by and large, Latin food was largely ignored, as were Latino personalities. Considering there were 50 million Hispanics, it puzzled me and – yes, it bothered me – that our foods and our culinary culture were not really acknowledged. Print media was no better. In magazines, you could find French food, Italian food, American food, haute cuisine, etc., but Latin food? Not so much. The Web was much more egalitarian given the new tools for blogs and videos, but still lacking overall.

So I set out to try to rectify that: To celebrate our foods, our ingredients, our culture and our unique, unmistakable, unpretentious and unsurpassed flavors.