Each year, the Grand Tasting brings San Diego’s best bites and sips together for the city’s biggest, most delicious culinary celebration. Foodies from near and far swarm to experience flavors curated by some of San Diego’s top chefs including Quinnton Austin – aka Chef Q – Grind & Prosper Hospitality Group’s Culinary Director, celebrity tastemaker, and long-time Friend of the Fest.
Originally from New Orleans, Chef Q brings a Southern flair to the San Diego culinary scene which comes to life at quintessential eateries like Louisiana Purchase, Q&A Restaurant and Oyster Bar, and Coco Maya by Miss B’s.
His formal training at the Culinary Institute of New Orleans laid the groundwork for a well-seasoned career where he worked up from Assistant Corporate Chef to award-winning Executive Chef at some of Louisiana’s top eateries before arriving in San Diego.
We asked Chef Q how his NOLA roots shaped and inspired his career and he said that New Orleans has so many talented chefs that strive to be unique and the best in the game, which brings an innate competitiveness to the city’s culinary scene. His experience as a tastemaker in The Big Easy led to a commitment to treat food as art. To him, New Orleans is a melting pot overflowing with different flavors and people, which is why when NOLA chefs migrate to new and different environments, they stand out – and in the most delicious of ways.
Besides his NOLA roots and extensive experience with French, Caribbean and Italian cuisine, we asked Chef Q what inspires him when creating a new mouth-watering dish and he responded;
“[It’s about] what you can put into it to make it your own. I like sweet and savory. I like adding fruits, I like adding different elements to your dishes to make it pop a little bit. I think that’s a really big thing, like ‘How creative can you get, even if it’s outside the box?’
[It’s about] measuring your flavors because you want that sweet, spicy, salty, and you want all those different flavors to pop. For me, those are the biggest things – ‘What do I want to put into the dish? What kinds of flavors? How much do I want it to pop? What do I want this dish to say to people?'”
San Diego Bay Wine & Food Festival foodies got a taste of the Chef Q flavor experience at Grand Fiesta in 2022 (and Taco TKO in 2021 and 2018) where he and the Coco Maya by Miss B’s team took home San Diego’s Most Awesome Taco – People’s Choice for their Pork Belly Pibil Taco.
The award-winning taco combined Caribbean flavors with Spanish influence, tapping into traditions from Chef Q’s hometown in New Orleans. Bringing creativity to the competition was his main goal and winning was the cherry on top. As Chef put it;
“We gotta get creative. We gotta get outside the box. The recipe is to have pride for one, and to keep some of the traditions [of the basic taco alive] but definitely spice it up a little. It means a lot to win, especially for Coco Maya being a new restaurant, the new kid on the block in Little Italy.”
So what’s next for Chef Quinnton Austin? Expanding San Diego-based eatery, Louisiana Purchase, to the Los Angeles market and bringing the flavors of Grind & Prosper Hospitality Group to the San Diego airport. Follow along Chef’s endeavors on Instagram at @chefworks86!
