Inside the Kitchen: Seven Questions with Chef Natasha Daniels of Providence

Korean BBQ. There’s so much variety, different cuts, different marinades, different banchan every time, that I genuinely doubt I’d ever get tired of it. It’s one of the few meals where the range itself is the whole appeal.

It’s not a fancy dish at all: it’s family meal at the Chef’s Garden, eating mofongo and chicken stew made by my good friends Dario and Mariel, two chefs I worked alongside there. They ended up getting married at the Culinary Vegetable Institute years later. That meal has stuck with me more than almost anything I’ve eaten in a formal dining room; it was made with real love, by people who became family, in the place that shaped how I think about food. That’s the moment food stopped being just a craft to me and started being about connection.

Fine dining, to me, is an opportunity. For the diner, it’s a chance to celebrate. For the cook, it’s a chance to prove the work you’ve put in, and to get a little better at it every single second. Fine dining has an obligation to do right by everyone who made that plate possible: the people growing the food, the people cooking it, the people serving it, and the people keeping the lights on and the floors clean behind the scenes. Meet that responsibility, and you get to create something spectacular in the process, something that doesn’t end when the plate is empty.

The near-term goal is the one I’ve been working toward for years: developing a signature style inspired by my surroundings and opening my own restaurant. But the bigger dream is bigger than one dining room. I want to build a restaurant group, on the scale of what Chef Keller has built, with one or two fine-dining flagships at the center, leading the way in what sustainable gastronomy can actually look like in practice. Not sustainability as a marketing line, but as the operating model: an ecosystem that genuinely takes care of everyone whose hands touch the food, from the farm to the pass. I want that flagship to be a beacon, proof that this kind of care can scale, not just survive as a one-off.

Asador Etxebarri.

I chase flavor first. Everything else, technique, plating, restraint, comes second to that. A lot of what shapes how I season comes from cuisines outside the traditional fine-dining canon: Mexican food, Korean food, Vietnamese food, places where bold seasoning and real balance aren’t afterthoughts, they’re the whole point. I also believe in earning an ingredient. The artichoke taught me that: you don’t get the good part without real patience and real technique first. Color matters to me too. So does acid. A plate should look alive before it even gets tasted. And somewhere underneath all of it is every place I’ve lived: Ohio, New England, Napa, Los Angeles. I don’t think that ever fully leaves your cooking.

A grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup.