Things soon got heated. “He was an absolute rebel,” Santa Cruz recalled, saying they’d get into screaming matches in the townhouse’s club room where they could close the doors away from the customers. He reenacts a typical one for me over the phone: “His face and my face would be inches apart. I would be, ‘Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.’ He’d be like, ‘Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah,’” Santa Cruz says. Yet: “He never failed me on anything.”
Straker says he learned a lot of things from posh super connector Santa Cruz. Like banquettes should be at a height where you can comfortably put your arm around your girlfriend. He had advice about the menu too. “Your food style has got to be so much so that you can take your girlfriend to dinner and she’s not going to be going like, ‘Oh, there’s nothing for me to eat.’ You’ve got to have a bit of steamed fish and some really clean vegetables. It’s not fucking sea bass mousse on top of mushroom thinging and dada dada dada then wrapped up in a bit of sea bass skin,” Straker says.
Then there was the most important skill of all: “I learned from Juan how to raise money.”
During the pandemic, he took on a stint as a private chef to a billionaire. He cooked on their yacht in St. Barths and their compound in Connecticut. All the while, he made TikTok videos. Thanks to his rakish good looks—and his damn good food—he kept going viral. By 2022, he raised enough money to open a restaurant in London. (That billionaire client is now one of his investors.)
Yet New York was always calling. “It’s a fucking vibe. People live outside their apartments. They’ve got energy, they go out for breakfast, lunch, and dinner,” he says of the city. “And it’s competitive. I want competitive. I don’t want to be a fucking biggest fish in a small pond. I want to be a small fish in a big pond.”
