Oscar

Oscar Diaz was born and raised in Chicago, with childhood summers spent in Jalisco, Mexico — the twin poles of a cooking identity he has come to call “Pocho” cuisine, the union of his family’s Mexican heritage and his American upbringing. He trained formally at Le Cordon Bleu in Las Vegas and cut his teeth in French and Michelin-starred kitchens across Las Vegas, Los Angeles

and Chicago before moving to Raleigh, North Carolina in the 2010s.

It was in North Carolina that his style crystallised. Working with the Ibarra family at Jos. & Sons, he noticed how naturally Southern and Mexican cooking spoke to one another, and began braiding the two. He went on to help launch the seafood-driven Cortez in Raleigh, where he

earned two James Beard Award semifinalist nods for Best Chef: Southeast. In 2023 he opened Little Bull in Durham (since recognised by the Michelin Guide), followed by Aaktun in 2024 and the mercado-inspired TaTaco in 2025 — the last a homage to the Jalisco markets of his childhood, complete with an in-view nixtamalisation and tortilla station.

Time magazine featured him as a chef defining the “Nuevo South.” A lifelong music obsessive and sometime DJ, Diaz talks about cooking in terms of “remix culture” — taking familiar reference points and recombining them into something personal. That instinct is exactly what surfaced on Top Chef: Carolinas, his first appearance in the competition, when a Southern breakfast-chain brief met a Mexican corn cake.