Success simmers for Brownsville chef who made James Beard semifinals

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Brownsville’s Ramblas Hospitality Group is in the James Beard Foundation spotlight once again, with Executive Chef Eugenio Uribe being named a semifinalist for the JBF Best Chef Texas award.

Uribe helms the kitchens at Le Rêve, an upscale French-American restaurant the Ramblas team opened in late May 2024, and Boqueron, the company’s tapas and wine bar, which opened in September 2022 and served as sort of a warm-up for Le Rêve and is still going strong in its own right.

Between Boqueron and Le Rêve (The Dream) sits Las Ramblas on Market Square, which opened in 2019 and was a finalist for the JBF Outstanding Bar award in 2023 and 2024. The annual awards themselves have been described as the “Oscars of the food world.” The 20 semifinalists were announced Wednesday.

Uribe is a graduate of the Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Austin. As an up-and-coming chef, he devoured every cookbook he could find to shed light on what the chefs in the cutting-edge kitchens of Europe, New York and Chicago were up to.

He was in his 11th year as head chef at El Divino in McAllen when Ramblas co-owner Michael Limas lured Uribe to Boqueron, with the promise of more to come — Le Rêve.

Limas said the Best Chef nomination is proof his sales pitch to Uribe to take a chance on Brownsville wasn’t just pie-in-the-sky.

“I was the one who sold Eugene on the dream to come down here,” he said. “For us, it’s a validation. The guy works so damn hard.”

Limas said Uribe has “really dialed it in with his team” since Le Rêve launched and that no one deserves Best Chef Texas more. The nomination is more evidence that smaller cities are getting noticed, citing Las Ramblas’ previous JBF nods plus Chef Ana Liz Pulido’s JBF Best Chef award last year. Pulido owns Ana Liz Taqueria in Mission.

Uribe is on a list with “some heavy hitters,” including a couple of chefs from Michelin star restaurants, Limas said. JBF will announce the five finalists on April 2, and that group will go to Chicago for the James Beard Restaurant and Chef Awards ceremony on June 16.

“I feel like we need to get the spotlight on us to prove that you can make it in the smaller markets, not just the big ones,” Limas said. “Where you see the trend going with the Beard Foundation, they’re very open to the small markets. We’re definitely hoping that trend continues.”

It’s also pretty good for business, he noted.

“For us, we’re still babies and we could still use the additional business,” Limas said. “We needed this, and it’s super cool.”

Uribe, still processing the news when reached by phone Wednesday morning, said he’s excited about the nomination and plans to leverage it to motivate his team even more.

“We’re trying to show people that there’s cool things happening down here,” he said.

Uribe said he interprets the nod from JBF as a sign that he’s on the right track in terms of what he’s doing in the kitchen.

“I think we’re going in the right direction,” he said. “You try to find your rhythm and find your style, and what people like and don’t like. It’s a constant change, I would say. We’re learning every single day. Let’s try something new and if it works, how can we make it better?”

He invited everyone to stop by the restaurant and “judge for themselves.” Uribe said the JBF recognition is also helpful because it can be hard to get noticed for one’s talents in a time “when everybody has a microphone.”

Besides continually trying new things in the kitchen for Le Rêve’s seasonally changing menu, Uribe said he’s also interested in sourcing more of his ingredients locally.

“Right now it’s mostly trying to establish a better network of local producers on everything, because I do want to try to work with more local farmers and producers and poultry or pork and all these things,” he said.

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