Claudette Zepeda grew up as a border kid between San Diego and Tijuana. On top of that, she spent summers in Guadalajara, watching her aunt run a bustling restaurant. She didn’t know it then, but those summers created the foundations for Mexican cuisine and hospitality in her mind. Then, she became a mom at 18-years-old. Claudette was a kid raising her own kid. She needed to pay the bills, sure. But what Claudette wanted more was to figure out how to build intergenerational wealth – and how to inspire young single moms to believe they could do it too.
In this episode of 9 to 5ish, Claudette shares:
Why she never allowed herself to dream beyond getting off food stamps and paying her bills on time
How she stumbled into being a celebrity chef thanks to “right place, right time”
Why it’s detrimental to not talk about failures publicly
A recent on-air mess up she can’t stop thinking about, and what it taught her
On Why Cooking is More than a Just Good Meal
Claudette: I did an event on Saturday at a friend's restaurant in LA, and someone came up to us afterwards…there's four female chefs and they're giving us all our kudos and they have different people – 130 people come. They all have different relationships with each one of the chefs…and I made a tostada pozole which is like the most humble recipe. It was a recipe that my aunt started her entire empire with when I was a kid. And it's a tostada with stewed hominy and pork, with a pozole broth. Super simple, lettuce, radish. Nothing crazy, but it is very, very good to me. [A man] literally started crying, explaining how it reminded him of his grandmother's food. So those are those moments where I'm like: you're on your purpose, whatever you're doing. It's not about the food. It's how you make people feel and the imprint that you leave on them after you're gone.
On What Rejection Means to Her
Claudette: Rejection is redirection. There's no such thing as, “this isn't for me because it's something against me.” It’s, “this isn't for me because there's something better for me out there.” And that is something that I constantly have to practice. I don't do this for me. I do this for my children because I want them to believe that with every hardship, there's a lesson to learn. Like finding the silver lining and working constantly, literally drawing and writing our own silver linings playbook…Changing that mindset and that comes from a long line of healing generational scars and lessons, finding the lessons in generational scars and letting that shit go.
On the Role of Humility in Her Life
Claudette: My life has always been a series of balances of: you get something good, but the universe comes and smacks you in the face and being like, “but stay humble.” There's another kick, and it’s like “but stay humble bitch.” There's all these moments of reality's always there for me to keep my feet on the ground and to keep the trajectory going, knowing that it has nothing to do with me…I took the words “breaking generational curses” out of my vocabulary and now I say that I am “creating new paths for generational wealth”. Not even just for my own children. But I am creating a road for other Mexican American young mothers, single mothers, to believe that it is possible because like I said:I didn't see anyone doing what I'm doing. So the road was unpaved by people that look like me and have my background.
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