Chef Arnold Yañez, CEC

Chef Yañez is a true Valley culinary legend. The American Culinary Federation has honored Chef Yañez with the rank of Senior Chef. He is a lifetime member of the ACF, and a member of the World Association of Cooks Societies.

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McAllen Monitor article on Chef Yañez
( reprinted from the McAllen Monitor, October 25, 1994 )

In 1962, Arnold Yañez signed on with the Echo Hotel as a relief cook.

Now the executive chef oversees the kitchen of one of the state's most enduring hotels.

While heading the team at The Echo, Yañez has engineered dinners for U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy, The Rev. Jesse Jackson and Kentucky Fried Chicken founder Col. Harland Sanders.

Yañez, 53, shows off a wall in the hotel's executive office. It is covered with plaques and honors he's accumulated during his tenure there. As he points to one of his certificates, a fellow "employee notices a burn on Yañez's arm and hand.

Hey, I thought you gave up cooking," says Echo's dining room manager, Janice Dwyer of Edinburg. "I thought you were getting somebody else to do the cooking for you."

Yañez smiles and shrugs. His eyes and actions don't convey the word retirement.

The chef was raised in Mexico and had no education before he moved to the United States in 1953, at age 25.

"I took a job working as a dishwasher and bus boy at the Flamingo Hotel in McAllen," he says, wearing a tall white chef's hat and apron.

Yañez's credo is a slight variation of the French mathematician Rene Descartes' statement, "I think, therefore I am." But the key words in Yañez's lexicon are bake, fry and broil.

"Being a chef is like being a doctor," he said. "If you have good food, people are never going to be sick. But if you have bad food, somebody's going to get sick eventually."

Yañez has awards and certificates from the National Restaurant Association, the Rio Grande Valley Chefs Association and American Culinary Federation Inc.

Like more accomplished artists, Yañez was self-inspired and his craft remains self-contained.

"When I was growing up in Mexico, nobody in my family wanted to be a chef, and none of my kids were interested in getting into this kind of work," he says "I don't know why or how I got into this, with no education of any kind. I learned to do this on the job."

His skills as a chef and manager received a lot of attention early on. Yañez was sent by the Echo management to the Gran Hotel Ancira in Monterrey to learn advanced methods of cooking.

In 1983, he was chosen by the International Cooking School of Houston to offer expert instruction in the art of preparing regional Tex-Mex dishes. Among the instructors was at least one world-famous chef - Paul Prudhomme of New Orleans.

Because of Yañez's attentiveness to his craft and sensitivity to his customers, his business needs no advertisement.

"He's very well known," said Stormy Molina, an Echo Hotel employee. "As an employee, I eat here every day. I grew up coming to this place. When I was a girl, the Echo was like an elegant, better restaurant, because the food was made by a chef."

In the late 1950s, the Edinburg Community Hotel Organization was formed to build a place for tourists and locals to vacation and dine. In 1959, the ECHO hotel opened under the organization's acronym.

Molina says the Echo is still known are and wide as "the" place to meet for lunch.

"The buffet is very popular. It's good and the price makes it a deal. People come from the banks, the city offices, law enforcement, the courthouse, teachers from Pan American," she said.

Besides his skill and experience as a chef, Yañez has become, during his 40 years in the restaurant business, an expert in carving food and ice into artistic images.

"I carve vegetables, fruits and 300-pound ice blocks with a chain saw. I've had a lot of business over the years. And of course, my grandsons like for me to make them pumpkin faces for Halloween," he said.

Almost any day of the week, Yañez can be found in the Echo Hotel. Like the captain of a ship, he knows how quickly a restaurant can "run aground."

"I work seven days a week, and I like to be here with my kitchen staff working by 9a.m.," he said.

I don't like to think of my boss asking "Where's the chef?'"

"It's the same formula for any business," he said. "As a chef, you need to think about, all the time, what's good for your customers - what they're looking for.

"If you don't give the customers what they're looking for, you're in trouble."