We were lucky to catch up with Edwin Sandoval ` recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Edwin , thanks for joining us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

XATRUCHO originates from the last name of a Honduran general who in 1856 defended the newly acquired Honduran independence ( September 15ht, 1821 ). His name was Florencio Xatruch.

When stationed in Nicaragua General Xatruch and his troops were regarded as heroes and well received . The Nicaraguan people began to call them Xatruches, Xatrachos and eventually Catrachos. To this day the coined name of Catracho/a is strongly representative of anyone born in Honduras. We all identify as Catrachos anywhere abroad, our way of connecting outside of our homeland.

Now, let’s take this to 1991!
I was born and lived in Honduras until I was 10 years old, through my childhood I was passed down a strong sense of pride and love for our tiny nation.

Fast forward to 2015!
At age 23 I was already 8 years deep into the food industry, I had spent most of my teen and early twenties in a kitchen learning as much as I could. At the time I had reached a point where I felt I needed to make a crucial decision. That was to decide whether to keep chasing a cooking dream or completely shift to something else.

I had been conceptualizing a food idea on my spare time for years, thinking and day dreaming as to what it would be called, what food it would serve and how the kitchen would operate.

It had been a long time coming but it finally happened, I reached my limit working for someone else. I made up my mind to focus on my idea, on my concept and just go for it.

I knew I needed something that would be hard to quit, I needed something that represented me but on a deeper level something that represented my vision as to where I wanted to take my very own cooking style, I needed something unique and new.

I was struggling with the name so one day I decided to research and look deeper into Honduran history and came across why we are called Catrachos. Not sure what clicked but it just did. As I became more knowledgeable of the story I was able to make more connections between Xatruch and what now is XATRUCHO.

As a company, our cooking style at XATRUCHO is based on classic cooking techniques with modernized approaches. We focus on Latin inspired cuisine with emphasis on Honduran flavor profiles. We take French, Italian and new American cooking techniques and apply them to Latin based recipes and ingredients. Our goal is to mesh the old with the new.

XATRUCHO
pronounced – CA -TRU – CHO

Hondurans – CA -TRA – CHOS
General – XA-TRUCH

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

As a chef I’ve been in the industry for the last 15 years and have done pretty much everything in a professional kitchen brigade. The last 6 years I’ve been running my own catering business and we expanded into a food hall in Greenwood Village serving Latin inspired cuisine 6 days out of the week.

Aside from catering weddings, private events and having the food hall we also focus on an educational piece. In the past we’ve partnered with the Botanic Gardens, local non profit organizations and private companies to provide cooking demos, classes and food videos.

We are proud of so much of what we do from the work we put into Latino communities around Denver to the way we represent the culture but being a chef driven concept, our primary focus is the quality of the food that we produce. We are extremely proud of cooking our food as seasonal as possible, one hundred percent from scratch and always made in house.

Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.

I became a sous chef at a French bistro and oyster bar when I was 21 years of age. I feel that this was a very important moment in my career that brought me a lot of happiness. I could finally call myself a chef and my career progressed at a decent pace. I was a chef de Cuisine at age 23 and by the time I was almost 25 I was an executive chef.

Throughout those years of leading and managing cooking teams and working 70+ hour a weeks, somehow I found time to meet and connect with people that were doing cool food centric events around the city. I was brought on for a back to back weekend event for 45 guests. None of the diners knew each other, the location wasn’t disclosed until day of and the entire vibe was just so cool and mysterious. Needless to say I felt in love with this new format of ‘pop up’ cooking.

Not long after I was brought back for more events and before I knew it I had multiple events lined up in a month and the decision time came up. I knew it wasn’t physically possible to work 70+ hours leading a kitchen staff and somehow find another 20 to 30 hours to dedicate to planning and prepping an event menu on the side.

Everything was so quick to happen that it scared me a bit and I ended up shifting away and refocusing on the restaurants I was employed at but there was something telling me I had made the wrong choice.

It wasn’t until two years later that I made my decision to quit my job as an executive chef of a restaurant and focus on my food concept and ideas. Almost 6 years later, we are thriving and continue to move forward.

What’s been the best source of new clients for you?

My business has grown primarily because of word of mouth. We have a clientele base that supports our food, our style of cooking and what we represent in the Latino community.

Our day to day guests at the food hall are amazing, we take the time to educate them about our food and we make sure to treat them like our friends.

Very consistently we have been successful at reaching new clients through our social media, so we keep the food content coming so they know what we’re up to.

Contact Info:

• Website: Xatrucho.com
• Instagram: @Xatruchoconcepts
• Facebook: @Xatruchoconcepts

Image Credits
@Brent Thelen @Kevin Hernandez