Miami is bursting with celebrity chefs like Daniel Boulud (db Bistro Moderne), Jose Andrés (The Bazaar) and J-G Vongerichten (Market). But with its newcomer European ex-pats and longtime Latin beat, the city also has a crop of exciting young hands-on chefs, running the kitchens for big names or starting up on their own. Here are four of Miami’s brightest culinary lights and the stories of how they got there.

Chef Stephane Caporal: Fisher Island Club

Sitting with Fisher Island Club’s dark haired, intense chef Stephane Caporal, it’s hard to imagine him in the uniform of the French Navy, but the young man found a way to make his compulsory military service tie in with his love of cooking. “”I was the personal chef for a three-star admiral. Not bad,” he says laughing. “I was lucky.”

His passion for food and his good luck began early. At five years old Stephane was following his mother around the kitchen, steaming fish and making a julienne of vegetables. In the school cafeteria he was critiquing lunches. “I just loved food!” he says. On his 10th birthday his aunt took him to famed restaurant Le Crillon in Paris, and his grandparents followed up with a trip to a Michelin three-star restaurant. “It changed my life!” he says. “At 10, I knew I wanted to be a chef. “Tell most kids they’re going to a football (soccer) game and they’re happy. Me? Tell me we’re going to a restaurant gastronomique and WOW!”

After a three-year stint at an iconic Paris culinary school, he apprenticed at a small Michelin-starred restaurant and from there, to what he calls his “worst job” ever, on a ship. He put in 18 hours a day and had nightmares about the sous-chef’s tantrums. That culinary combat training, plus years as a private chef for European A-listers and time in Michelin- starred restaurants including L’Esperance in Burgundy, paid off for Stephane. He now captains seven restaurants on Fisher Island, the most expensive zip code in the U.S.

He is also still as absorbed by cooking as he was as a child. “If I have ingredients and see an empty plate,” he says,” something comes over me and I have to cook!” He wants his three-year-old daughter Jade to appreciate food as much as he does. “I looked at her school’s lunch menu and said, “No way.” He now wakes up at 5 a.m. to make lunch for her. “The palette takes years for an education so we start early!”
Stay on Fisher Island

Chef David Rustarazo: Klima

Paris-born, Barcelona raised David Rustarazo didn’t have a shot at learning about food inhis early life. In Rustarazo’s house they ate spaghetti. That was pretty much what the family could afford. “My parents worked very, very hard,” he says, and though he may not have learned anything about the culinary world from them, he did learn about their work ethic. “I always wanted to be like them.” Pursuing a career as a chef was the farthest thing from his mind when he quit school at 14 and went to work with his father in construction.

A few years later, while working as a waiter at a disco in Barcelona, he met a chef who talked to him about “gastronomy,” a new word for him. He suddenly decided he wanted to be a cook. He took an unpaid job in a restaurant where, on the first day, he ate onion, tuna and artichoke for the first time. “I’d never had that before, or zucchini or eggplant or…” and lists the most ordinary things absent from his working-class childhood. “Suddenly I actually tasted food. My life changed that day.”

He saved some money for a knife, the tool of the trade and landed a job at a Spanish restaurant. Other chefs in the restaurant went home at 5 pm, but not Rustarazo. “I stayed in the kitchen alone, cleaning fish, trying new things and reading and reading cookbooks.” He then chose the “hardest” restaurant” to work in, Barcelona’s Coure, under the tutelage of Albert Ventura. He worked 20 hours a day learning everything he could.

At the recently opened Klima, David “Rusti” Rustarazo brings the same simplicity and elegance to the restaurant that he learned at Coure. “Everything you put on a plate has to have a reason and has to have harmony.” And like his mentor Albert Ventura, “celebrity” is the farthest thing from his mind. He stays focused on Barcelona-inspired food. It is a serious job and he is a serious young man. “La cocina no es una broma,” he says. Preparing food is not a joke. “We must take its creation very seriously!”

Chef Jeremy Ford: Matador Room

Sitting at a table over a plate of raw shaved snapper with green chili dressing and crunchy rice, Jeremy Ford is talking about his childhood. “My father wanted me to be a contractor like him. Even got me my own tool belt,” he says. “I hated the sawdust, the heat. It just wasn’t me,” he says, stopping all conversation to hold up a spoonful of sizzling chilies and garlic to study. “I LOVE garlic!” he pronounces passionately. When Chef Jeremy was growing up in Jacksonville, his mother’s cuisine tended toward chicken and biscuits or a just-snagged fish his father caught and brought home.

It was at 15, while working at a local restaurant frying up “thousands and thousands of onion rings,” that his future came into focus. “A light went on. I just knew I wanted to be a chef.” He would even go in early in the morning and try out his own recipes. First one? Grilled tomato with herb dressing. “I took a bite and I loved it – and cooking!” At 17, he packed up his truck with his cookbooks and guitar and headed to L.A.  He told himself, “I’ll be a chef or, if that fails, a famous heavy metal rocker.”

Three thousand miles and a week later, he showed up at the back door of one of L.A.’s top restaurants. “In shorts and a T-shirt and I asked for a job at this fancy restaurant. Imagine?” he says laughing, recalling the youthful chutzpah.  “Come to work tomorrow at nine,” he was instructed harshly. He recalls spending every spare minute studying French cookbooks, struggling with communication in the French-spoken-only kitchen and uncomplainingly mastering every tough task thrown at him. From the kitchen of Christophe Emeron, young Jeremy moved to Patina to be with Joachim Splichal and then did a stint with Jean Jacques in Paris before moving to Miami and taking the reins Matador Room. Looking back he seems still in a state of wonder at his luck. “I guess when you find something you love, it takes over and takes you where you are supposed to be.”

Alex Chang: Vagabond

When he was a teenager, Alex Chang’s mom worked long hours. “Go figure out how to cook,” she said to her sports-obsessed teenage son. Luckily he says, there was a Rachel Ray cookbook in the house. The girl he dated found it pretty cool that he cooked for her, making tacos and bean burritos like his Mexican-born mom and trying his hand at a few Asian dishes, a taste his Chinese father had cultivated in his children with regular Saturday trips for dim sum.

As a college undergrad studying kinesiology at the University of Southern California, Chang and his roommate organized a weekly supper club in his on-campus apartment. These dinner parties became a go-to place for L.A. foodies who were talking up his three-course gourmet dinners. “It was crazy,” he says laughing.” I’d go to classes, go to work (he was a prep cook at a nearby restaurant), shop for food and cook for the supper club.” At graduation the direction was clear. “Cooking just took over my life!”

He got a job as a lunch line cook at L.A.’s nationally acclaimed Lazy Ox Canteen. But for Alex Chang, it was a move to Tokyo with his father that made all the difference. He landed an apprenticeship at Les Creations de Narisawa, considered one of the world’s top restaurants. “There, they commit their souls to their craft,” he says with deep respect in his voice. “I learned everything. I saw what it takes to be excellent.”

Alex Chang brings all these influences to his new post at the Vagabond Restaurant and Bar. “I try not to be too literal but the menu is a reflection of my Mexican-Chinese background.” The most talked about item on is Peanuts & Chapulines, a small dish of Mexican grasshoppers (a staple in parts of Mexico) with sautéed peanuts, Szechuan peppercorn, fresh cilantro and lime.

Does he miss his undergraduate underground eatery made famous in a documentary? Not the small fridge, doing dishes by hand, and running around between classes looking for ingredients, he says. But sometimes he does miss the chaos and edginess, he says, as he prepares to deal with another full house at his new 120-seat restaurant. “It’s was like a punk band playing in a bar before making it big.”