Chef David Cordúa Keeps the Home Fires Burning
April 2023
"I was definitely a restaurant brat," said David Cordúa. The Houston chef laughed at the memory of his long-ago childhood routine. "After school every day, my two sisters and I would go to my father's restaurant," he said, "and the cooks would make us something to eat. We loved the grilled chicken with sherry cream sauce. After that we'd sit at the bar and do our homework."
The time was the late nineties, and the place was the tremendously popular Churrascos, which had been opened by his dad, Nicaraguan-born chef Michael Cordúa, in 1988. It was a classy early example of the Nuevo Latino concept that took hold in the U.S. in the mid-nineties, and Michael would go on to add two more restaurants to his burgeoning empire, Américas and Artista, both of which would have enormous followings in Houston for more than a decade. By his late teens, David was helping in the kitchen of Américas, and after earning a degree from Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, he became executive chef of the family's restaurant group.
Now, at forty years old, he has opened his own restaurant, the Lymbar.