We always enjoy sitting down with those that are enhancing the culinary landscape wether they are making great dishes or telling us about them! Chef Monti Carlo, Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Senior Editor of Food & Dining talks with us about why she enjoys cooking, her passion for it, being on MasterChef and her cookbook, Spanglish!
ATHLEISURE MAG: When did you first fall in love with food and why you enjoy working in this space?
MONTI CARLO: I think the first time I understood food had real emotional power, I was six years old. We had just moved from Puerto Rico to Houston, and I didn't speak a lick of English yet. I wasn't ready for how muted life in the States was, how everything felt unfamiliar and cold.
There’s a story in the book about me having a total meltdown at school a few months after we moved to Houston, Texas. I had accidentally written a curse word on a spelling test because I barely understood English yet. My first-grade teacher snapped my favorite pencil in half and screamed at me in words that made no sense to me. I mustered all of my six-year-old rage, flipped my desk and ran away.
It wasn’t really about the pencil. I was a six-year-old and felt lost. I missed Puerto Rico. I missed hearing Spanish around me. I missed understanding the world without having to stop and translate everything in my head first.
I got into a whole lot of trouble that day. But that night, my mother made sancocho, a Puerto Rican beef and root vegetable stew. It was a recipe my Abuela (grandmother) made for us weekly. Even though I couldn't vocalize it then, I'll never forget the way the smell of that cilantro-scented broth transported me back to my island.
What I learned eating that bowl of stew took me decades to understand. Food can comfort you before you take a single bite. I learned that a humble dish can carry the memory of your Abuela's voice. It can carry your identity. It can carry the space that feels most like home.
If you’re paying attention, food tells you everything you need to know about the people who made it. You can see the effect of migration in a dish. You can see the ingredients that were used as a celebration and those that were used as part of survival. You can tell what traditions cooks fought to hold onto, and what flavors reminded them of home.
That’s what I love most about working as a food editor. Every restaurant, every recipe, every menu is really a story about people trying to preserve some part of themselves.
AM: You were the first Puerto Rican woman to compete on Gordon Ramsay's MasterChef. What was it like to be there and what was your biggest takeaway from this experience?
MC: One of the things the producers kept asking us was to "put ourselves on the plate." For me, that immediately meant the flavors I grew up with in Puerto Rico. But the interesting challenge was that many of the ingredients central to Puerto Rican cuisine simply weren't available in the pantry.
So, I had to cook the way many diasporic people live: through adaptation and improvisation.
I remember making a Puerto Rican-style shepherd's pie topped with sweet mashed plantains, essentially a pastelón. I made a scotch egg with canned crab because canned crab is something I grew up with at my Abuela's house.
MasterChef taught me something that later became central to Spanglish: authenticity is not rigid. Food doesn't stand still, frozen in time, like a display in a museum. Cuisine evolves when people migrate. Sometimes you lose ingredients but you adapt with substitutes.
I realized that what I had spent my entire life doing, taking Puerto Rican flavors and memories and finding ways for them to survive inside unfamiliar spaces, was its own kind of culinary language. Like I say in my book, if my kitchen could talk it would speak Spanglish.
AM: Tell us about the culinary scene in Atlanta and why you feel it is the most exciting?
MC: Atlanta feels exciting to me because it still feels emotionally honest. There are cities where dining has become so performative that you can almost feel chefs cooking toward the hot new trend. Atlanta has a culture of people who cook from lived experience, and there's a deflection of the pressure to flatten yourself into something universally palatable.
You see it in West African chefs exploring the connections between their foodways and the American South.
It is the Caribbean chefs reclaiming narratives around diasporic cuisine. It's Southern chefs addressing history through food. It's in the immigrant-owned restaurants building entire communities around dishes that remind people where they come from.
And because Atlanta is a majority Black city with such a strong immigrant population, the culinary scene reflects conversations happening around identity, migration, and culture in real time. It's not static. It's alive and deeply personal.
That makes it one of the most creatively fertile food cities in America right now.
AM: What do you enjoy about being the AJC's Senior Editor of Food & Dining and what does it mean to you to be there?
MC: What matters most to me is creating a more diverse library of food stories. Food media has historically treated many cuisines, especially immigrant cuisines, Black cuisines, Caribbean cuisines, working-class cuisines, as interesting only once they become trendy enough for mainstream validation. But the communities shaping American food culture have always been here.
I am working with writers that are interested in documenting the family-owned strip mall restaurant making regional Guatemalan cuisine. I want AJC Food and Dining to tell the story of the Nigerian pop-up that's finally turning into a permanent space. I want to highlight the Puerto Rican chef rebuilding a community through intimate dinners.
I also take seriously the responsibility of writing about labor, affordability, and survival within the restaurant industry itself.
To me, food journalism is never just about recommending where to eat. It's about documenting who a city is becoming.
AM: What are the stories you enjoy working on in the food space and why is it important to share those stories?
MC: I'm drawn to stories about migration, poverty, reinvention, and cultural preservation because so much of what we now call cuisine was born from people making something beautiful from next to nothing.
For example, I'm fascinated by the ways diasporic communities preserve identity through ingredients even when geography changes. The way Puerto Rican families in the South adapt recipes based on what's available locally. The way immigrant restaurant owners build spaces that become emotional gathering points for entire communities.
I also think a lot about how cuisines change once mainstream culture embraces them. Suddenly everyone wants the food, and that's fantastic. But very few people talk about the families who were cooking it when it was considered cheap, strange, or unworthy of attention.
Good food writing should preserve context, not erase it.
AM: Your cookbook Spanglish is out this month! Why did you want to create this cookbook?
MC: I wanted to write the kind of cookbook I rarely saw growing up: one that understood food as both recipe and emotional archive. A book that tells real, unpolished stories.
Spanglish begins with leaving Puerto Rico at six years old and arriving in the States, unable to speak English. And from there, the entire book becomes about what it means to build identity in the space between two very different worlds.
The recipes are deeply traditional Puerto Rican flavors mashed into continental American favorites. I have dishes like morcilla sloppy joes, sofrito tomato soup with bacalaíto onion rings, and guanábana pound cake, because that's what the diaspora looks like to me.
The book is really about adaptation without shame.
For a long time, people treated Spanglish (the language) as something broken. But I see it differently. Spanglish is evidence of survival and resilience. It's what happens when two realities learn to exist side by side.
The food in this book works the same way.
AM: Gordon Ramsay wrote the foreword for your cookbook! What does it mean to you to have him do that?
MC: It feels deeply full circle because Gordon met me during one of the hardest periods of my life. At the time, I was a broke single mother facing homelessness trying to rebuild everything from scratch through food. So having him write the foreword for a book that tells the complete story, not just the television version of it, feels incredibly meaningful.
Gordon understood the emotional core of the project. He understood this wasn't simply a collection of recipes. It was a story about survival and identity told through food. That means the most to me.
AM: What are three food trends you're excited about right now?
MC: 1. Diaspora cuisine being discussed with more specificity.
I'm excited that conversations around Caribbean food, African food, and Latin American food are becoming more regionally nuanced instead of being flattened into generalized categories. Puerto Rican food is not Cuban food. Jamaican food is not Trinidadian food. And people are becoming more curious about those distinctions.
2. "Humble" ingredients being treated with seriousness and care.
Ingredients once associated with poverty or working-class cooking, like canned meats, root vegetables, offal, preserved seafood, rice dishes, are finally being recognized for the ingenuity and history they carry. That feels important because so many immigrant cuisines were built from necessity and creativity.
3. Restaurants becoming more narrative-driven.
I find more and more that people want to understand who cooked the food. They want to know where the recipe came from, what story shaped it, what family memory lives inside it. Technology has left so many of us feeling isolated and that has diners craving emotional connection again, not just aesthetic dining experiences. And honestly, I think that's healthier for food culture overall.
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