As the owner and chef for Thyme Matters for over 16 years now, Chef Alejandra Chávez and her husband Iván continue to offer innovative cuisine to the city of El Paso and its surrounding areas. For her, fulfilling her life’s passion and serving others is really living the dream.
Alejandra Chávez’s first memories of food revolve around the family kitchen and the home cooking of her mother and grandmother. For her twelfth birthday she asked for a mixer and decided that she wanted to be a chef. With a Lebanese/Mexican background, the importance of food in her family was no small matter. However, her family pressured her to obtain her bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin in communications and business. Upon graduation, she went to work at Cargill then Enron, but something didn’t feel quite right. Her calling to go to culinary school kept nagging at her. So it is no surprise that while Enron was still making headlines, she went to Italy, looking for food.
Chavez enrolled in a culinary school in Florence called Apicius. There she learned all about Italian cuisine and wine. She did her internship at the 5 star Montebello hotel in Tuscany. Since her passion for cooking grew stronger, she then enrolled in a more intense culinary program in Costigliole d’Asti in the Piedmont region. She earned her culinary master degree at the Italian Culinary Institute for Foreigners (ICIF) and was named “A friend of Italian Cuisine”. After completing her coursework, she moved to the region of Umbria where she worked at the 4 star Park Hotel ai Cappuccini in a small medieval town called Gubbio. Without really planning on it, Alejandra Chávez became a chef.
After returning from Italy, she got an internship with a celebrity chef, Alejandro Ruiz, at Casa Oaxaca in Oaxaca, Mexico. It was working in a small kitchen and traveling to the Abastos market every day that she learned about traditional Mexican cooking. Instead of all the cooking gadgets back home, she used molcajetes and metates to blend the local ingredients with spices such as hierba santa and epazote to create simple food with fresh ingredients.
When she returned to El Paso, she began asking, “Why can’t El Paso have the very best? They deserve it.” It was then that Chef Chávez began Thyme Matters as a catering business and acted as a personal chef. Eventually, she got busy enough to add a few tables to the front of her catering operation, and started serving lunch. It wasn’t long before she realized that she could put a white table cloth restaurant in El Paso. Her 140 seat restaurant which includes a patio-lounge overlooking the Franklin Mountains is situated at a premium west side location. Both the menu and the physical design of the space are contemporary and filled with regular customers.
Most recently, Chef Chávez was invited by the Mexican Consulate to the world trade center in Mexico City as a representative from the city of El Paso to form a national restaurant association for Mexicans living in the United States. She was also selected as a prominent Hispanic business owner for the Paso del Norte Entrepreneurship Oral History Project. She has been recognized in the media as one of the finest chefs in the region by El Paso Style magazine, Sabroso magazine and the El Paso Times on numerous occasions. Her passion for food was also clearly seen for over three years in one of her cooking segments on the local NBC affiliate five o’clock news program She has participated many local cooking events and charities and was invited to the Santa Fe Concorso in Santa Fe, New Mexico to give a taste of her delicious food to hundreds of people.
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