Chris Santos

Some chefs want you to sit still, fold your hands and let a tasting menu happen to you. Chris Santos wants the opposite. He wants elbows on the table, six plates landing at once, somebody reaching across you for the last dumpling and a room loud enough that you have to lean in to hear the story your friend is telling. Long before the phrase turned into a menu cliché, he was building whole restaurants around the simple, slightly greedy pleasure of sharing food with people you like.

That instinct took a kid from Fall River, Massachusetts, who started out washing pots for pocket money, all the way to the Lower East Side, to a two storey crystal chandelier in a former furniture shop, to a judging chair on one of the most watched cooking shows on American television, and most recently to an art deco dining room inside Caesars Palace. Along the way he has also put out a cookbook, founded a heavy metal record label and helped invent a piece of home boxing kit. Chris Santos has never been especially interested in staying in his lane.

TL;DR

• American chef and restaurateur, born 26 March 1971 in Fall River, Massachusetts, and raised in Bristol, Rhode Island.
• Trained at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, graduating with honours in 1993, then made his name in New York kitchens.
• Opened The Stanton Social in 2005 and Beauty & Essex in 2010, two Lower East Side rooms that turned shareable small plates into a national style.
• Managing partner and executive chef with Tao Group Hospitality, with Beauty & Essex now running in New York, Las Vegas and at Mohegan Sun.
• An original judge on Food Network’s Chopped, where he has appeared across more than a decade of the series.
• Author of the 2017 cookbook Share, founder of Blacklight Media Records, and the chef behind Stanton Social Italian at Caesars Palace since 2026.

Chris Santos key facts

Chris Santos: career timeline

From a Fall River childhood to a Bristol dish pit

Chris Santos was born on 26 March 1971 in Fall River, Massachusetts, a former mill city on the Taunton River with one of the densest Portuguese American communities in the country and a food culture to match. He grew up just across the state line in Bristol, Rhode Island, a harbour town of white clapboard houses, boatyards and the oldest continuous Fourth of July parade in the United States. It is a small place, and small places tend to produce cooks who know exactly what a community table is supposed to feel like.

He was thirteen when he took his first kitchen job, washing pots at a little local restaurant. That is usually where the story stops for a teenager with a dish pit job, but the chef there noticed him, moved him off the sink and put him on the stove. By the time most of his classmates were thinking about summer work, Santos was already learning to cook on the line. He has said since that he never had a grand plan to become a chef. The kitchen simply grabbed him and refused to let go.

He graduated from high school in Bristol in 1989 and went straight up the road to Providence.

Johnson & Wales, and the case for being self taught

Johnson & Wales University is one of the great American culinary schools, and Santos arrived planning to do the two year culinary arts programme and get out. The university had other ideas. It awarded him a fellowship, and he stayed on for two more years to study restaurant and hotel management, graduating with honours in 1993 with both halves of the business in his head: how to cook the food, and how to run the room that serves it. That second half explains a great deal about the career that followed.

What is striking is how firmly he still describes himself as self taught. He never did the traditional apprenticeship under a name brand master, never spent years absorbing house style in a Jean Georges or a Daniel Boulud kitchen. His training came from a school, a stack of cookbooks, a lot of eating and an enormous amount of time on the line. That absence of inherited dogma is exactly why his food feels unbothered by rules. A chef schooled in one tradition tends to protect it. A chef who assembled his own education from many sources tends to mix them, which is precisely what Santos has done for thirty years.

New York, Time Café and a 27 seat room of his own

In 1994 he moved to New York City and was hired at Time Café on Lafayette Street, one of those addresses that was less a restaurant than a scene. He rose fast. At 23 he was executive chef, running a busy kitchen in a city that eats professionals like him for breakfast, and he stayed until 1998.

Then he did something that a lot of ambitious young chefs talk about and very few actually do: he stopped. In 1999 he spent the better part of a year travelling, working his way through 14 countries and more than 40 cities across Europe, eating everything in front of him. Chefs come back from that kind of trip changed, and he did. The obsession with regional technique, the appetite for flavours from wildly different places sitting happily on one table, the willingness to put a Spanish idea next to a Korean one: all of it hardens into a style on a journey like that.

He returned to the United States in 2000, put in a stint at the French inspired Cranebrook Restaurant and Tearoom in Boston and consulted at Rue 57, and then, in November of that year at the age of 29, he opened his first restaurant. Wyanoka had 27 seats. It was a hidden gem in the truest sense, a tiny room that quickly built a fiercely loyal following and won warm notices from critics, including a favourable review in The New York Times. It was also the first public sighting of the Santos formula: global influences colliding on purpose, plates built for reaching across.

The next few years were a run of hard, unglamorous, formative jobs. In 2003 he took over the kitchen at the award winning Latin restaurant Suba. In 2004 he was executive chef at Mojo in Brooklyn while simultaneously co-owning The Mexican Sandwich Company. He was learning the borough, learning the economics, and getting ready for the restaurant that would change everything.

The Stanton Social and the invention of a dining style

In January 2005, with partners Rich Wolf and Peter Kane, Santos opened The Stanton Social on Stanton Street on the Lower East Side. The room was gorgeous, all quilted leather and herringbone, but the radical part was the menu. Instead of appetisers and mains, it offered a long roster of multicultural small plates designed to be ordered in a pile and passed around. Latin, Asian, Eastern European and old school American ideas sat side by side without apology.

Diners had never quite seen it done at that scale in New York, and the reaction was immediate. Time Out New York, New York Magazine and The New York Times all took notice, and Frank Bruni reviewed it for the Times in June 2005. What Santos had really built was a format. In the decade that followed, the shareable plates model spread through American restaurants so thoroughly that a generation of diners now assumes it was always the default. It was not. The Stanton Social was one of the rooms that made it so.

Two years later, in 2007, StarChefs named him a Rising Star Chef in New York, the recognition that formally moved him from promising to important. The Stanton Social ran until the end of 2018, a remarkably long life for a restaurant in that neighbourhood, and the name has since travelled west to Las Vegas.

Beauty & Essex: a pawn shop, a chandelier and the hottest restaurant in America

In December 2010 Santos opened the biggest thing he had ever attempted. Beauty & Essex took over the old M. Katz Furniture store at the corner of Essex Street and turned it into a bi-level restaurant and lounge of genuinely theatrical ambition: 250 seats, 10,000 square feet, a two storey crystal chandelier and a twenty foot skylight pouring light down into the dining room.

Within months it was voted the hottest restaurant in the United States. It has been a fixture of New York dining ever since, perennially booked, reliably full of people you recognise, and still one of the hardest tables in the city to get on a Saturday night. More importantly for a chef, the food held up under all that noise. Beauty & Essex is a spectacle, but it is a spectacle with a real kitchen behind it.

The pawn shop door

The detail everyone remembers is the entrance. You do not walk into a restaurant. You walk into a working pawn shop, complete with glass cases of watches, guitars and jewellery, and only when you pass through the back of it does the room open up in front of you. It is the single best piece of restaurant theatre of its era, and it has been carried faithfully into every later location of the brand.

That instinct for staging is not decoration for its own sake. Santos understands that a shared plate arriving in the middle of a table is a small performance, and that the room needs to be worth performing in. Put the two together and you get the reason Beauty & Essex has been able to travel to completely different cities and still work.

Chopped, and a chef the whole country recognises

Food Network launched Chopped in January 2009 and Santos was there from the beginning, one of the original judges tasting whatever the mystery basket had inflicted on the competitors that day. Tattooed forearms, shaved head, an expression that gives absolutely nothing away until he decides to speak: he became one of the faces of the show, and he has kept coming back across more than a decade of seasons, including the junior editions.

He is a genuinely good judge, which is rarer than it sounds. He explains why a dish failed in terms a home cook can actually use, he gives credit where an idea was brave even when the execution went wrong, and he never mistakes cruelty for authority. Beyond Chopped he has turned up on The Today Show, CBS The Early Show, The Martha Stewart Show and Food Network’s Heavyweights, but it is the Chopped chair that made him a household name well beyond the Lower East Side.

Las Vegas, Mohegan Sun and the Italian chapter

From 2016 the operation went national, in partnership with Tao Group Hospitality. That January he opened VANDAL, his third Lower East Side restaurant, a street art inspired room with a menu that read like a world tour. In May of the same year Beauty & Essex opened at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, and Hollywood followed in 2017. Santos had become a chef with a brand, and a rare one: the concept survived the trip intact because the pawn shop, the chandelier and the shared plates were all load bearing, not garnish.

On 14 July 2022 it was announced that he would open Stanton Social Prime at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, reviving his first restaurant’s name for a steak focused, shareable menu. It opened in 2023 and was an immediate hit, built around dishes like a steak tartare quesadilla that is exactly as good an idea as it sounds.

Then came a homecoming. On 7 February 2025, Beauty & Essex opened an 11,000 square foot room inside Mohegan Sun’s Casino of the Sky in Connecticut, complete with the pawn shop entrance. For a chef from Fall River who grew up in Bristol, bringing the flagship back to New England was clearly personal, and he said as much at the time: the region holds a special place in his heart.

The most recent chapter arrived in 2026, when the Caesars Palace room was reborn as Stanton Social Italian. Santos kept the hits and pushed the kitchen towards a gleefully modern take on red-sauce Italian, in an art deco space of bold colour and rich texture. The menu runs from steak tartare Piemontese with truffle arancini and Chef Grandma’s meatballs through house-made pastas and an extra crispy chicken Parmigiana, up to a super tomahawk carved at the table for four. Dessert includes a limoncello tiramisu and a spumoni milkshake that looks like a drink and turns out to be entirely edible. Thirty years in, the man is still hiding jokes in the food.

As of 2026, Tao Group Hospitality lists Beauty & Essex in three locations: New York, Las Vegas and Mohegan Sun.

Beyond the kitchen: guitars, gloves and a record label

Santos is a lifelong hard rock and heavy metal fan, and unlike most chefs with a good record collection he did something structural about it. In February 2016 he teamed up with Brian Slagel of Metal Blade Records to launch Blacklight Media, a label built to give overlooked, high energy bands a bigger audience. Its debut signing was the progressive rock band Good Tiger. The name says the whole idea out loud: put a blacklight on talent that has been hiding in plain sight.

He is also a committed boxer. In April 2013 he went into business with Brian Pedone to found Boxing For All, the company that went on to develop Quiet Punch, a compact home boxing trainer that mounts in a doorway and lets you work a round without waking the building. It is a very Santos product, practical, a bit cheeky, and born out of something he actually does.

Restaurants

Awards and honours

Watch Chris Santos

See Chris in action in this video.

Signature dishes

If one dish belongs to Chris Santos it is the French onion soup dumplings he built for The Stanton Social. The problem he set himself was simple and slightly absurd: how do you share a bowl of soup? His answer was to fold the soup into dumplings, sear them until the outsides crisp, nestle them into an escargot dish, blanket them in Gruyère, run them under the salamander until the cheese browns and blisters, then spear each one on a garlic crouton so you get crunch, molten cheese and hot onion broth in a single bite. They sold in such volume that cooks were assigned to little else. From Beauty & Essex comes the other signature, a balsamic tomato tartare crowned with a sunny side up quail egg, shaved Parmesan and chives, served with Parmesan crostini, alongside the grilled cheese and tomato soup dumplings that repeat the original trick in a new key. Stanton Social Prime contributed the steak tartare quesadilla, and Stanton Social Italian now fields Italian cheesesteak sliders under black truffle fonduta, penne alla vodka with pancetta, ricotta and Calabrian chillies, Parmigiano crusted shoestring fries that defeat the sharing principle entirely, and a spumoni milkshake that is secretly a cake.

Cookbooks

Chris is the author of books including Share: Delicious and Surprising Recipes to Pass Around Your Table (2017).

Personal life

Santos married the actress Natalie Makenna on 22 May 2022 at Calamigos Ranch in Malibu, California, after meeting in 2017. The celebration leaned hard into the fairground nostalgia of his Rhode Island childhood, right down to a Ferris wheel, and the music came from Soul Station, the rhythm and blues project led by Paul Stanley of KISS, which is about as on brand as a wedding band can get for a chef who runs a metal label. Away from the stove he boxes regularly, collects records, and keeps a close tie to New England, a connection he made concrete by bringing Beauty & Essex to Mohegan Sun. He is active on Instagram as santoscooks, where the feed mixes restaurant news, Chopped appearances and a steady stream of food that looks exactly as generous as it does on his menus.

Chris in context

Chris Santos is one of many chefs and food personalities profiled on Pickup Table 4, alongside Antonia Lofaso and Anne Burrell.

Follow Chris Santos

Chris Santos — official · Instagram

Chris Santos FAQ

Who is Chris Santos?
Chris Santos is an American chef and restaurateur, born in 1971 in Fall River, Massachusetts. He is a managing partner and executive chef with Tao Group Hospitality, the co-founder of Beauty & Essex, The Stanton Social and VANDAL, and one of the original judges on Food Network’s Chopped.

Which restaurants does Chris Santos run today?
As of 2026 he is behind Beauty & Essex in New York, Las Vegas and at Mohegan Sun in Connecticut, plus Stanton Social Italian at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, which replaced Stanton Social Prime in 2026.

Is Chris Santos still a judge on Chopped?
Yes. He joined the judging panel when Chopped premiered in January 2009 and has remained a recurring judge across more than a decade of seasons, including the junior editions of the show.

What is Chris Santos best known for cooking?
Shareable small plates that borrow freely from Latin, Asian, European and American traditions. His most famous single dish is the French onion soup dumpling, created for The Stanton Social and finished with Gruyère on a garlic crouton.

Has Chris Santos written a cookbook?
Yes. His first cookbook, Share: Delicious and Surprising Recipes to Pass Around Your Table, was published in 2017 and collects recipes built on the same communal dining idea as his restaurants.

Where did Chris Santos train?
He studied culinary arts at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island, then added restaurant and hotel management after the university awarded him a fellowship, graduating with honours in 1993.

Sources and further reading

This profile draws on reputable references including Wikipedia, Tao Group Hospitality, Stanton Social Italian, Las Vegas Magazine, Mohegan Sun Newsroom, Metal Blade Records, Nation’s Restaurant News, the official Chris Santos site.