Diana Barrios Trevino sits beside the new bar at Viola’s Ventanas, flashing her trademark smile. The smile is luminous, contagious, ubiquitous: Who in San Antonio hasn’t seen it on a cooking show or in one of her restaurants?
From the pearly white grin comes a story, a recent anecdote related to a long-ago event.
On Memorial Day weekend, Trevino received a text from a friend vacationing on the Gulf Coast: “You are on tv in port a! Best of Bobby Flay. Omg omg Now the throw down!”
The text appeared below a 2007 video clip from Beat Bobby Flay, a popular Food Network show. Almost 20 years after Trevino defeated Flay in a Puffy Taco Throwdown, the episode lives on, shaping a culinary legacy.
Trevino is a serendipitous TV chef, an effervescent Latina who rose from a small restaurant kitchen to become perhaps the most recognizable face of San Antonio Tex-Mex. She owns three popular restaurants with her brother, Louis Barrios, appears on a monthly San Antonio Living cooking segment and performs live cooking demonstrations.
You may have seen her on the Today Show, cooking with Emeril Lagasse. Or on a segment of Good Morning America. Or on another Food Network show with Flay and Sara Moulton. Or on the Simply Ming Show on PBS. Or perhaps on Despierta America Un Nuevo Dia, which airs in the U.S. and in Latin American countries.
The list goes on.
In short, Trevino, 62, has been a television fixture for 30 years. Over time, she has emerged as a humble kitchen celebrity, a culinarian who still refuses to call herself a chef.
“I didn’t go to culinary school,” said Trevinio, daughter of the late restaurateur, Viola Barrios. “But I’ve taken culinary classes. So please, do not ask me to make you béarnaise sauce or something fancy because I don’t know how it’s going to come out. But I can make Viola’s recipes and be really good at that.”
A family business
Trevino grew up in the kitchen with her mother, observing, asking questions, fashioning her own creations. Viola Barrios taught her how to cook and modeled community outreach. She took her children every summer to Bustamante, Nuevo León, Mexico. There in her hometown, she distributed food and clothes to the poor.
The example inspired Trevino and Louis Barrios to create Viola’s Huge Heart Festival to support children who age out of the foster care system.
The festival will be held Monday at 4 p.m. at Viola’s Ventanas and benefit more than 300 youth from nine nonprofits, including St. PJ’s Children’s Home and Roy Maas Youth Alternatives. The private event will feature a chicken fajita dinner, live music, snow cones, face painting and animals from the San Antonio Zoo.
According to the National Foster Youth Institute, 25% of former foster care youth experience homelessness within four years of being emancipated from the system at 18.
“The statistics on these children are terrible,” Trevino said. “My mother would love that we are doing this.”
Viola Barrios died in 2008, slain by an 18-year-old neighbor, Joe Estrada, who is serving a life sentence without parole. When the killer’s family moved in next door on Tioga Drive, Viola greeted them with a plate of hot tamales. On subsequent visits, she delivered lemon bundt cakes.
Trevino looked up to her mother when she was a toddler. At age 3, Trevino reached for a small bag in a kitchen cabinet. Viola watched in amusement as it landed on her daughter. “I wound up with flour all over me,” Trevino said, “from head to toe.”
The family’s first restaurant, La Cazadora, often drew Trevino into the kitchen. When she was 9 or 10, she grew hungry after school and made herself a taco: chicken and guacamole on a corn tortilla. Her mother remarked, “That’s really good,” and made one herself, adding a dollop of sour cream.
“That’s how Tacos a la Diana became an item,” Trevino said. “And they’re still on our menu.”
A launching pad
After selling La Cazadora, the family opened Los Barrios in 1979. Trevino, her brother Louis and older sister, Teresa, helped out with a variety of jobs. After Trevino became engaged to Roland Trevino, her mother encouraged her to cook. “Come on,” she’d say, “let’s go to the kitchen.”
As Los Barrios grew its customer base and garnered positive reviews, Diana Barrios Trevino married and started a family. She modeled part-time for a fragrance company and continued working at the restaurant, hosting, waiting tables and prepping food. But she did not cook.
An unexpected opportunity drew her into the spotlight. In 1996, Louis arranged for Trevino to do a cooking segment on KENS-5. Two years later, a WOAI-TV producer asked Louis to cook for an early morning show.
“I said ‘no, but my little sister will be happy to do it,’” Louis Barrios recalled. “I told him, ‘She’s a natural talent.’ He said, ‘Do we need to ask her if she’ll do it?’ I said, ‘Tell me me what time you need her to be there and when.’”
Trevino laughs at the memory and says, “That’s when I really, really learned how to cook.”
Trevino cooked at home for her husband Roland and their children. But she didn’t cook at the restaurant and didn’t know how to recreate her mother’s recipes for a five-minute segment. So Viola took her back to the kitchen.
“My mother and I practiced,” Trevino said.
When she arrived on the set of News 4 San Antonio Today, Trevino observed other cooks and took mental notes. Prepare the food. Talk. Keep prepping. Talk some more. “I was a very good, quick study,” Trevino said.
The following year, a producer from Good Morning America called the San Antonio Convention & Visitors Bureau, asking for someone to cook with Lagasse at the Arneson River Theater. An official who had seen the WOAI-TV morning show recommended Trevino.
A national spotlight
On May 21, 1999, Trevino introduced America to the Los Barrios style of Mexican cooking and a local tradition: flour tortillas, calabacita con pollo (squash with chicken) and cascarónes, colorful confetti-filled eggs used to crack on skulls. Lagasse fell in love with Trevino and her mother and visited Los Barrios later that day. After the show, Random House asked Trevino to write a cookbook. Lagasse penned the foreword.
GMA ushered Trevino into a world of celebrity cooking. She promoted the Los Barrios Family Cookbook on The Today Show, did another segment on GMA, appeared on QVC and cooked with Flay and Moulton on the Food Network.
Back in San Antonio, Trevino refined her culinary chops under the lights of the morning show with Leslie Bohl.
“I’m not a chef,” Trevino said. “My culinary training came from my mother. She poured herself into me with every single episode because I had a great need to learn. After doing this over and over again, preparing those recipes every two weeks, I got the essence of cooking and the art of cooking. That’s how I learned. A light bulb went off. I got it. This makes so much sense.”
Another opportunity arrived in the spring of 2007. The Food Network asked Trevino to appear on a new show called “North of the Border.” The invitation was a ruse. Instead, a TV crew came to film a “Puffy Taco Throwdown” with Bobby Flay.
Hundreds gathered on the sprawling patio of La Hacienda de los Barrios, the family’s second restaurant, to watch the matchup: Flay and his Yucatan chicken taco with chipotle, peanut-barbecue sauce and red cabbage slaw vs. Trevino with her spicy, shredded chicken taco with guacamole, lettuce, tomato and a touch of salsa.
At one point, Trevino’s mother felt sorry for Flay and began to help him. The gesture made a lasting impression. When Viola was murdered a year later, Flay called to offer his condolences. No family member of the challenger, he told Trevino, had ever helped him on his show. He wanted to fly in for the funeral but a scheduled event prevented him from attending.
After the throwdown, a local food writer and chef judged the tacos on taste, texture and authenticity. A gentleman with a sombrero lifted Trevino’s left hand. With her right, she cracked a cascarón on Flay’s head, a spray of confetti fluttering to earth. “Next time, I promise,” she said triumphantly, “you’re going to win.”
A bigger purpose
The episode continues to air. Viewers keep reaching out with text messages: I can’t believe it’s almost been 20 years!
Trevino can’t believe the turn in her life. One day she’s doing everything at Los Barrios but cooking in the kitchen; the next, she’s cooking on the air.
“I remember shooting a segment with Diana and her mom a long time ago at Diana’s house,” said San Antonio Living host Shelly Miles. “To see the two of them together was very special. And from there, Diana took over! From SA Living to Bobby Flay to cooking with so many other chefs and in front of live audiences. I guess it helps gaining your chops on local live TV. But Diana is so good. She was always destined for more.”
Inside Viola’s Ventanas, not far from a mounted portrait of her mother, Trevino’s dark eyes turn moist. Monday’s event to support foster care youth represents the heart of her mother. She cared about children, about the poor and the hungry, about youth in need. So she drove to Bustamante and threw them parties and gave them presents and fed them cake.
“Mother used to say, ‘No te cuesta un centavo ser feliz o ser amable,’” Trevino recalled. “It doesn’t cost you one cent to be happy or kind.”
Viola Barrios founded a small restaurant. It grew and created a major platform for her youngest daughter. Trevino never asked for the spotlight. But one door after another kept opening until she found herself before a national television audience, cooking and charming viewers.
The viewers became customers and the customers enabled Trevino to use her influence.
To help at-risk foster youth.
To make her mother proud.
