The road to becoming the popular Mexican food expert for The New York Times and writing her first cookbook on Mexican heritage cuisine was a bit of a winding one for Kristina Felix — quite literally.
In 2013, Felix was a Fulbright scholar in Ollantaytambo, Peru, exploring the Valle Sagrado (“Sacred Valley”) and climbing mountains by bus or on the back of a motorcycle to study textiles with Andean artists. A 2010 graduate of the University of Texas at Austin’s M.F.A. program, she arrived in Peru leaning toward a career in visual arts, but left with her appetite whet for a different life direction.
“There was something about that experience that shifted my perspective on art-making,” Felix says while stirring an herbaceous-smelling pot of black bean soup on a recent morning in her East Hampton home. “It was like visual art wasn’t the media I wanted to use to express the stories I wanted to tell.”
Raised in the Chicago area by parents who had emigrated from Mexico, Felix was awe-inspired in that Peruvian art community, particularly when it came to mealtimes in the artists’ homes where she was learning to weave. “We would sit around their hearth, on the floor, and share the meal, which was very simple, generally — quinoa soup with potatoes and wild grains. And tea, always tea.”
Her senses came alive when she tasted that food and understood all it represented. “It’s visual, it’s auditory, it’s communal. It’s a feeling and it’s so cool, and it’s what I was trying to do with my artwork, but I could never quite get there,” she says. “But if I started thinking about food and recipes, then it all made sense.”
In February 2017, while at a residency at the Vermont Studio Center, Felix found herself making ceramics and playing with thrifted ceramic finds. “At the end of the month, you show what you’re working on,” she recalls. “I set a table.”
Fast-forward to today, and Felix’s culinary arts career is on the rise. She left a gallery job behind her in 2018 when she began working as an assistant for Ina Garten in East Hampton, for five years learning the ins and outs of building a thriving food business, including recipe development and food photography. She dipped her toe into cooking for community events, preparing things like tlacoyos (a snack of Mesoamerican origin made from masa and savory fillings) for a Folly Tree Arboretum benefit and big pots of soup for the Springs Food Pantry’s Chowdah Chowdown.
During the pandemic, she started a side business making homemade tortillas. Soon after her tenure with the Barefoot Contessa ended, Felix got an email from Genevieve Ko, senior editor of NYT Cooking and Food at The New York Times: Would she be interested in testing recipes? Heck yes.
It wasn’t long before Felix moved from testing other people’s recipes to pitching her own; today, some 30 of her culinary creations live in the NYT Cooking database, the majority of them rated five out of five stars by Times eaters. Her first yet-to-be-titled cookbook is due to her publisher — the gold standard in cookbooks, Workman Publishing — on April 1.
“I want to tell a different story about what Mexican food is,” Felix says while stirring the black bean soup. “The flavors we associate with Mexican cuisine have been growing on this continent for thousands of years: the beans, the squash, the chiles, the corn are all native to this continent. It’s weird to me that there’s an exotification of Mexican food, like it’s always spicy or something other than what it is, which is the food of North America. I feel like that is the story I am trying to tell.”
She spent some time in Mexico toward the end of 2025, in part to research her cookbook, but also to load up on inspiration as she heads into the home stretch of her deadline.
Because cooking isn’t just a profession, it’s also an everyday necessity, Felix likes to have fun with food. She recently — finally! — received an invitation to join the Rancho Gordo Bean Club, an exclusive Napa, Calif.-based subscription service supplying a quarterly bounty of hard-to-find legumes from across the bean-growing world.
“Black garbanzos. Oh my god, isn’t that cool?” she beams after opening her most recent shipment. “And red popcorn! Oh, nice, black-eyed peas. Yeah, I love beans.”
Locally, Felix spends a lot of time at EECO Farm, a community garden in East Hampton, growing her own herbs and vegetables.
“You can get some of the most incredible produce,” she says, picking up a small pumpkin from her table. “Eight years ago, I never would have thought, ‘I’ll cook this.’ Now, I know the person who grows them, and I want to honor all the work that goes into growing this food with a delicious thing that you put in your body.”
The highest form of praise she can receive is when every last bite of her food has been consumed — no leftovers. It means the combination of ingredients, techniques and care is just right.
“I think like an artist still, where everything you put into the work, all the time and materials, it all becomes a part of it,” Felix says. “I think the same way about a recipe.”
