Jesse Valenciana, as a regular reporter and columnist for The Takeout, is one of the premier food journalists focused on Mexican cuisine and other Hispanic foods of the Americas. He also presides over Nashville’s hippest catering and pop-up company, The Secret Bodega.

A veteran of several prestigious restaurant kitchens and a former marketing executive with Goose Island Brewery, he has appeared on The Today Show and on local television segments in Chicago and Nashville, among other cities. His experience with birrias spans from eating his grandmother’s traditional birria every Sunday as a child to collaborating with leading chefs on novel birria creations today.