Diego Argoti
Poltergeist | Los Angeles
April 2024
Learning from his dad, a grocery store employee who had a knack for butchering chickens, decorating cakes, and putting together flower arrangements, Diego Argoti always enjoyed cooking. However, it wasn’t until later in life, after dropping out of college, that Argoti began to work his way through professional kitchens. Restless and eager as a young cook, he bounced around restaurants before finding work at Nancy Silverton’s Chi Spacca and Bestia under Rising Stars alum Ori Menashe. In 2015, after moving on to help open another alum spot, Ray Garcia's Broken Spanish, Argoti returned to Bestia, where he learned to bake bread and roll pasta until he joined the opening team at Bavel as Menashe’s sous.
After eight years at the restaurant, the pandemic struck and Argoti felt ready to move on, so he bought burners with the money he saved up and started building out an idea for his pop-up. What would become his concept, Estrano, started out in an alley in Silver Lake with a giant speaker, music blasting, waiting to see who would show up. The response was immediate, and Argoti was tossed into the thick of it in the blink of an eye, growing from 100 to 200 covers in the first few months and capturing the attention and support of other people in the industry.
Eventually, Argoti was offered the opportunity to take over the kitchen at Button Mash, where he has brought his loud, mischievous, eclectic, renegade, satirical, take-no-prisoners cooking style to the residency. While Argoti hopes to continue building up the Estrano brand, his focus with Poltergeist is on supporting his team, giving and getting inspiration from the people who work for him, and preparing his cooks to say goodbye to their mentors and forge their own paths in the kitchen.
