SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — After an eight-year wait, the historic third Michelin star that chef and co-owner Val Cantú and his team at San Francisco's Californios craved is theirs. It's a first for any Mexican restaurant worldwide. So it's understandable he and his 40-person staff have more swagger.
“It’s been just really rewarding to see the team kind of like, carry a little bit more confidence in their step,” Cantú told The Associated Press. “Maybe I’ve got some new confidence too.”
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Nopales from the prickly pear cactus are prepared at Californios in San Francisco on Thursday, July 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Haven Daley)
Tortillas are displayed at Californios, the first Mexican restaurant in the world to earn three Michelin stars, Thursday, July 16, 2026, in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Haven Daley)
Chef Val Cantu, co-owner of Californios, poses in front of his three Michelin Star plaque in San Francisco on Thursday, July 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Haven Daley)
Chef Val Cantu, co-owner of Californios, speaks with a member of the staff in San Francisco on Thursday, July 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Haven Daley)
A tostada with bluefin tuna is prepared at Californios in San Francisco on Thursday, July 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Haven Daley)
The feat caps a trajectory that began with Cantu getting his first star right out of the gate when Californios opened in 2015. He got a second one in 2018. At a June ceremony in San Diego, Cantú, with his wife Carolyn by his side, received his third star and a crisp white Michelin chef's jacket.
The accolade feels like validation not just for Californios but for the notion that Mexican food in Mexico and across the diaspora can be an elevated experience. Similar to fine dining Chinese restaurants just a few miles away from Californios, Mexican American restaurants have dealt with criticism for daring to charge more and offering tasting menus. Meanwhile, few bat an eye at French and Japanese restaurants with similar prices.
The Michelin Guide, started in 1889 by French brothers Andre and Edouard Michelin, created a star-ranking system in the 1920s. Today, the guide has ratings for over 40,000 restaurants. To evaluate a restaurant, Michelin sends inspectors to dine anonymously. The inspectors said Californios ascended the ranks because it has never been “afraid to cross borders” on the plate, according to Michelin’s website.
From the first bite, Californios patrons experience the Texas-born Cantú's blend of Mexican culture with California ingredients. He starts a meal with a sope, a small hand-formed masa cake made with white corn and beans from a farm in nearby Santa Rosa. Then, with a spatula, caviar made in partnership with a Sacramento sturgeon farm is carefully placed on top.
“It’s just really, really delicious and kind of feels like a warm hug,” Cantú said. “It feels comforting.”
Michelin inspectors agreed.
Californios deserved a three-star promotion, one of five inspectors said, for dishes consistently “executed with such precision, refinement and clarity without losing the Mexican identity — things like kombu or the matsukasa yaki fish taco.”
Sometimes Cantú and his team would try to guess if a diner could be an inspector. That turned out to be a good reminder that “every guest gets the same quality of presentation and hospitality,” the chef said.
In the past few years, Michelin has starred a number of Mexican restaurants including a 10-by-10 foot (3-by-3 meter) taco stand in Mexico City. The growing recognition comes at a precarious time for immigration enforcement policies and the treatment of immigrants — even those in the U.S. legally.
Not someone who seeks to inject politics into food, Cantú could not ignore constant headlines about federal immigration operations — some of which have resulted in deaths including a Mexican man in Houston and a Colombian man in Maine earlier this month. Immigrants are “the backbone of all these dish pits and kitchens,” says Cantú. He has shown support through gestures. In March, he collaborated on an “anti-ICE” fundraising dinner.
“The culinary world is like a huge supporter of immigrants and the need for immigrants and the need to treat people with respect,” Cantú said. “It’s hard for me to say much more.”
Being in a blue state, Cantú is certain most of Californios’ diners share that sentiment.
Gustavo Arellano, a food writer and journalist who’s also Mexican American, believes the cuisine’s popularity really helps humanize the immigration debate.
“You see this especially like in small Southern towns where the rhetoric is ‘I’m against illegal immigrants. I don’t want too many Mexicans,'” Arellano said. “But, then they look at the Mexican restaurant in town and they’re like ‘Well, not them.’”
Growing up, Cantú watched his father and uncle in Texas run a Mexican restaurant and tortilleria. As a chef working at high-end establishments in Austin and San Francisco, he found himself asking, “Why is no one doing Mexican cuisine and treating it with like extreme care?”
Inspired by the Bay Area, he settled on the name Californios. It's a nod to descendants of Spanish and Mexican settlers who settled in the 1700s and 1800s in what would become California.
Californios started with a $57 four-course tasting menu. The pushback was immediate.
“There was ton of like, ‘This is not Mexican cuisine,’” Cantú said. “Even from our families, you know, trying to explain a contemporary cuisine to a lot of people is totally foreign because people kind of think that cuisine exists in a cookbook and that it doesn’t change.”
Californios is at the forefront of what some call “alta California” cuisine, where the children of Mexican immigrants or immigrants themselves use classical chef training with Mexican flavors. The term refers to the former Spanish province north of Baja California; Arellano describes it as an “ideology” that originated in California and has spread across the U.S.
Raised flavor profiles and prices ultimately raise skepticism. Arellano argues people think this way partly because they're trying to keep Mexican food in a box.
“There's always going to be a knee-jerk reaction,” Arellano said. “It goes to this myth that Mexican food should be cheap because Mexicans, all of us are supposedly working class that cannot afford higher-end stuff. That's classist.”
Cantú plans to keep bringing attention to his Mexican-California brand of fine dining. A cookbook is in the works.
“Mexican cuisine is one of the most diverse and complex cuisines in the world,” Cantú said, “and there’s countless Mexican immigrants in the United States and Latin immigrants who have their own ideas and concepts of what things can be.”
Tang reported from Phoenix.
Nopales from the prickly pear cactus are prepared at Californios in San Francisco on Thursday, July 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Haven Daley)
Tortillas are displayed at Californios, the first Mexican restaurant in the world to earn three Michelin stars, Thursday, July 16, 2026, in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Haven Daley)
Chef Val Cantu, co-owner of Californios, poses in front of his three Michelin Star plaque in San Francisco on Thursday, July 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Haven Daley)
Chef Val Cantu, co-owner of Californios, speaks with a member of the staff in San Francisco on Thursday, July 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Haven Daley)
A tostada with bluefin tuna is prepared at Californios in San Francisco on Thursday, July 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Haven Daley)
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The police shooting death of a homeless man who wounded an officer with a knife while resisting arrest has roiled Wisconsin's capital city, with protesters and community groups demanding accountability and an end to racial injustice.
Corey Durell Ruiz, 38, was shot and killed on a city street Wednesday, the moments of his death captured in bystander videos that were later posted online. The race of the officer who fired his gun has not been released by police. Ruiz is identified as Black or Latino in Wisconsin court records.
“It does not matter who you are or what your past is, you should not lose your life as a result of an encounter with law enforcement,” Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said during a news conference Thursday afternoon.
Wisconsin court records show Ruiz had been in and out of jail over the past decade for mostly misdemeanor offenses including disorderly conduct, drug possession, auto theft, battery and invasion of privacy. He was also convicted of felonies including possession of cocaine and marijuana, robbery, strangulation, resisting an officer and causing bodily harm.
“He’s a human being. He had a family. He has parents who loved him who brought him home, who cared for him,” Common Council President Sabrina Madison said, adding that she’s struggling to understand what she’s seen in videos of the shooting that have circulated on social media.
“My first thought is, when the officer’s walking away, why isn’t he walking away in cuffs,” Madison said. “I’m angry, there’s no way around it.”
Ruiz's family has retained Ben Crump, an attorney who has represented the families of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, who were all shot and killed by the police. Crump said the case must be examined for excessive force.
Frustrated residents marched, and a memorial of flowers and signs grew near the place where Ruiz died. It was just blocks from where two other police killings happened in 2015 and 2012.
A group of about 20 protesters burst into Thursday's news conference, taking the microphone from police Chief John Patterson and arguing with some attendees who said they wanted to hear more about the investigation.
One protester held a sign saying “Corrupt cops deserve to die too!!!”
Moments earlier, the mayor said the shooting would be “rigorously investigated.”
Once the protesters quieted down, the chief resumed his presentation, promising his department's full cooperation with the state investigation.
None of the four officers who were detaining Ruiz wore body cameras, but passersby recorded the confrontation on video, and accused the officers of overreacting.
“I thought, ‘Holy cow — what could have warranted that?’ It looked to me like they had him under control,” David Ortiz-Whittingham, who saw officers swarming and heard the gunshots, said Thursday. “Even now, knowing about the knife, did he have to die for it? Could this have been de-escalated?”
The police chief released few details Thursday, saying a Wisconsin Division of Criminal Investigation probe of the officer-involved shooting must run its course.
Earlier Thursday, Madison's independent police monitor, Aeiramique Glass, said police had not yet shared evidence or the officer's identity with her office, which will review the case and can recommend to the district attorney that charges be filed if warranted. She said the department and city are “obstructing what the community and the public” want.
“Let me do my job,” she said.
Patterson said the police were committed to cooperating with Glass.
Patterson has urged caution in reading too much from the cellphone videos. He said none show the perspective of the officers, and additional video that hasn't been released is being reviewed.
The officer who fired his weapon is an 11-year veteran of the force, the chief said. He and the three other responding officers will be placed on administrative leave pending the investigation by the Wisconsin Division of Criminal Investigation, as required under state law.
Patterson said police were responding to calls that someone was attempting to enter parked vehicles, and the suspect fled on a bike before the officers surrounded him. One deployed a taser, but Patterson said the effort failed to control the man.
In the videos circulating online, the man can be seen standing before he's brought to his knees as the officers struggle to force him into a prone position. Then he falls quickly to the pavement after what sounds like three gunshots, and seems motionless as the officers handcuff him behind his back. Arriving officers then escort one of the officers a short distance away.
Patterson said he did not know the extent of the knife injuries sustained by the officer.
“This situation was clearly dangerous," Patterson said before adding he was saddened by the loss of life.
The shooting happened in the middle of an intersection in the popular Marquette neighborhood, less than 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) from the state Capitol. Bystander videos show numerous cars at the scene, with people watching as it unfolds.
“I saw everything! I saw everything! You did not need to kill him! ... We watched it all!” a woman yells in the video recorded by Ortiz-Whittingham. Three loud shots can be heard among the sirens, followed by screams.
Residents who dealt with two other police killings expressed frustration Thursday.
In 2015, a white police officer shot and killed Tony Robinson, who was biracial, on the same street. Large protests followed, but the district attorney filed no charges, determining the officer was justified. In 2012, Paul Heenan, a white musician, was fatally shot after he had been drinking and mistakenly entered his neighbor's house. That officer was exonerated as well.
The chief acknowledged that the neighborhood “has experienced a lot of trauma” and urged people to support one another.
“I want transparency. I want accountability,” Patterson said.
Black advocacy groups, protesters and politicians are speaking out against the shooting, which has also focused attention on the Madison Police Department’s lack of body-worn cameras. The force of around 500 is among the largest in the Midwest that doesn’t use the devices.
Madison said Thursday that she expects a police request for $400,000 to be approved, enabling the cameras to be phased in over the next three years. Others lamented that cameras weren't already being used.
The mayor said her budget, which has not yet been released, will include funding for body-worn cameras. She said the city needs to put together a policy for their use before the budget takes effect in January.
The shooting has quickly infused itself into the race to succeed Evers as governor, with voting already underway in the Aug. 11 primary.
Democratic socialist candidate Francesca Hong called the shooting “state sanctioned violence” and Democrat Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley said the reports are "painfully reminiscent of the tragedies we have witnessed in Kenosha, Minneapolis, and far too many communities.”
Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany called on his rivals to let the state investigation “establish the facts without politicians rushing to judgment.”
This story has been corrected to show it is the Wisconsin Division of Criminal Investigation, not the Department of Criminal Investigation.
Associated Press writers Ed White in Detroit and Jake Offenhartz in New York contributed to this report.
Residents react during a press conference regarding the incident where a man was shot and killed on Wednesday by Madison police, Thursday, July 23, 2026, at the police station in Madison, Wis. (AP Photo/Kayla Wolf)
Family members react as they gather at a memorial Thursday, July 23, 2026, in Madison, Wis., where a Madison police officer shot and killed Corey Durell Ruiz on Wednesday. (AP Photo/Kayla Wolf)
People mourn near a memorial at the site where a man was shot and killed on Wednesday by Madison police, Thursday, July 23, 2026, in Madison, Wis. (AP Photo/Kayla Wolf)
A protester holds a photo of Corey Durell Ruiz as they march Thursday, July 23, 2026, in Madison, Wis., after he was shot and killed by a Madison police officer on Wednesday. (AP Photo/Kayla Wolf)
Protesters march after a Madison police officer shot and killed a man Wednesday, July 22, 2026, in Madison, Wis. (AP Photo/Kayla Wolf)
Attendees gesture during a candlelight vigil where a Madison police officer shot and killed a man Wednesday, July 22, 2026, in Madison, Wis. (AP Photo/Kayla Wolf)
Mourners gather around a memorial at the site where a man was shot and killed on Wednesday by Madison police, Thursday, July 23, 2026, in Madison, Wis. (AP Photo/Scott Bauer)
Attendees light candles at a candlelight vigil where a Madison police officer shot and killed a man Wednesday, July 22, 2026, in Madison, Wis. (AP Photo/Kayla Wolf)
Attendees gesture during a candlelight vigil where a Madison police officer shot and killed a man Wednesday, July 22, 2026, in Madison, Wis. (AP Photo/Kayla Wolf)
Gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong speaks alongside protesters near where a Madison police officer shot and killed a man Wednesday, July 22, 2026, in Madison, Wis. (AP Photo/Kayla Wolf)
Attendees gather at a candlelight vigil where a Madison police officer shot and killed a man Wednesday, July 22, 2026, in Madison, Wis. (AP Photo/Kayla Wolf)
Protesters march after a Madison police officer shot and killed a man Wednesday, July 22, 2026, in Madison, Wis. (AP Photo/Kayla Wolf)
