- Low-riding is therapy to me.
You just get in the car.
It's almost like taking a long walk.
My mind goes somewhere else.
To me, low-riding, it's my heart.
When I was 13 years old,
me and my cousin, Robert, used to walk to school together
and my neighbor, Rego, he was outside one day,
shining up his '87 Monte Carlo.
I told Robert, "You go talk to him."
Robert's like, "No, you go talk to him."
I ended up getting the courage.
I went up to him like, "Hey, nice car."
And he's like, "Hey, you kids need a ride to school?"
Pulling up that first time
and he hit the switches,
everybody in the school was like,
"Oh! It's so cool!
Wow!"
That day I told Rego,
I said I want a lowrider just like this one.
He said, "You're going to have a lot more."
And you know what?
That day, it changed my life.
I have an '87 Luxury Sport Monte Carlo, G body.
It's candy apple red with gold leaf pinstriping,
airbrushing on the trunk
and also in door jambs.
I have red zenith wire wheels with white walls.
My interior's custom.
It's a peanut butter colored leather interior
with diamond stitching.
I have a V8 engine.
I have a stock engine because
my lowrider's a daily driver
and it's on juice.
Juice is hydraulics.
The hydraulics have front-back, side-to-side.
It has an extra two inch lock up in the front.
My lowrider is, honestly, my childhood dream.
I bought this car from my cousin, Ogi.
I begged him for two years to sell it to me.
He was building this Monte Carlo.
The car was in okay condition.
I remember it having
a little more stock wheels, stock trunk.
The engine didn't even look too good in there.
The interior was ripped up.
It was like a diamond in the rough.
But we took this car and we built it from scratch
and once I saw it being built,
I got a little bit jealous.
I said, "No, Z, sell me that car."
Low-riding
it's an art.
My car is a reflection of me.
It shows character, accomplishment,
and it shows that I'm an artist.
I love going down 4th Street.
I love seeing the culture.
I love seeing my people.
I was born in Newport Beach, California,
raised in Westminster.
I'm the youngest of the three.
I have two older sisters.
My dad's Guatemalan
and my mom's from Durango, Mexico.
She was that stay-at-home mom,
became an attorney.
Coming from Durango, Mexico not knowing anything,
not knowing the culture, the English, nothing,
for her to speak perfect English
and to become a lawyer,
man, my mom is amazing.
And she helped out my dad a lot.
She was my dad's muscle.
My dad was a valet parker.
And one day, the owner of the restaurant came out and said,
"I need cooks. All the cooks walked out."
And my dad said, "Hey, I'll cook tonight."
My dad's passion for the kitchen after that
was a big deal.
He became a chef.
The owner of the restaurant, Rex Chandler,
he ended up putting my dad as the executive chef.
My dad ran 21 Oceanfront.
He got a Michelin star.
He was one of the top chefs of Orange County.
You know what, I always wanted to follow his footsteps.
I always wanted to be like him
and that's when I came into the business,
at the age of 13.
I was 13 years old.
I was into the street culture.
I was into graffiti.
I did my big graffiti piece in Westminster
and I ended up getting locked up
right in front of the block.
My mom went and bailed me out.
My dad got so pissed off.
He said, "Why don't you just leave him in there?"
Like, "No, that's my only son.
I have hope for him."
My mom had a conversation with me that day.
She said, "Why?
Why, mijo?
We worked so hard to come to this country.
Why be bad?"
And it clicked to me, you know?
Like, "Hey, I'm sorry.
I'll make it up to you."
The money that my dad spent to bail me out,
I ended up having to pay it back
so I ended up washing dishes.
But one day I was watching my dad
and he was over there cooking, doing everything,
running the whole restaurant.
It was almost like an orchestra.
I wanted to be just like him.
On the car ride home that day,
he told, "Your graffiti art is just like my dishes.
Your canvas is a wall.
My canvas is a dish.
You can have everything, it's yours."
And that's when I wanted to become a chef.
I'm the executive chef at Cafe Tu Tu Tango.
Since the age of 20,
I've ran a lot of restaurants
all over Southern California, Orange County.
We're talking about Savannah Chop House, French 75,
five diamond restaurants.
Now I'm here at Cafe Tu Tu Tango.
Cooking is fun.
It's not a hobby or nothing.
It's me, it's my lifestyle.
I love making people happy.
I love entertaining.
I love it when somebody sees my dish
and they're like, "Man," big smile on their face.
Cooking to me is
making my dad proud,
filling his shoes.
The day that he told me that
I was going to become better than him was--
Here it is today:
I will never be better than him.
One of my dreams was this:
Not only becoming a chef,
was to be on TV shows,
to entertain everybody.
I ended up coming on Food Network.
I ended up winning Season 9 of Guy's Grocery Games;
Cutthroat Kitchen, Season 2;
and also A&E FYI Mavericks Challenge.
Being executive chef at the age of 20,
being Hispanic, Latino,
people doubt us.
You know what?
I'm tattooed, I'm bald-headed.
I run a successful business
and I have other businesses coming up.
Armani is seven years old.
He's my everything.
I want to inspire my little boy,
my two boys.
I have Armani, whose seven years old.
Little Chris passed away last year.
He was only nine months.
Little Chris was born with a bad heart.
He had a lot of operations.
That week that
he got sick,
his doctor was on vacation and
he was a specialist.
On the way to the hospital,
I rushed him to the hospital that day
and he passed.
It wasn't the same afterwards.
It wasn't the same.
A month later, I got a divorce.
I had to start life over again.
I lost everything.
The house, the cars, everything.
Whenever you have a downfall, you get back up.
Everybody judges the lowrider culture.
Everybody thinks that it's a cholo scene,
it's a bad scene.
There's bad scenes everywhere,
but when they see somebody like me
that's driving a machine like that,
they don't know the hustle behind it.
They don't know what I went through
to get something like this.
They don't see the passion behind it, the love.
They don't see me driving it with my little boy,
having the conversations in the car.
They don't see me using this as therapy.
They don't see the heart behind it.
There's a lot of heart behind it.
When you're a teenager, everybody thinks that
the world's against you.
All that you got to say is,
where am I going to be at in the future?
Where am I going to see myself?
And, alls I can say, never ever ever ever ever ever give up.
You cannot be afraid of anything.
You have to do it on your own.
We came to this world on our own.
Why not do it?
And it's only in you
who you want to become.
My name is Chris Zoran.
I'm an executive chef,
and I'm a Lowrider Roll Model.