Angela Dimayuga Is the New Creative Director of Food and Culture at the Standard

Angela Dimayuga is no longer a free agent. The former executive chef of Mission Chinese is now the creative director of food and culture for the Standard International hotel group, Grub Street reports. She started last week.

During her six years at Mission Chinese, Dimayuga was responsible for some of the restaurant’s most famous dishes, like Josefina’s House Special Chicken, green tea noodles, and the bread service. She resigned in October, later citing an inability to grow at Mission Chinese as the reason for her departure — specifically, Mission Chinese owner Danny Bowien declined to include her in plans for a new Brooklyn location.

At the Standard, Dimayuga will oversee the hotel’s restaurants, as well as lead programming that combines food, music, and art. In the years prior to leaving mission Chinese, Dimayuga worked as more than a chef, collaborating on projects in the arts, fashion, and nightlife. She’ll further that multidisciplinary approach to her work in the new role. “To be honest, when I thought about next steps, ‘Angela Dimayuga to open her own restaurant’ was too linear,” she told Grub Street. “I wanted to do a lot more exploration.”

The Standard, which has hotel locations in New York City, Los Angeles, and Miami, is expanding outside of the U.S. for the first time. Dimayuga will take the lead at the restaurant at the new London location set to open 2019, as well as work with the chefs at the existing Standard hotels. According to Dimayuga, she may also have the opportunity to work on the restaurants and cultural programming at future Standard hotels in San Francisco, Milan, Phuket, and Mexico City.

Dimayuga’s move to hotels isn’t entirely without precedent. Chefs and hotels have gotten cozier and cozier over the past few years. The Sydell Group made quality restaurants a top priority at the Line brand of hotels by recruiting chefs like Spike Gjerde and Erik Bruner-Yang in D.C. and Roy Choi in Los Angeles. The Nomad, the name of both the Sydell Group hotel and the restaurant run by Eleven Madison Park’s Daniel Humm and Will Guidara, recently expanded to Los Angeles. Plus, the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas just unveiled six new restaurant openings for this fall, including Andy Ricker’s Pok Pok and famed Nashville hot chicken restaurant Hattie B’s.

Dimayuga sees the job as a way to take a more all-encompassing approach to serving a guest, and although she doesn’t divulge her particular plans for cultural programming, pop-ups and partnerships with musicians, artists, chefs, and more are extremely likely. She says of her new gig, “It’s lifestyle-connected and that’s what I’ve always been drawn to. It’s an opportunity to take my interest in hospitality as a cook to the next level.”

• At the Standard, Angela Dimayuga Wants to Further Blur the Line Between Food, Art, and Activism [Grubstreet]