Jorge de la Torre is the Director of Culinary Arts for Kitchen Network-Park Hill, a non-profit incubator/accelerator/commissary for minority owned businesses and a workforce development learning center in Denver, Colorado. Jorge graduated from the University of New Mexico with a bachelor’s degree in business before going the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco. After graduation from culinary school, Jorge de la Torre worked at in San Francisco and Hawaii. He then moved to Vail, Colorado, and worked for Vail Associates and was chef/owner of a restaurant. He also worked for Whole Foods in Denver, many catering companies and a steakhouse in NYC before finding his true culinary passion to teach.
In 2001, de la Torre began his career as a culinary educator as a chef instructor for The Restaurant School at Walnut Hill College in Philadelphia, PA. He joined Johnson & Wales University-Denver in 2002 as the director of culinary operations, received his master’s degree in Adult Education from Colorado State University and was promoted to the position of dean of culinary education in 2005 until the University’s closing in 2021.
He is on the board for We Don’t Waste, a nonprofit that picks up food from restaurants, stadiums, caterers to distribute for free to those in need, Work Options that focuses on teaching professional culinary skills to formerly incarcerated people and is a council member for CHOW (Culinary Hospitality Outreach and Wellness) which deals with the mental issues of the culinary world.