CHEF PROFILES

Tatiana Rosana: The Chef Who Brought Miami Heat to Boston’s Seaport

PARA MARIA | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM

By Eric Barton | Sept. 28, 2025

AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.

The first thing you should know about Tatiana Rosana is that dinner at her childhood home in Miami wasn’t just about eating. It was a group project. Cousins, aunts, and uncles crowded around the table, everyone with a job, kids peeling potatoes and juicing sour oranges, and music always in the background. Those meals taught her that food isn’t just sustenance — it’s work done together, an act of care, a way to make everyone part of the story.

Her grandparents had fled Cuba with nothing but the clothes they wore, and her parents were just children when they boarded Freedom Flights, unsure of what waited in a country they didn’t yet understand. That weight of loss and resilience showed up every night at the table, in rice and beans that carried memory, in roasted pork that said survival, in the unspoken reminder that food was proof the family had made it.

That’s the story Rosana carries today as chef of Para Maria at The Envoy Hotel in Boston’s Seaport. Her cooking leans global, like in her garden vegetable paella pictured up top. There’s notes of her Cuban upbringing, like in the mango in her shrimp ceviche, and her wife’s Korean heritage, like the gochuchang in her tuna tartare. But it always circles back to Miami. “Miami is in my blood,” she says. “Miami raised me, and my cooking philosophy is rooted in a deep appreciation for nostalgia and creating experiences that make people feel something.”

Tatiana Rosana

Rosana didn’t start out expecting this life. As the daughter of immigrants, she figured she’d become a doctor or a lawyer. She even enrolled in pre-med. Then, halfway through college, she realized her heart wasn’t in it. She called her father, worried she was letting him down. His answer stuck: You’ll be good at what you put your head into, but you’ll be great at what you put your heart into. She pivoted, finishing an English degree before heading to culinary school, where she found the mentors who shaped her into the chef she is now.

Her grandmother would have approved. Maria was the matriarch, the kind of woman who fed anyone who showed up and still had enough left for whoever wandered in late. Rosana remembers her cooking with purpose, never apologizing for the abundance. Para Maria is named in her honor, a restaurant that tries to recreate that same sense of generosity.

Shrimp ceviche with mango aguachile

By the time Rosana arrived in Boston, the city was cold in every way Miami wasn’t. The winters were brutal, the neighborhoods harder to crack. She missed the café con leche she could get on every corner back home. But Boston also gave her room to build something of her own. She found her people, she bought a better coat, and she made the city hers.

Tuna tartare with gochujang vinaigrette

Pork katsu sandwich

Television noticed too. Twice she won “Chopped.” She cooked under the studio lights of “Beat Bobby Flay” and “Guy’s Grocery Games.” She became a regular on “Bar Rescue.” Those shows offered chaos that wasn’t all that different from a Friday night in the kitchen—except in service, she notes, the pressure comes from diners who have chosen your restaurant, not producers looking for drama.

Tatiana Rosana with Alexis and Arlo

Her food is personal, but so is the way she talks about the industry. Rosana has become a vocal advocate for what she calls “queer food,” which she describes as more than just cooking by queer chefs. It’s about building safe, affirming spaces in a profession that has long been hostile to anyone who didn’t fit its narrow mold. “Visibility is not a luxury,” she says. “It is a necessity.” It’s not just about her and her wife of 11 years, Alexis: it’s about creating the kind of world she wants for Arlo, their son.

That idea threads through her cooking: Cuban roots, Korean influences, Boston ingredients, plated in ways that tell her story without apology. The food is hers, but it’s also bigger than her. It’s a table set like her grandmother’s, meant for family, strangers, and anyone who needs a seat.