Mendizabal is the owner and chef of Black & Orange Burgers at Dupont Circle as well as executive chef of Lima. Before coming to D.C., he was a physicist and mathematician in Cuba before escaping from the communist island nation on a raft. How did you decide to escape Cuba on a raft?

Pretty much you take a couple of inner tubes, put them together and hope for the best. We made oars out of four-by-fours. Of course we were scared. I don’t know, we just had conversations and one day, you jump. What moves you to do such a crazy thing? It’s never one thing that moves you when you jump into the water … it’s a lot of things together.