When you first press play on Álvaro Díaz’s “Omakase,” you are immediately transported into the kitchen. A stove flickers on. A knife hits the cutting board. Chants of “¡Sí, chef!” ring out like a dubbed episode of “The Bear.” Then, before the listener can fully settle in, the Puerto Rican rapper and singer fires off bars claiming that Grammys were stolen from him and details his many nights spent sleeping on the floor to his new normal of earning $500,000 per show.
It is a boastful, theatrical and deeply specific opener — but after the double whammy of past album releases “Felicilandia” (2021) and “Sayonara” (2024), which helped Díaz ascend well beyond the Puerto Rican trap scene he called home, his swagger feels earned.
Across the next 16 tracks, Díaz invites listeners into what he describes as his own kitchen. The title comes from the Japanese tradition of trusting the chef to serve whatever they choose. For Díaz, that idea became the album’s creative language.
“I was like, exactly, I want to be the chef,” Díaz says. “I just want to do what I want. People trust me, and I just give them the experience.”
That trust sits at the center of “Omakase.” Instruments become ingredients. Songs become dishes. Genres become flavors. Rather than building an album designed to explain himself to a wider audience, Díaz uses “Omakase” to pull listeners deeper into his own taste.
The kitchen concept also has roots beyond the album’s title. Díaz points to his cousin — Chef Tino, a Puerto Rican chef he grew up watching on television, as one of the figures who shaped the visual and conceptual language of the project. Set in Isabela, Puerto Rico, “The Table by Chef Tino” sees diners sit close to the kitchen and watch the cooking unfold in real time.
For Díaz, the appeal was not only the finished meal, but the performance and chaos of getting there: the shouting, the fire, the timing, the ingredients becoming something else in front of you. “I wanted to really get into the process of the kitchen,” he explains, describing the project in stages: “The raw part, the fire, and then the plating.”
That became clear this past September with “Seleda,” the album’s first single: a groovy, merengue-laced track built around spacey piano, oddball synths, and a playful eccentricity that feels closer to Tyler, the Creator than any obvious Latin radio formula.
It was the first taste of Díaz’s anything goes approach, one that would expand through singles like “Babyrecords” and “Malasnoticias,” the latter featuring Mexican trio Latin Mafia over synths that sound like they were pulled straight from the anxious neon haze of “Uncut Gems.”
“That’s what I want to do with this album,” Díaz says. “I want to surprise people. I think the first listen is going to be amazing.”
In today’s Latin pop landscape, looking backward has become a way to move forward. Música mexicana’s boom has reimagined sounds passed down through generations with corridos, rancheras, norteño, banda and sierreño for the streaming era. Bad Bunny’s “Debi Tirar Más Fotos” turned Puerto Rican traditions like plena and música jíbara into a modern love letter to the island, while Karol G’s “Tropicoqueta” embraced the Latin genres she grew up with, from vallenato and merengue to cumbia and reggaeton.
“Omakase” is in conversation with that same roots-first impulse, but Díaz’s inheritance is messier and more personal. His Puerto Rican foundation is there in the chef concept, the merengue, the reggaeton, the Boricua slang — but so is internet culture, Deftones, anime or films like “Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World,” and “Uncut Gems.” For Díaz, heritage is not a fixed sound to preserve; it is one ingredient in a larger mythology.
For Díaz, that freedom is part of the mission. “Latinos, we don’t have to only make stuff about us,” he says. “You don’t have to be afraid of the same references, of this sound, this type of music. It’s not just reggaeton or just rap.”
That philosophy carries into his curation of collaborators. By bringing artists like Rúbí, Akriila and Latin Mafia into the realm of “Omakase,” Díaz surrounds himself with artists stretching what Latin music can sound like, look like and reference.
A prime example of that post-crossover approach is “Bimel,” a song that sees Díaz reconnecting with Lv Ciudvd member Caleb Calloway over a drum loop that feels drawn from the early works of Pharrell and the Neptunes. The track also features unlisted cameos from Rauw Alejandro, Papi Sousa and Feid, tucked into the song like Easter eggs, rather than announced as marquee features.
For Díaz, that choice was intentional. He wanted to include his friends in the world of “Omakase” without letting the feature list overpower the project’s mystique. Rather than turning the song into an obvious posse cut, Díaz treats those voices like hidden ingredients.
On “Pienso En Ti,” that philosophy turns volatile. It opens with distorted drums and scratchy, warped synths before transforming, about a minute in, into a full-on cumbia track. The switch catches the listener off guard, especially as Díaz slips into sad boy mode, singing about a girl he still catches himself thinking about. Then, in its final minute, the song mutates again, this time into reggaeton.
“Pienso En Ti” also carries extra emotional weight as the last track Díaz got to work on with Mexican artist and producer Milkman, who passed away. “Shout out Milkman, bro,” Díaz says. “He was crazy.” Díaz remembers Milkman as someone who was real, calling him, asking what he was working on, and pushing him creatively. “He was always checking on me,” Díaz says. “Always.”
The song also reveals how deep Díaz’s reference points can go. While discussing the track, he mentioned that some of its atmosphere and strings reminded him of Deftones’ “Sextape,” a detail that helps explain why the song feels so hard to place. It is not simply cumbia, reggaeton, alt-pop, or urbano; it carries a shoegazing moodiness, an emotional fog that makes the genre switches feel less like gimmicks and more like memories changing shape.
By the time “Omakase” reaches its second half, the world only gets stranger. “INAROW62” opens with a “Scott Pilgrim” sound bite, continuing a reference point Díaz previously explored on the “Sayonara” track “Ramona Flowers” — named after the titular character’s edgy female love interest. The track begins almost like an acoustic ballad before corrido-like trumpets cut through, followed by spicy synths that pull the song into a completely different emotional register. Across his music, characters like Ramona Flowers, Mia Wallace (“Pulp Fiction”) and Elvira Hancock (“Scarface”) become portals for him to process matters of love, obsession, distance and fantasy.
The project is already set to move beyond the album — Díaz has teased a tour in support of “Omakase.”
“I want people to pull up dressed as chefs,” Díaz says. “That’s the vibe. You’re not just going to a show, you’re coming into the restaurant.”
Perhaps the biggest takeaway from Díaz’s adventurous approach is that the future of Latin music does not have to be built around making itself easier to understand for outsiders. It can be more specific, more referential, more personal or more unruly. “Omakase” feels like a portrait of Latin music after the crossover era: full-on world building instead of translation.
Díaz does not invite listeners in by simplifying himself; he simply invites them to trust the chef.
The post Álvaro Díaz dares Latin trap fans to expand their palates in ‘Omakase’ appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
