Real Teachers: The Great Susana Trilling
By Stuart Grauer

Walking past a little hole-in-the-wall in the sleepy village of Pomuch, Yucatan—a place I would have never noticed—Susana suddenly stopped our group and led us inside, all the way to the back. There, what looked to my gringo eye like a short-order cook was at work. But he was no short-order cook: this man made the best pibil in the state and was a good old friend of Susana.

Great art challenges our routine assumptions, disrupts our day, and, at its greatest, inspires us to live more creatively and better.

Most people knew Susana Trilling as a chef, and rightly so. But to me, she was something else. She was a real teacher. One of the greats. Her classroom was a spacious teaching kitchen in Oaxaca, which inspired The Grauer School's teaching kitchen, and also inspired the world. Her lectures came through stories, scents, and presence. Her assessments were things like knowing looks and full bellies after communal meals. Or just a nod.

When I first visited her school, Seasons of My Heart, I wasn’t looking to improve my cooking. I’d been lured in by her book, The Seven Moles of Oaxaca and a beautiful city. But ultimately, she earned a place in my personal pantheon of real teachers—those rare individuals who teach far beyond their discipline.

Monte Alban School

I related to her as a school founder. She had made her mark as a celebrated chef in New York City—where fame, fortune, and burnout run together (and where I was born)—and then gave it all up to start a school in a humble countryside enclave outside Oaxaca, Mexico. She launched Seasons of My Heart in 1999, in the Etla Valley just northwest of Oaxaca City and not far from the ancient ruins of Monte Albán. The area was rich in culture.

Like my own concept of a great school, her Rancho Aurora was no big-money magnet; it was a sanctuary rooted in tradition, family, and purpose. As I was deep in the process of creating something of my own—a school, a community, a philosophy—my own teachers began appearing in less conventional forms, from farther places. Susana stood out among them. She was a polymath of the senses, a connector of worlds, and a teacher of teachers.

I was learning that teaching, and learning, aren’t based so much on subject matter as they are on one’s way of living, and on devotion to an art.

Tradition & Ceremony

A couple of years after that first meeting, I was called back down to that area, to a tiny hillside village just outside the revered, ancient Monte Albán. A nonprofit had found me and asked for help in establishing a school there.

When I arrived, I walked straight into the third day of a three-day wedding ceremony—people milling about the hillside. At the kitchen hearth in a covered hollow near the bottom, there were gigantic vats of mole, a few bottles of clear liquid with worms settled at the bottom, and steaming tamales wrapped in banana leaves, served fresh from a couple of open fires. Laughing children chased roosters between adobe walls and makeshift wooden fences—scenes I instantly started capturing for my book Real Teachers, and that still remind me how incredibly sweet this life can be when it’s simple.

I learned a little of the tradition down there: the dusty road that led to the single water source, which stayed locked most of the week; the women in embroidered huipiles grinding dry corn on metates; the altar candles flickering beside marigolds—and a little community room with a dozen computers.

This is the culture Susana settled in. And no haute cuisine tasting menu on Manhattan’s Upper East Side—the other place she came from—could ever match it.

Cooking School

As we studied with her at her school near Monte Albán, spending hours just chopping, we saw how these people, her staff, were not just employees—they were family. They were part of a fabric of loyalty and rootedness, the dishes they created were extensions of that, and I wanted my school to be that way which sometimes has been tough to do in a world where so many people focus on a “work-life separation” that I never understood. They belonged. They lived it.

In their kitchen, we all toiled together, immersed in the simple rhythm of chopping, in search of the greatest mole ever made—with love.

Year’s later, we traveled with Susana and her son Kaelin through Yucatán, watching them both distinguish the flavors of each region—not from books, but from knowing the best chefs personally, often in their own, dirt backyards: planting pibil underground, lighting the fires in earthen pits, or tucked in roadside joints making the best achiote by hand. On a panga on the Caribbean coast, the fishermen who somehow all revered Susana chopped the red onion relish with the sharpest knife in the world with one hand, squeezed the limes with the other.

On another tour through Mexico City, she would stop us at market stalls and tiny restaurants—places we would never have seen—because she knew the people behind them. She greeted vendors by name, tasted their goods with reverence, and guided us toward unassuming corners that held little culinary treasures. It wasn’t about glamour or prestige. It was about uniqueness, connection, and story.

Each dish was a relationship that starts with recipes such as we call lesson plans but launches from there into the creative process using what is fresh and local as teaching resources.

They all reminded me of why I had created a small school.

Susana’s school was a quiet masterclass in how to live and teach. Through her simple way of teaching, she offered lessons that academics and psychologists around the world could write books and design courses about. She was beautiful, too—with warm, knowing eyes and a gentle smile, always adorned in an exotic splash of color and pattern woven into traditional motifs, as if her spirit was stitched into everything she wore, though on our last trip she had to step away regularly to try to clear her throat, and those times were a bit of solemn pause.

How She Taught

First, she taught us, without ever saying so, that close relationships with family, colleagues, and friends come first. She prioritized shared meals, face-to-face conversation, and time together in the kitchen. No digital shortcuts. No organizational chart.

Second, her whole life invited us to cultivate our inner life: she honored the land, the seasons and whatever was fresh, and the stories and people behind the ingredients. Today, when I ask waiters if this or that is sustainably harvested it is normally a joke because I know they seldom know. But for her this was no joke. Cooking as a sacred act of attention and gratitude to the natural world, the seasons of our hearts.

Third, while we all appreciate comfort, Susana reminded us that what the heart truly craves is meaning. A simple meal, prepared with love and shared with others, far outweighed anything money could buy—the joy of simplicity.

I’ll never forget watching her eat—how she’d dip her fingers gently into a mole or a broth. She did this kind of tasting everywhere, even in five-star restaurants: just pinch her fingers into something on the plate and taste it. She trusted her senses, her intuition, her heritage. Those were teaching moments of trusting oneself and learning by direct experience.

“I listen,” she said, “to the ingredients, to the people.” Of course, she was talking about the stories behind them that are the teaching. Like making the mole negro not from a recipe, but from memory and scent, how she toasted each ingredient until it “smelled like it was about to burn,” then ground them by hand on a metate just fine enough. What’s powerful is that she was actually born in Philadelphia and later on, called to something old, chose to become a student of those traditions. She learned from Indigenous cooks, village grandmothers, and street vendors—grinding ingredients on the stones, making tamales, and learning the art of mole not from cookbooks, but from elders who cooked by intuition and memory and who were ennobled by Susana and loved her.

Legacy

Susana passed away just a few days ago, on May 2, 2025, at 70 years of age. May she rest in peace.

Her legacy continues through Kaelin, who is ensuring that Seasons of My Heart remains in excellent hands. We watched him lovingly tend to his mother as she tried to continue her journeys—integrating into her vast global network of culinary artists and artisans, while quietly hiding her discomfort as her health slipped away. As we sampled generations-old recipes she devoted her life to preserving, Kaelin was already beginning to carry her vision forward. He will continue expanding the school’s reach—you can buy their mole in Costco now!-- developing her networks and recipes, and sharing their spirit around the world.

Susana Trilling exemplified the idea that great teaching and leadership are equivalent to the study of great teachers and leaders, wherever you find them, in whatever form they express it.

Susana Trilling was a Real Teacher. Now I think about her when I pass someone I would have ignored, fully concentrated and absorbed in some tiny working space, or even when I am tasting some savory flavor I might have scarfed down mindlessly, or anywhere people are so immersed for so long in their art and science that you know is their life.

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