The Most Connected Person In LA’s Food Scene Isn’t A Critic, Chef, Or Creator

You’ll be talking to a chef in Los Angeles about an event they loved doing. Someone mentions Miles. A restaurant owner starts telling the story of a collaboration that unexpectedly worked. Miles comes up again. A pop-up finds itself standing next to a Michelin-starred restaurant at a festival. There’s Miles.

The references arrive casually, almost as though everyone assumes you already know who they’re talking about. The intriguing part is that many diners would struggle to pick him out of a crowd.

So who is Miles?

Miles Canares is best known as the co-founder of Family Style Fest, the food festival that helped blur the lines between restaurant culture, streetwear, and community in Los Angeles while growing into one of the most closely watched events in food—all while its lineup announcements generate the kind of anticipation usually reserved for concert posters and sneaker drops. He doesn’t run a restaurant, publish restaurant critiques, or spend his days creating food content for social media, yet over the last decade he has become one of the connective threads running through Los Angeles food culture.

The path there began in streetwear.

Back in 2013, Canares launched Venue, an independent streetwear trade show during a period when brands, retailers, bloggers, buyers, and aspiring founders still gathered under convention-center lighting to figure out what might matter next. He wasn’t arriving with a prestigious résumé or a major brand behind him. He entered the space as a fan, drawn less to products than to the people making them and the communities forming around them.

When food eventually entered the picture, the transition felt less like a career pivot than a continuation of the same fascination. Canares noticed that the people waiting hours for sneaker releases were also the people waiting hours for restaurants. Both worlds were driven by discovery, word-of-mouth, and the excitement of finding something before everyone else.

“The same kid waiting two hours for Howlin’ Ray’s was waiting two hours for a Jordan drop,” Canares told me.

What many people saw as separate cultures, he recognized as communities organized around the same impulses. That realization would eventually lead him from streetwear into food, carrying with him the same curiosity about people, taste, and the communities that form around them.

That realization eventually led to projects like K-Town Night Market and The Eat Show before expanding into ComplexCon’s food programming and, ultimately, Family Style Fest, which he co-founded with Ben and Bobby Hundreds of streetwear institution The Hundreds in 2019. In many ways, the festival became a natural extension of the overlap Canares had been noticing for years between food culture and streetwear culture.

Today, Family Style occupies an unusual place within food culture because it resists many of the hierarchies that typically shape food events. Michelin-starred chefs share space with neighborhood institutions. Nationally recognized restaurants appear alongside businesses many attendees may be encountering for the first time. The resulting lineup often feels less concerned with status than with conversation, which is perhaps why Canares spends so much time thinking about who belongs next to whom.

Listening to him describe the process, I expected a discussion about trends, rankings, or the endless chase for whatever restaurant currently occupies the center of the internet’s attention. “I first just become friends with these people,” Canares said. “I don’t have a motive of, like, I want to write about them.” Instead, the conversation kept returning to relationships. Restaurant owners call him. He calls them. Conversations continue even when there is no immediate opportunity attached. Some restaurants eventually participate in Family Style. Others never do. Some collaborations materialize. Others remain ideas exchanged over text messages and dinners. The relationship survives either outcome. In an industry increasingly organized around transactions, there is something almost old-fashioned about the way Canares describes staying in touch with people simply because he enjoys knowing them.

That distinction feels important because so much of modern food culture is organized around extraction. A restaurant becomes content. A chef becomes a story. A collaboration becomes a headline. Canares seems more interested in maintaining the relationship than forcing the outcome, which may explain why restaurant owners continue picking up the phone.

That perspective may explain why Family Style feels different from many food festivals. Canares doesn’t seem to think in terms of vendors so much as characters.

“I liken it a lot to making a movie,” he said. “There’s your first on the call sheet—your A-list actors. Then there’s your breakout stars.”

The comparison helps explain why a Michelin-starred restaurant might share space with a neighborhood favorite or an emerging concept. Canares isn’t simply assembling a lineup; he’s thinking about how each participant contributes to the larger experience.

That same philosophy extends beyond the restaurants themselves. During our conversation, he became animated discussing floor plans, walking through the thought process behind who stands next to whom, which sections should feel lively, and how some of the festival’s best discoveries happen by accident.

“It’s like planning a city,” he said.

The line lingered with me long after our lunch ended because it revealed how differently Canares thinks about the event. Most attendees experience Family Style as a finished product—a lineup flyer, a ticket, a day spent eating. He’s focused on everything that happens before that: the relationships, the pairings, and the small decisions that shape how people move through the festival and what they leave talking about afterward.

For years, those decisions kept him awake at night.

He told me he would agonize over lineup announcements, second-guess placements, reshuffle participants, and wonder whether he had overlooked someone deserving. The anxiety makes sense. Los Angeles alone contains enough extraordinary restaurants to make consensus impossible, and Family Style now stretches beyond Los Angeles into New York, Miami, New Orleans, and Las Vegas.

Somewhere along the way, however, the pressure seems to have evolved.

“It doesn’t have to be who’s on the lists all the time,” Canares said. “It can be spots that you genuinely like. Let’s see who likes them.”

There is a generosity in that statement that feels increasingly rare because many people build platforms around certainty. Canares appears to have built his around curiosity.

Curiosity brought him into streetwear despite having no obvious pathway into the industry. Curiosity pulled him toward food. Curiosity still sends him driving across neighborhoods because someone mentioned a restaurant worth checking out. Curiosity allows him to have a celebrated chef collab with a little-known business and trust that the audience will figure out why the pairing works.

Los Angeles rewards that instinct because no single person can fully map the city. Its food culture stretches across neighborhoods, immigrant histories, family businesses, and generations of accumulated knowledge, creating a landscape too large for any one person to claim complete ownership of. The best anyone can do is help illuminate a corner of it.

That may be where Miles Canares fits in. He isn’t evaluating restaurants, building them, or documenting them so much as creating pathways between them, introducing people to places, communities, and conversations they may not have encountered otherwise.

In a city where some of the most remarkable meals remain hidden in plain sight, that role carries a quiet influence all its own.