When I was growing up in Southern California in the early 1990s, my family often went out to eat on weekends. We didn’t go out for Mexican food very much though. The food served at popular Mexican restaurants – with baskets of cold tortilla chips and salsas that were mostly raw tomato – were “not the real thing,” my mother would say.
A Google image search of an El Torito menu from those days reveals images of combination plates of burritos and taquitos topped with sour cream that looks like it was piped through a cake decorating tip, garnished with a single black olive. So maybe Mom had a point.
Certainly nothing compared to Mom’s cooking. Hers was the best.
“In those days there were only certain places that you knew you could go to and [you knew] it was going to be good,” recalls Diana Robertson, who owns Cielito Lindo on Olvera Street in downtown Los Angeles. “If you have the real stuff, my goodness, you don’t want to throw money away on something that is not going to be delicious, because you’ve been blessed to have that real home cooking!”
Cielito Lindo was opened by Robertson’s grandmother in 1934. Famous for taquitos and their signature avocado sauce, the spot is counted among those authentic OG places by Southern Californians who know what’s auténtico.
On those weekend dinner trips of my childhood, there was only one Mexican place my family frequented with any regularity: Colima Mexican & Seafood Restaurant, on North Fairview Street in Santa Ana. Owned by Arturo Valencia, the restaurant is named for the Mexican state where my mother is from. It specializes in mariscos and other dishes you might find in its coastal namesake.
“My mom’s side of the family always had catering trucks, or lunch wagons as they call it,” Valencia says. “We’ve always been in the food business.”
The tortilla chips at Colima’s are served warm, and the salsa isn’t made of raw tomato, but instead flecked with the charred skin of roasted tomatoes and seeds of chilies. The corn tortillas are hecho a mano. The birria is made with chivo. Back then, it was the only Mexican restaurant that earned my mother’s approval.
“Your Mom came here because she liked the food, because she realized it was like her cooking,” says Valencia.
To be honest, I wasn’t always excited about visiting Colima’s as a kid, especially when I knew we could be at Pizza Hut. Sometimes, I was afraid friends visiting my house would detect the strong smell of roasting chiles that permeated the house when Mother held poblanos over the open flame of our stove, or the potent scent of tripe simmering with hominy in menudo – and notice an otherness I wanted to conceal.
But I also spent the entire year longing for the savory shredded beef and earthy corn masa of the tamales we only made together as a family during Christmas time. Such is the complexity of being the child of immigrants. I grappled with looking Latina but not knowing Spanish, and deciding how much claim I wanted to lay to a culture that was consistently devalued in the society I lived in.
Eventually, I was able to connect deeply and fully with my culture – and food played a large role in getting me there.
During high school, I got a job at a small café as a hostess, which launched my nearly 15-year stint in the restaurant industry. I learned a great deal about demi-glace and haricot verts in the many high-end establishments I worked in, but I did not see the food I grew up eating on those menus.
That is, until I went to work at Taco Maria in Costa Mesa.
“Taco Maria is, and continues to be, a vehicle for me to explore my identity and my origins,” says Carlos Salgado, the restaurant’s owner and chef.
Taco Maria opened in 2013 and earned a Michelin star by 2019. In a move that can be classified as radical, Taco Maria didn’t even serve chips and salsa. It began as a taco truck – the way Colima’s did – and tortillas are hecho a mano, made from heirloom blue corn masa, cooked and ground in-house.
But that is where the similarities to Colima’s end. Before the pandemic, Taco Maria served a four-course menu with dishes like lamb birria made with farmers market ingredients along with thoughtful wine pairings. Salgado applied the technique and reverence he learned working in fine-dining establishments in San Francisco to Mexican food, and thereby created a dining experience that previously had only been presented within the context of European cuisines.
“I recognized a lot disparities in fine food and in Mexican restaurants, and there were what I perceived to be these artificial stratification in food of different cultures,” Salgado says. “Why was the same product served en croûte with a bone reduction any more valuable than a product served in masa with a complex mole sauce that came from Mexico? That didn’t make sense to me.”
Salgado introduced me to the idea that the second dish was no less luxurious, delicious, cultured or storied than the first. He grew up in Orange County where his parents owned a Mexican restaurant of their own, La Siesta.
Places like Cielito Lindo, Colima and La Siesta were opened by immigrants to make a living and to serve people from their homeland. “When we first opened, clientele was maybe 80 percent Hispanic and 20 percent American,” Valencia observes. Colima’s customer base today is incredibly diverse by comparison. “Now we have Vietnamese, Korean, Hispanic … all coming in.”
These spaces also served as ways for first-generation immigrants to preserve their heritage.
Robertson says much of the modern interpretations we see of Mexican food today owe their existence to the early vendors of Olvera Street.
“A lot of the food that you see now … it survived because that small group of people were able to speak their language and bring their traditions, their dances, their songs and their food to a safe place,” Robertson says. “We were able to preserve a lot of the Mexican culture in L.A. as it developed.”
Like many of the industry pioneers, Robertson says she isn’t very progressive when it comes to modern takes on Mexican cuisine – although she does sees certain adaptations as a necessity.
“For one thing, my mom used to make chile rellenos,” says Robertson. “Now in Mexico when you say chile rellenos, you are going to get that big chile that looks like a bell pepper. But she couldn’t find that here, so she used Anaheim peppers. The differences were organic.”
Cielito Lindo’s own signature avocado sauce, while rooted in Mexican tradition, was developed in Los Angeles. A quip from an Anglo about Mexican food having no variety influenced Robertson’s grandmother to express how diverse her food could be.
“They said, ‘All the Mexican food is the same! It’s all red!’” says Robertson. “So she just went home and whipped up something. And now remember these were poor people, so she used some avocado and some tomatillo. She wouldn’t be able to make a guacamole because that would be too expensive.”
What she did come up with was a delicious vibrant green sauce that people took to, and is part of the reason Cielito Lindo is still popular today.
At Colima’s, Valencia says his ingredients are locally sourced, but he is committed to authenticity.
“We try to be the mom-and-pop restaurant, and we try to be as authentic as possible,” says Valencia. “The recipes are my mom’s, and we try to make the food, as much as possible, as what you get [in Colima.]”
Questions of authenticity seem only to be reserved for ethnic cuisines, and it’s a question Salgado answers with another: “What purposes does it serve? And does it have any real influence on the enjoyment? Remember that restaurants and meals are ultimately about creating happiness. Authenticity is one of those things that you can rigidly define and when you do, you probably find that virtually nothing is categorically authentic.”
The old-school places started doing it their way because that was the only way they could. They adjusted to what was around them and incorporated what was available. It’s the way they are still doing it. It will always have a place in Southern California.
“My parents’ food at their restaurant was like your rice and bean and one enchilada, one hard shell taco … covered in cheese, put under the salamander, with shredded lettuce and a slice of out-of-season tomato,” Salgado says. “And you know what? I love it and I miss it a lot.”
But in the way the first generation arrived in the United States and mixed it up out of necessity and ingenuity and straight-up survival, the next generation is layering their own experience into the recipes.
“And there is something about this last generation, where maybe we developed the generational wealth to create riskier experiments in modern restaurants,” Salgado says. “Maybe our parents have succeeded in passing on to us that incredible work ethic and pride in our culture.”
The threads that run through the generations are not that hard to trace.
One day while I was polishing wine glasses in the kitchen at Taco Maria, a prep cook tipped a large pot over to strain the maize that was cooking to be made into masa. The steam that filled the air was perfumed with the scent of corn, and the warmth the steam produced quickly made the already hot kitchen even warmer.
I identified it as one of the strong smells that permeated my childhood home. The smell, the steam and the warmth felt so distinctly familiar, my eyes inexplicably welled with tears. It was a small but powerful moment that sent a wave of pride and a surge of connection to the work I was doing right through me. This was the food of my people.
Mexican food is cycling through a natural progression, and while it is impossible for each new generation to carry the sum total of the previous generation’s food and culture into the future, it is a noble endeavor to try. I now see previous generations more as guardians of traditions and understand their unwillingness to let go of them.
Mom had a daughter who didn’t speak the language and didn’t care to know the customs. She feared something would be lost. That she might be lost. So, supporting restaurants like Colima’s, which made food that reminded her of home, was one way to ensure that traditions might live on.
As I have grown older, I have come to embrace the smell of roasting chiles and the visits to Colima Restaurant. I ask Mom to show me how she makes the food that produces the bold smells in our home so that I might continue make it. She shows me how she roasts chilies and how she pinches off the right amount of masa for tortillas hecho a mano. In turn, my mother has grown less rigid in her evaluation of Mexican restaurant food. Though Mom still maintains that hers is almost always better.
