My favorite burrito in the United States is at Lucy’s Drive-in, on Pico Boulevard and La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles, a beat-down diner where black and brown chow down on classic Cal-Mex grub. The chile relleno burrito, a hunk of milky cheese inside a slightly spicy, egg-battered pepper, next to a sweet vein of refried beans, wrapped in a tissuelike flour tortilla, and washed down with the whipped-fruit drink Orange Bang!, is edible paradise. The best tamales in the United States are at my family’s house come Christmastime … but since you’re not invited, the next best thing are those from the Mississippi Delta—specifically the ones steamed at Pasquale’s Tamales, a trailer in Helena, Arkansas, run by a third-generation Sicilian-American tamalero: they are chewy, spicy temples of American multiculturalism. And oh, those lamb chicharrones at Angelina’s in Española, New Mexico, fried and gnarled and succulent and so gamy you can taste the bah.
See how personal my tastes are, and how they probably don’t match yours? How ultimately frustrating it is to try to compile a list of the best Mexican food in America. Is it just me, or is reading now reduced to paragraph-sized telegrams oozing authority on a certain issue by ranking and numbering? Top-five lists—who doesn’t love them? I, for one—the concept is gimmicky, arbitrary, and beyond overdone. So let’s do it!
There are thousands of great Mexican meals to be had in the United States, some even tastier than the plates I’ll cover in this chapter. But there’s a difference between the best and the greatest, and I chose the following eateries under the latter parameter because they called to me again and again during my research for this book over the past couple of years of hundreds of meals consumed, thousands of miles traveled, dozens of places searching for a sublime taco, an ideal horchata, a stupendous sope. Perfection doesn’t exist, but a great story pared with a satisfying lunch? An eater’s dream.
It’s not just the food that drew me to the following list so much as what the restaurant represents. Most of these meals will never migrate past the city limits but aren’t particularly difficult to replicate. But the stories behind them—their symbolism, their panoply of flavors, their customers and creators—are worthy of highlighting. If you’re ever near them, make the pilgrimage. Besides, I couldn’t fit any of my muses into any other chapter—with the exception of one place, they didn’t create monumental shifts in how we devour Mexican. They’re just bueno.
Tulsa, one of the dozen or so buckles of the Bible Belt, doesn’t have the best reputation nationwide, nor is it known for anything food-wise outside of barbecue—if that. For years its most famous Mexican restaurant was Casa Bonita, a compound of Mexican-themed rooms that was like Disneyland drowned in nacho cheese. There were jungle rooms, tables and chairs made to look as if they were transplanted from a splendorous hacienda, strolling mariachis—but no thirty-foot waterfall featuring cliff divers jumping to the applause of appreciative diners, as that was the domain of its Denver-area sibling immortalized in a South Park episode. In its heyday, school buses from across Oklahoma drove to Tulsa’s Casa Bonita to give students a taste of Old Mexico and bad chili con carne that they ordered from a cafeteria-style system of trays. But Tulsa’s version—which called itself “Tulsa’s Favorite Mexican Restaurant” and emblazoned the motto on a thousand-light marquee outside its fake-colonial facade—closed in 2011 after four decades of operation, no longer needed in a city now increasingly Latino.
Another Mexican relic now rules over Tulsa: El Rancho Grande, off historic Route 66, the oldest Mexican restaurant in Oklahoma and one of the oldest remaining restaurants in Tulsa, period. El Rancho Grande refers to a famous Mexican film from the comedia ranchera movie genre, a type of Mexican film where levity is found among the peons and dons on a ranch, where men resplendent in sombrero and charro costumes sang songs of love in bars and on horseback: Mexico’s own fantasy heritage. At night the restaurant’s sign lights up—a sombrero-wearing neon charro throwing a lasso that spells out “El,” with the rest roping around “Rancho Grande.” It’s not exactly an authentic charro—the sash around his waist is more Spanish toreador than Mexican vaquero, and the yellow shirt looks more appropriate for the Grand Ole Opry than anything Latino. But inside, the interior was recently remodeled to better mimic the higher-end Mexican restaurants wrought by the Southwestern movement—mosaic tabletops, colorful paintings, tropical music.
The menu is a timeline of Mexican food’s journey through the United States. Chile con queso serves as an appetizer, boiling and fiery, but the queso flameado—jack cheese baked on chorizo—tastes like the Americanized cousin of the Mexico City favorite queso fundido. “Classic” tacos come either fried or prepared in small flour tortillas, but the soft tacos are straight out of an East Los Angeles lonchera, just the corn tortilla, meat, cilantro, and onions. The fajitas platters sizzle through business hours, but more than a few people also order camarones al mojo de ajo, shrimp sautéed in potent garlic-spiked butter that penetrated America’s Mexican restaurants during the 1980s. There are even fish tacos on the menu—in the land of Okies? Once heretical, nowadays commonplace.
El Rancho Grande’s food is largely fine, if tried and true. But one grand, glorious exception exists: the Night Hawk special, a feat of TexMex majesty. It’s ostensibly two cheese enchiladas topped with processed cheese, then smothered in chili con carne on one half, and a soft cheese taco slathered in chili con queso on the other. In its presentation, the Night Hawk looks like a Pac-Man in reverse. The bright yellow cheese taco side occupies a third of the plate, as if the chili con carne gobbles up that last sliver in a culinary bid for domination. That cheese fights back; as the plate settles, some of the molten dairy product spills over to the chili con carne side, creating a color scheme as warm as that of the Arizona State Sun Devils.
The chili is an angry, dark red; flecks of beef sit around the spicy goop. It sings of San Antonio’s queens—not too sweet, not far removed from the cauldrons that gave palpitations to the original easterners who clamored over it, unctuous enough to trap a small mammal. The heat of the plate and the steaming ingredients mean that the queso coagulates over the cheese taco and assumes the consistency of Play-Doh. The taco and enchiladas, while tasty, are afterthoughts in the battle for your palate. A fork is all you need to eat through the meal, and you can’t eat each side on its own; mixture, miscegenation is a must. So you’ll find yourself scooping some chili onto the queso, splitting the enchilada to join in the soft taco. No side dishes required—no beans and rice, no chips, no salsa. It’s not a subtle meal: the double onslaught of queso and chili con carne disrupts your throat with dueling notes of spice and creaminess, an exclamation of Texas braggadocio. But the assertive dual notes settle long after red and yellow cake the corners of your lips, and you find yourself not wanting to wash off the remnants for the Proust-ian jolt that a simple flick of a tongue induces when no one watches.
Wading through the platter is following Tex-Mex from curio to accepted diet to artifact. A Mexican immigrant named Ruby Rodrigues opened El Rancho Grande in 1950 at a tiny eatery across the street from the city’s Holy Family Cathedral. Rodrigues (born Guadalupe Almendares) had lived in Tulsa since the 1920s, and her husband was a tamale man. Oklahoma at the time had a small Mexican community, mostly transplants from Texas who went north in search of work, and migrant workers following the harvests and railroads. But business must have been great for Rodrigues and her husband, because they moved El Rancho Grande just a year after opening it to its present location. She promoted the restaurant’s dishwasher, San Antonio native Larry Lara (real name Inez, but that’s technically a woman’s name, and what Mexican man wants a woman’s name unless it’s Guadalupe?), to head cook upon moving to the new location. The two of them perfected the menu so it became a repository of Tex-Mex classics, a place for Lone Star transplants to visit for a taste of the motherland, and ran the restaurant mostly by themselves until Rodrigues retired in the 1980s. She sold El Rancho Grande to her landlords, but Lara stayed on until 2004—nearly fifty-five years.
Lara introduced the Night Hawk special, but no one knows why Rodrigues gave it that name, although it’s probably a nod to the dish’s ideal audience, people looking for energy to confront the lonely night. Only one other restaurant in the United States sells the Night Hawk: Ojeda’s Mexican Food in Dallas (far better are their brisket tacos, fatty and luscious; its Night Hawk is just too prim and proper, and shredded beef inside the enchiladas mucks up the meal).
Alas, the customers for El Rancho Grande, while many, dine more out of habit and loyalty and are largely Americans or assimilated Mexicans. It’s a shame, because the Night Hawk is edible, intoxicating history on a plate.
Two options exist for people who want the El Güero Canelo experience. One is to visit the original location, on Tucson’s South Side barrio, a sprawling collection of benches and booths that look like the eating area at a concession stand at a drive-in movie theater. The meal everyone eats—hot dogs—adds to the surreal playground experience, especially given that the clientele ranges from children to adults, and is almost exclusively Mexican. At night, old and young, families and friends, flock to eat wieners, stand in line to the walk-up window, former kitchen trailers now bound to the ground. They order one, two, a dozen hot dogs. A cart, the original Güero Canelo, is chained near one of the order windows; nearby are multiple newspaper clippings, including a nice write-up in the New York Times suggesting that this restaurant is more than just a beloved hole in the wall.
Proof is about eight miles to the north, in a gleaming building as spacious as an airplane hangar. Everything gleams—the high windows that allow natural lighting to flood the inside, the new stainless-steel picnic tables (with benches painted in the Mexican tricolor), the food trays that hold dozens of condiments. The add-ons seem contradictory, even wrong for a hot dog, which also is the focus of everyone’s orders. Radishes snuggle up next to petals of raw red onions next to cucumber slices next to a variety of sautéed peppers and lakes of salsa; there’s even guacamole. Customers weigh down their hot dogs with the sides, take extra containers, and still make multiple trips back. It’s a Fourth of July picnic at the park, open 365 days a year.
Tucson—the Old Pueblo, the city that supposedly introduced the chimichanga to American diners, the municipality that definitely introduced Sonoran cuisine, Cal-Mex’s grandma—is now a hot dog town, even more so than Chicago. But it’s a specific type of red hot for which los tucsonenses line up: bacon wrapped around a frank like the stripes on a barber pole, pork grilled on pork until the bacon binds itself to the casing, becomes inextricable without a committed chomp. The bun used is a special, fluffy kind with a tough crust used for Mexican-style sandwiches called bolillos, excavated split-top style instead of getting sliced, with the ends of the bolillo intact so the hot dog squeezes into the miniloaf as snug as a galosh around a foot. Inside is a smear of beans; on top go tomatoes and squirts of mayonnaise, green salsa, and mustard. It’s up to eaters to further doodle with their dog in ways that make the Mission burrito seem as Byzantine as a glass of water.
Across Tucson, hotdogueros sell bacon-wrapped hot dogs in every imaginable setting: at roadside stands, out of vans and taco trucks, on menus of respectable Mexican restaurants, from pop-up tents on street corners, even via coolers. They’re not necessarily original, of course: Americans have wrapped raw strips of bacon around hot dogs, put it on the grill so that its fat seeped into the sausage, then placed it in a bun for decades. And it’s not even the first hot dog customized with Mexican flavors: chili in a bun has dominated hot dog tastes since at least the 1920s, and baseball fans have thrown in pickled jalapeños and nacho cheese on their wieners as far back as the 1970s. But it was in the desert between Tucson and Sonora where the bacon-wrapped hot dog became irretrievably Mexican and earned its proper name: the Sonora dog.
The king of Tucson’s Sonora dog scene is El Güero Canelo, which gets its name from the owner: Daniel Contreras, a boulder-sized man with the flat top and imposing look of Dick Butkus, except with a perpetual smile, lighter skin, and red hair, the bases for his nickname (the Light-Skinned, Cinnamon-Haired Man, or El Güero Canelo). He had worked as a chef at another Tucson landmark, Micha’s, before his wife suggested they open a food-cart business. Contreras purchased a six-foot-by-eight-foot taco cart in 1993 that he wheeled to a vacant lot in Tucson’s South Side barrio.
Contreras sold various items, as he does today: burros, quesadillas, tacos, and those Sonoran dogs. (The one Tucson specialty he never sold was the cheese crisp, a flour tortilla buttered, covered with shredded cheese, then baked inside an oven like a pizza until the cheese melts into blobs and the tortilla becomes, well, crispy, then presented on a raised plate so eaters can break off slices. It seems like a creation of a poor college student stuck in his dorm during winter break, at wit’s end for some food, digging into his roommate’s refrigerator and finding only those ingredients, wanting pizza and not an enchilada—but it works. Good, but nothing approaching the baroque interplay in the Sonora dog. Sorry for the aside, but I had to get at least one mention of this somewhere in this tract. Now, back to the Sonora dog.)
But it was Sonora dogs—which Contreras remembered eating as a child in Sonora during the 1960s—that ensured his success, and Contreras moved into his first restaurant setting in the mid-1990s, taking the cart along with him as a memory. It expanded over the years, which explains the first El Güero Canelo’s shabby spread. But this wasn’t enough—demand was so high for El Güero Canelo that Contreras opened a second location, on the city’s ritzier North Side, in 2007, a third in 2011, and has plans to expand to Phoenix soon.
Versions of the Sonora dog crossed back into Mexico, skipped over the Sea of Cortez to Tijuana, then went north to the United States again. In Tijuana, the splash of salsa turned from green to Valentina’s, a mass-produced hot sauce with a vinegary finish. In Los Angeles, street vendors skipped the bolillo, returning to regular buns and adding ketchup and sliced jalapeños instead of whole roasted peppers. The Sonora name was dropped, and new names emerged for it: Border dogs. Ghetto dogs. Barrio dogs. Danger dogs. Heart attack dogs. Tijuana dogs. Americans always need a dash of illegality with their Mexican food, eh? It also doesn’t help that Southern California health officials continually target bacon-wrapped hot dogs, arguing that the marriage of bacon and wieners unleashes unknown pathogens without ever offering complete proof, or that many vendors of bacon-wrapped hot dogs are unlicensed street vendors, setting up stands and coolers outside bars and concerts after they empty out in the late nights, like the city’s tamale wagons of yore.
Back in Tucson, the city shrugs. How can anyone be opposed to the Sonora dog? The grilled frank, plump with a slight snap? The snake-wrapped bacon, shattering upon contact? A soft, slightly toasted bun, one that keeps its structural integrity despite all the toppings one may put on, soaking the various condiments? Customizable—isn’t that the American way?
Is this hot dog truly Mexican? Who cares? In Tucson, the birthplace of Linda Ronstadt, Americans became Mexicans long ago; it’s now the rest of the country that’s finally wising up.
Pink. Cadillac pink. The original owner of Alebrije’s Grill in Santa Ana, California, picked that color because he knew it’d stand out in a sea of white taco trucks; the current owner of the Alebrije’s on the corner of Main and Cubbon Streets in Santa Ana, Albert Hernández, kept the shade for the same reason. Even when he participates in clustertrucks,1 parking next to luxe loncheras with outlandish designs and murals and coloring, the soft, welcoming pink of Alebrije’s captures eyes, entices the curious—and they usually haven’t even heard of the masa marvel that Hernández will recommend: the taco acorazado, which translates as the battleship taco.
Okay, so deeming an Orange County taco truck as harboring the third-greatest Mexican dish in America is totally provincial, but hear out my reasoning. I wanted to include a street vendor, because the informal economy is what has long pushed and innovated Mexican food. California had to make the list, or I’d face exile from the Golden State to Texas. It wouldn’t be a proper list without, you know, a taco, given the title of this book. Finally, although the Sonora dog is a glorious immigrant worthy of adulation, I needed to include at least one more shout-out to the current wave of regional Mexican food that, if it hasn’t yet reached your city, will get there within a decade, if not sooner.
All of this aside, Alebrije’s taco acorazado doesn’t even need a backstory. Hernández and his crew of aunts and female cousins grab a ball of fresh masa, give it a couple of rolls, then smash it down with a press so it flattens into something as wide and thick as a pamphlet. The masa sheet gets tossed onto the grill—it’ll turn into a tortilla, stretched to the point where corn tortillas can stretch until they collapse under their own weight and begin splitting. This tortilla packs unadulterated corn flavor—no preservatives, no additives, no extra salt or sugar, but the straightforward taste that immediately entranced the Spaniards.
Alebrije’s tortilla alone beats three quarters of any Mexican meal you might buy in your life, but it’s a mere vessel for the mountain to come. As the cooks tend to the tortilla, flipping it every minute so it thoroughly cooks and turns a tanned yellow while adding specks of char, another chef takes slices of beef, dunks them in egg batter, rubs the slices with bread crumbs, and grills them on the stove. They’ve just started cooking the milanesa, the breaded beef cutlet that came to Mexico with—take your legend—Italian immigrants by way of Argentina who were familiar with Milanese cooking styles (hence the name, which in Spanish refers to “Milanese style”), or the German and Czech immigrants who brought along their German/Austro-Hungarian Wiener schnitzel. Alebrije’s milanesa is thin, buttery, with expertly grilled meat inside the crunchy blanket that the bread crumbs have become. The milanesa alone makes a filling meal, but that’s going on the taco—but wait, there’s more!
Once the tortilla and milanesa are ready, Alebrije’s puts the tortilla on a flat plate, then covers the tortilla with a bed of fluffy Mexican rice. Then go the slices of milanesa; their gnarled, imposing appearance can look, in a pinch, like the steel plates of a battleship—at least that’s what the people of Cuernavaca in the Mexican state of More-los thought when the dish first appeared in the Mexican city during the 1940s. This is the taco acorazado, but Hernández modifies it further—on the side of the taco he places sautéed jalapeños, onions, and a grilled cactus paddle, free of any slime. On top of the milanesa go avocado slices, pickled carrots, and a dusting of salty queso cotija. It’s up to you to decide which of the three salsas (piquant green, smoky red, or sweat-inducing orange) you’ll squeeze from the bottles on hand, or how much of the purple pickled onions packed with slivers of habanero that sit in brine, nearly pulsating with their decadent hell, you’ll toss as the final dressing before the coming deluge.
You don’t eat a taco acorazado so much as deconstruct it. Start by alternating bites among the cactus, the milanesa, the onions, the jalapeños, and a scoop of rice to add that last dash of unami. Spice, sweet, vegetal, sour, crunchy, smooth, even dairy: the acorazado represents nearly every flavor imaginable, all accentuated by whatever salsa you may have drizzled. You whittle away at those toppings, forkful after forkful after forkful, until a few stray milanesa slices are left, until the mound of rice is reduced into a knoll, until the cactus paddle, smoky and chewy, is gone. You’re already stuffed—but now, before you, is a proper taco.
While you were slicing through the acorazado, the flavors of all the ingredients seeped into the tortilla on the bottom. Its thickness means that the tortilla won’t disintegrate when you finally fold it in half to complete your meal, nor will it wobble like an inferior product. It’s now moist, absorbent to all the ingredients it held, Atlas-like, above itself. The taco acorazado isn’t a taco so much as bliss by a thousand bites.
Hernández is a native of the Mexican state of Guanajuato, and Alebrije’s actually specializes in Mexico City–style food, which is really just a hundred different ways around masa: huaraches (a sope extended until it’s the shape of a sandal), tlacoyos (an elongated gordita stuffed with fava beans), alambres (“wires” in Spanish, and named as such because six double-folded corn tortillas are the base for a jumble of carne asada, ham, bacon, bell peppers, and thick cheese melted on top of the mess), and the region’s take on quesadillas, folded in half, looking like a crepe, and stuffed with a buttery cheese à la Brie. But early on, Hernández latched on to the acorazado as his ticket to success. “No one else was making it,” says Hernández, who learned of the dish in the United States. “It is such a big meal that I knew if anyone tried it even once, they would tell anyone who ate it what a huge taco this was.”
Soon the Orange County buzz for the taco acorazado was such that other loncheras ripped off the meal, as well as their Los Angeles counterparts. It even made a cameo on Last Call with Carson Daly when they profiled me, because I insisted on the setting. Will the dish go nationwide? Not too many people from Cuernavaca live in the United States outside of Southern California—but then again, it didn’t take Mexicans living across this country to popularize chili in the late nineteenth century, did it?
At night, a light looms over El Paso, the hardscrabble town on the U.S.-Mexico border just a couple of border guards away from one of the world’s murder capitals, Ciudad Juárez. It’s the largest man-made illuminated star in the world, 459 feet tall and 278 feet wide, shining with 459 150-watt bulbs strung across Franklin Mountain to let the world know you’re entering Texas. Visitors to the city can see it from 100 miles up as planes descend onto El Paso International Airport, and drivers can view its icicle-white lights, shaped into the Lone Star, from 30 miles away.
Chico’s Tacos, El Paso, Texas, where the hot dogs come in hamburger buns and the tacos bob in a sea of tomato salsa. (Photo by Melody Parra, What’s Up Weekly)
Across the city, not far from the airport, stands another bright monument, a humbler one: a small, smiling boy in serape and sombrero, holding a carton tray of taquitos drowning in a sauce in his left hand while the other makes the A-OK sign. This is Chico’s Tacos, a small El Paso chain started in 1953 by Joe Mora and two friends but now wholly owned by Mora’s children. The restaurant is perpetually full—immigrants probably hours removed from crossing la frontera, youth sports leagues coming for a celebratory (or consolatory) postgame meal, everyone getting their orders within minutes. Street vendors waving candies and other snacks enter the restaurant, but the owners don’t drive them away. Security stands by, but spend most of their shift flirting with the girls behind the counter instead of monitoring for roughhousing. The chicas yell out order numbers in English and Spanish, even though everyone understands either language. It’s the kind of restaurant where the high-pitched laments of conjunto norteño (the Mexican music with the accordion in it that sounds like polka because it basically is) icon Ramón Ayala spin on the jukebox just after a No Doubt paean to suburban angst, and not only does no one blink, but also most sing along flawlessly to the two.
All tables possess at least one order of Chico’s tacos—thin, tightly rolled taquitos stuffed with ground beef that tastes more like burned nubs than anything bovine, placed in a nacho carton filled to the brim with a weak, watery salsa more tomato than chile and more soup than salsa; the actual heat is a green condiment offered in a small thimble on the side. The taquitos are stacked so some are fully submerged in that soup; others stay dry save for their shiny shell. A flurry of processed American cheese covers the stack, some of which stays above the soup and melts only slightly upon resting on the taquitos; the strands that slip into the broth turn it into Texas-style queso.
It’s a bizarre dish, about as Mexican as Chico’s hot dogs—two crimson wieners spliced and placed in a bun on top of pinto beans, pickles, mustard, and green chile. But no one cares. A single order of Chico’s tacos is three tacos; the double is six. Most people ask for two doubles. They’re crunchy, if a bit stale-looking, and the best way to eat them is to order extra melted cheese, keeping as much of that tomato soup as possible, using each taquito as a straw to stir the cheese into the liquid, then scooping up the liquefied cheese and taking a bite. The soup still remains at the end: slurp it up by tipping the carton, craning your neck so you don’t spill too much on your shirt. Anyone looking for a prim sit-down feast is better off at another place, but a warning: most residents of Chuco (the nickname the city’s Mexicans gave it long ago) will end every proper meal with a midnight run.
El Paso loves Chico’s, but the restaurant has met controversy in the past. In 2009, two gay men were kicked out for what they claimed was kissing in public, and they also alleged that police officers threatened to jail them under an obsolete antigay statute that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional in 2003; a lawsuit is pending. Chico’s also is where the Great Taco Riot of 2008 occurred. At about two in the morning one February, a fire broke out in the attic of one location, forcing the evacuation of Chico’s and costing the restaurant more than $45,000 in damages.
Many in the late-night crowd were drunk, which explains what happened next: when the firefighters evacuated the restaurant, and the owners announced that Chico’s was closed and they couldn’t get refunds or reclaim the tacos left behind, people started yelling and throwing cans. It got so bad that firefighters called for police backup; thankfully, no arrests were made. It was a local embarrassment, but ask El Paso residents about the Great Taco Riot and you’ll find more than a few sympathetic ears. “We understand the sacrifice they had to make leaving possibly a double order of Chico’s Tacos with extra cheese behind, but when an emergency response agency asks you to evacuate, including firefighters and police officers, it’s usually because it’s an emergency,” a bemused spokesman for the Fire Department told the El Paso Times.2
All this, over taquitos? Damn straight. This is El Paso, the type of town where an Irish-American gets elected to head the Mexican-American Bar Association, and no one has a problem with it. El Paso is the Mexican future of this country—not always hunky-dory, of course, and with problems, but ultimately no different from any other metro area, if not a bit better. And with a double order at Chico’s tacos, fried and slightly spicy and sweet and crunchy as a communal meal, El Paso is as good a harbinger as any that not only will everything be all right, it’ll also come with a hell of a lot of cheese.
Stella Cordova lived to be a hundred years old, a century well lived that took her from the farming town of Walsenburg, in the heart of Colorado’s Hispano country, to Denver, where she became a beloved Denver icon on a par with John Elway. At age fifty-nine, after having raised ten biological children and two adopted ones, she reentered the workforce as a cook in a restaurant called Chubby Burger Drive-in, in the city’s Italian neighborhood, which over the years became Latino. Chubby was failing, but Cordova bought the place and saved it by introducing burritos, tacos, and tostadas, all topped with her fabulous green chile. An institution was born, gradually changing its name to just Chubby’s.
At five foot nothing and just a bit over a hundred pounds, Cordova was the quintessential Mexican abuelita, frequently giving away free meals and always quick to flash a smile. But the diminutive build belied a tough-as-nails mujer who worked the fields as a child harvesting corn and melons. At Chubby’s she commanded everyone’s attention, whether riffraff during the day or rowdy bar crowds that begged her to stay open past the 3:00 A.M. last call, people who couldn’t wait the three hours until Chubby’s reopened at six in the morning. And then there was the Frightened Thief.
As she told the Denver paper Westword, Cordova was washing the pots one night from another long shift when she realized that a customer who had been loitering inside had vanished. Just as soon as Cordova noticed, the customer reappeared, now at the back door of the restaurant and masked with a plastic bag.
“This is a stickup!” he yelled at the kitchen. Cordova didn’t flinch.
“Okay,” she replied. “Go right ahead.”
“This is a fucking stickup!” the would-be robber screamed again, adding an expletive for good measure.
Cordova stopped washing the pots.
“I want the money!” the robber spat out, his hand in a pocket trying to form a bulge that might look like a gun.
“You wait a minute!” Stella snapped back. “Let me finish my pot.” And she did, while the criminal stood outside the kitchen, shocked.
It took a couple of minutes, which included Cordova drying her hands, but she finally found time to get robbed. The gunman entered the back door of Chubby’s when he saw Cordova approaching the register, but Cordova stopped him.
“No. You go around the other way,” she ordered, to which the robber dutifully complied.
As the gunman walked around the building, Cordova hid a stack of twenty-dollar bills in her pocket, grabbed a bag and filled it with fives and ones, and handed it to the thief. He grabbed it and ran, not even bothering to pick up the money that dropped to the floor.
You never interrupted Stella Cordova while she was at work. And you never left Chubby’s without a meal: as the thief took off into the night, the counterman—who had witnessed this entire episode without once leaving his post—realized there was a problem. “Hey!” he yelled fruitlessly. “You want a burrito?”3
Chubby’s is not even a restaurant per se: just a cinder-block building with a tiny waiting area, a kitchen, and a sign. All orders are to go, and the counters inside, while accompanied by stools, are really for people to relax on while waiting for their grub. Outside are a couple of scratched lunch tables. For years they’ve had plans to expand, but the soul of Chubby’s will forever be that front counter, which affords everyone a view of the small kitchen where Cordova greeted generations of Denverites with a fix for Mexican hamburgers.
Denver’s addition to the burrito family is the Mexican hamburger, a bean-and-chicharrones burrito stuffed with a hamburger patty inside, then smothered in chile. Nearly every Mexican restaurant in the Mile-High City—and more than a few non-Mexican places—offer this blend of American and Mexican tastes, from high end to taquerías, places run by Mexican immigrants and those from Cordova’s generation. Cordova never claimed to have created the Mexican hamburger, although she told reporters that her inspiration for selling it at Chubby’s came one day when she was cooking a hamburger, sliced the patty in half, then stuffed it into a burrito. Denver consensus states that the first Mexican hamburger was sold at Joe’s Buffet, a now-gone eatery in one of Denver’s Chicano neighborhoods, beginning as a blackboard special in the late 1960s and advertised as “Linda’s Mexican Hamburger,” after a waitress. The Mexican hamburger spread across Denver—but only Denver, much to the surprise of Mile-High City denizens, who always assumed that their dish, like the local NFL squad, had a national reach. Perhaps because it’s so straightforward—putting a hamburger patty inside a burrito? How truly revolutionary is that? Yet that’s what makes the Mexican hamburger so brilliant—its simplicity, its utterly unremarkable nature, the effortless mixing between two peoples. And at Chubby’s, the Mexican hamburger reaches every overblown food cliché one can imagine.
Chubby’s is most famous for their chile, a gravy which comes smothered on everything—inside actual cheeseburgers and on top of them. On burritos and over fries, a hearty condiment for a hardy city where you need all the comfort you can get. It works best, though, smothered on the Mexican hamburger, the greatest Mexican dish in the United States. Brace yourselves, folks: underneath that Broncos-hued chile lies the structure of a burrito—a flour tortilla containing refried beans, your choice of meat, and a grilled hamburger patty, almost extant in shape. On top of this is the chile: smothered completely over the burrito until it’s little more than a beached whale over a viscous, spicy sea. The flour tortilla itself is cooked well until it becomes firm, almost crispy, so you can slice off a chunk of Mexican hamburger and it won’t flop around on your fork as it enters your mouth. The patty sits in the center, well done, its beefiness absorbing the lard of the chicharrones and of the refried beans. When you order one, the Chubby’s staff serves it on a cardboard plate, then puts another plate on top and staples them together, to ensure that not a drop of the ambrosia spills and wastes.
I’ve had puffy tacos in San Antonio that produced visions of grandeur, glorious bowls of the green in Hatch, fabulous taco pizzas in Minnesota, and python-esque Mission burritos in San Francisco, but the Mexican hamburger is the dish that best personifies the Mexican-American experience, a monument to mestizaje. The tortilla is wholly indigenous; its flour version, the legacy of Spain. The focus on green chile places the Mexican hamburger firmly in the Southwest; its gravy, the legacy of Tex-Mex. The hamburger patty, of course, is wholly American—but even that has a German past. This fugue is pure rascuache, the Mexican concept of creating beauty from seeming junk. And the taste? Heavy, thick, yet Chubby’s Mexican hamburger at its best retains all the flavors of its distinct parts. No added salsa is necessary—amazingly, underneath all that heartiness, the chile comes through and zaps every cell of your body to attention.
Let the Baylessistas scream—this is a dish as Mexican as the Templo Mayor, as American as the Washington Monument, as Chicano as George Lopez. But like so many other tales of Mexican empires, Chubby’s Mexican hamburger is also emblematic of the messy, sometimes acrimonious saga of how Mexican food has evolved in this country.
Cordova allowed some children to operate other Chubby’s using the same name. But soon other imitators—a few with no connection to the family, but most Stella’s squabbling progeny—opened their own Chubby’s knockoffs, some as far away as Hawaii. The king of these familial franchisers is Stella’s grandson Leonard Cordova, whose Bubba Chinos has ten locations and is expanding. He’s an affable, large man who bought a fleet of tricked-out Hummers done up in street art advertising Bubba Chinos and sells jars of the chile Cordova used to offer—and for that, many of the other Cordovas despise him. In fact, his restaurant used to be called Chubby’s Bubba Chino until a cousin sued to stop Leonard from using the Chubby’s name. “I’ll tell you, if our family would have acted like a family, then Chubby’s would have been way up there, like Chipotle,” the litigating cousin, Julian Cordova, told Westword. “We would have been all over the world.”4
Stella’s Chubby’s—now known by the cumbersome title Grandma’s The Original Chubby’s—still stands, on the corner of 38th and Lipan Avenues, run by Stella’s grandson Danny Cordova, whom she raised like a son and who took care of her in the last decades of her regency. Danny hasn’t changed much in the three years since her passing—the calendars, for one, now have a portrait of Stella and her husband, Alex, a former oil worker to whom she was married for nearly seventy years, creating a family forest of hundreds of grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and even more generations. Danny is rightfully protective: all the takeout menus, the ones with the angelic portrait of Stella and Alex, blare at the bottom “NOT AFFILIATED WITH ANY OTHER CHUBBY’S,” and above the entrance is a sign listing the many imitators they disavow—principal among them Bubba Chinos.
There you go, folks: America’s five greatest Mexican dishes. Send me angry letters—isn’t that the point of lists? You can disagree with my choices, but you cannot understand the allure of Mexican food without trying these places. Americans: unite under Mexican food, just like your ancestors, just like your descendants! It doesn’t matter your dish choice: it’ll be sometimes derided, sometimes mysterious, oftentimes scorching, and not always good, but always, always eaten. A lot.