Pepe and Deborah Stepensky
Editor’s Note: Pepe Stepensky and his wife, Deborah Stepensky, own four restaurants in San Diego, including two locations of Porkyland, which is famous for its carnitas. In this interview with el Restaurante publisher Ed Avis, Pepe discusses his history in the business, his Jewish roots, and his award-winning documentaries.
I moved to San Diego from Mexico City on July 4, 1986. My brother owned a chain of dry cleaners, and he invited me to join him. I was dating Deborah by then. We dated three weeks and I asked her to marry me – I knew by then that she was a keeper.
I worked with my brother until we learned about a Mexican family that was moving back to Mexico and wanted to sell their restaurant. Their restaurant was called the San Diego Burger Company, and it was in a food court in Seaport Village. So Deborah and I bought it. That was about 20 years ago.
The interior of Porkyland
Now, you should know that I’m a vegetarian, and my knowledge of doing things in a burger restaurant was very limited. So when we got the place, I sat for hours in Carls Jr. and Wendy’s and watched what they were doing. That’s how I learned that business. For example, people were telling us the bread on the bottom of our burgers was mushy. So I asked the guy a Carls Jr. and he said you need to put the tomato and lettuce under the meat. I said Hallelujah! Finally I know how my burgers get mushy – I was building them the wrong way!
In Mexico I had worked in advertising. I was the creative director of an ad agency, and Deborah was doing production for the state TV channel, Channel 13 in Mexico. We discovered that working in a restaurant is very creative work, too. In advertising you make a commercial and you don’t see the immediate results. But in a restaurant, you put something on the menu and you immediately see whether people like it or not. We really like that.
Right next door to our burger place was a Mexican restaurant, but it wasn’t doing well and it wasn’t serving authentic Mexican food. The Seaport Village management asked us if we wanted to take it over. We did and changed the name to Margarita’s Kitchen and Cantina and started serving all real Mexican food.
My wife is a very good cook. She’s the one who started changing the menu, making
Tacos at Porkyland
her own salsas and everything. Her grandmother and mother were really good cooks, too, and Deborah has what you need: She has a very good taste for making the food, and she really likes what she’s doing. You need both things.
We had been running Margarita’s for 15 years when we learned that the owner of a very well-known Mexican restaurant called Porkyland wanted to sell. They had a tortilleria as part of the business, and they wanted to focus on that. So we bought Porkyland with the idea of doing authentic Mexican cuisine. We wanted to grow the menu at Porkyland, so I went to every single taco shop in the area and looked at all of their menus. I looked at 30 to 40. Then we said we need to add some things to be unique, like elotes asados, sopes, mole, bowls and salads and a variety of selections for vegetarians.
We are also well known for our carnitas. We marinate our carnitas for six hours in vanilla and sugar in a big copper bowl, the traditional way. Copper is the only material that has even heat on the whole thing. For our tacos al pastor, we make our own trompos with the pineapple on top. Most restaurants in the states don’t do it that way, but we do that.
For desserts we have a little carrito filled with paletas that we buy from a Mexican
Paletas Carrito in Porkyland
company. They’re very popular. We also make our own buñuelos. We also have little tiendas in the restaurants, where we sell our pickled carrots, onions and jalapenos -- escabeche – plus our salsas and chips.
We have two locations of Porkyland now, and we do lots of catering for weddings, office meetings, and all kinds of other events.
I already told you I’m a vegetarian, and there’s something else you should know: I’m Jewish. So I’m a Mexican Jewish vegetarian who makes a living selling pork carnitas!
My father-in-law is a Holocaust survivor. He was in the ghetto in Lutz, Poland. There were 300,000 Jews in that place, and only 800 survived. They had to dig their own graves. The day they were going to kill my father-in-law, the Russians came and saved them. He’s 86 years old now.
He wanted to come to America, but America was taking very few surviving Jews from Europe, so he ended up in Venezuela. He met my mother-in-law in Mexico on a trip, and they got married after dating for three or four weeks. They were married 57 years, until my mother-in-law passed away.
They were in the food business in Mexico City. When my mother-in-law learned she was a celiac, they opened a little bakery for sugar-free and gluten-free food. My father-in-law keeps working in that bakery.
My own grandparents came from Russia and Poland. My parents were born in Mexico City. I go back to Mexico City and eat in the different taco shops to see what else we can integrate into our shops. Some things they just do differently there. For example, a quesadilla in Mexico City is made with masa and fried in oil; here it’s made on a flour tortilla.
As I told you, I worked in advertising in Mexico City. I didn’t abandon that creative work when I came to the United States. I’ve written and directed plays, and I co-founded the first Spanish-language theater troupe in San Diego, Teatro Punto y Coma. I also have made several documentaries. One was about a popular singer living in Israel; that was called “The Land of Milk and Honey,” and it won an Emmy. Then we did one called “A Jew in Caborca,” about the father of a friend of mine who left Poland to escape the Nazis and ended up in a little town in Sonora, Mexico called Caborca. He loved it so much he stayed there, even though he was the only Jew in Caborca. We were nominated for an Emmy for that documentary, but didn’t win that time. Then we did a third documentary about a sportscaster from Telemundo who had a surfing accident when he was 20 and became a paraplegic. It was called “Una Vez Mas.” That won three Emmys.
Ed Avis is the publisher of el Restaurante. You can reach him at edavis@restmex.com