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Raul Luis, right, with his family: Vicky Luis (wife), Juliett Luis (daughter), and Raoul Luis (son).
Editor’s Note: Mexican cuisine evolves as cooks and chefs use the ingredients they have on hand. Raul Luis experienced this when he opened a location of his family’s restaurant, Birrieria Chalío in Ft. Worth, Texas. The family has three locations in Los Angeles. In this conversation with el Restaurante Publisher Ed Avis, edited for clarity and length, Luis describes how his menu have evolved based on his geography and where his employees are from.
When I was younger, I expected birria, which was something I consumed since I was a kid, to taste the same everywhere. And it didn't. Why is that, I wondered? What happened? Well, by talking to people, I heard the stories about people going into Guadalajara, for example, which is the hub, and they the learn the recipes.
But then you go back home, guess what? You don't have access to those spices anymore. People try to take back a certain dish back in those days to a certain town and they no longer had access to the same ingredients, so they had to supplement it with something else or substitute it with something else.
Now if you fast forward to the 1970s in the U.S., we had very limited access to Mexican products. And if someone would go to Mexico, my parents or uncles would say, “Hey, bring me back some candy, bring me back this, bring me back that.” They always wanted to taste things from back home.
L.A. was a hub for people coming from Mexico. People came to L.A. because people there spoke Spanish, people felt comfortable. So L.A. started getting people who were from different Mexican states, different regions of Mexico. They were marrying one another or living together. So you have a husband and wife from different regions, and they have to accommodate each other's flavors. It was a fusion between the different regions from Mexico. That coupled with the limited access to certain spices, the cuisine changed and it keeps on changing.
You look at stuff on Instagram, there's people always making new dishes. It's because of the fusion. Not only is it people from Mexico, you couple that with partnering up with people from Central America, South America, different regions. So the food just keeps evolving.
In our restaurants, we would hire people from other regions of Mexico. When we first started, I only had three things on the menu, and the employees would come in they would get tired of eating the same food every day. So they would bring their own stuff and create dishes. So we had people from the coastal areas that would create seafood dishes. Wow. They were really good. And then you would get people from central Mexico, they started making their own food.
So as time went by, we began to change. Our menu began expanding because these people were coming in and creating these dishes. My whole menu today is a result of that.
I always tell people one of the best dishes I ever had was created by this couple -- a girl from Veracruz and a guy from Sinaloa. They married each other, and man, the seafood dishes they created were great, because now they took these two regions that are rich in seafood and combined them. They eventually left and started their own restaurant.
For a long time, we were serving regular, store-bought tortillas. Then an employee came in with a little masa, and she made her own tortillas. And we started making our own tortillas as a result. It was just that one simple item, but that changed the whole dish.
Here’s another example: A couple brought us the bacon wrapped shrimp. And there was a guy from Guerrero who said, “Oh, that’s just like mom used to make!” So we named it after the Guerrero moms – the dish is called Momia. Most of the dishes on our menu we attribute to what region the cooks are from.
When I opened my restaurant in Texas in 2005, they expected a different type of food. They were used to Tex-Mex. Many times people would come in and say, “Take it back. It's no good.” It was just not what they're used to. People would say, “Where’s the queso?” We don't sell queso. And that's kind of weird because most of the restaurants in Texas, that's the number one dish, queso and chips.
One of the dishes that helped me, it was a breakthrough, was the molcajete. Back in Los Angeles in the early eighties, I believe it was a restaurant in Huntington Park, started the molcajete. It was basically a chili sauce with all the meat. Mexicans, regardless of what region they’re from, like hot sauce. So when I brought the molcajete to Texas, people loved it.
Another dish that helped me break through was the wet burrito. They didn't know what a wet burrito was. You put the wet burrito on the menu, and customers are like, “Wow, It's pretty good. It's different.”
It's changing now because we’re getting more people coming into the area from the east coast and the west coast. But for a long time, people didn’t get it. They’d say, “I don't want this. Where’s the chili beans? Where’s my queso on my enchiladas?”
In L.A., our number one dish is birria. You walk into one of our restaurants, eight out of 10 people are eating birria. But in Texas, a large percent of people are from the northern states of Mexico, where the birria wasn't as well known. It took me 20 years, but just this last week for the first time, the birria outsold the molcajete! It took 20 years.
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