NPR News

NYC isn’t known for its Mexican food. A restaurant week was organized to change that

By Isabella Gomez Sarmiento

Published October 16, 2024 at 7:06 PM CDT

Jonathan Perez grew up watching his parents serve up Mexican staples in East Harlem. Now, he's keeping their restaurant Ollin running — and making it a staple of the Latine, LGBTQ community in New York City.

Updated October 17, 2024 at 11:34 AM ET

In the kitchen of a small, colorful restaurant called Ollin in East Harlem, Jonathan Perez and his brother recently prepared a number of dishes: crispy empanadas, birria enchiladas and fluffy cemitas.

Perez’s parents opened the first iteration of Ollin in 1997, and the restaurant has been serving Mexican staples like tacos, tortas and sopes since then. But the cemita, a sandwich from the state of Puebla, where Perez’s family is from, is Ollin’s specialty.

“A lot of people don’t even know what a cemita is,” Perez told NPR. “It’s a sesame bun bread with breaded beef or breaded chicken. It’s got our homemade chipotle sauce from actual peppers – not chipotle aioli or anything like that – and it also has an herb called papalo, and it has quesillo.”

Perez says that a lot of the Mexican food in New York has Poblano roots; some people even refer to the city as “Puebla York.” But he says the taste of home was not so prevalent across the boroughs. Noe Zepeda, a 23-year-old fashion designer and co-founder of a grassroots arts collective called Migo Events that celebrates Mexican culture, agrees with Perez.

Ollin's Mexican Restaurant Week menu included birria enchiladas, rice and beans, empanadas and a margarita.

“I used to tell my friends growing up, ‘I can’t find a good Mexican spot,”’ said Zepeda.

But now, he says, that’s all changed. A Pew Research Center analysis found that about 1 in 10 restaurants in the U.S. serve Mexican food — and a report by the research firm Datassential found that Mexican cuisine is growing in popularity, especially with Gen Z and millennials. Birria, tostadas and mezcal are all the rage right now. That’s why, for Hispanic Heritage Month, Migo Events pulled together a Mexican Restaurant Week that mapped out 20 must-try spots across the city.

“We never have a good reputation in New York of having good Mexican food,” said Paulina Montiel, co-founder of Migo Events. “It’s always ‘L.A. has good Mexican food,’ ‘Texas has good Mexican food.”’

But New York does too, says Montiel, who is originally from the West Coast. And she believes the Poblano dishes sprinkled across the city’s menus deserve their flowers, as do the people cooking them. “A lot of us grow up and our families have worked in the restaurant industry,” she explained.

Noe Zepeda, left, and Paulina Montiel, middle, are the co-founders of Migo Events. They partnered with Joaly Silva, right, to come up with a map of their favorite family-owned Mexican restaurants in New York City.

According to the National Restaurant Association, more than a quarter of all food service employees in the U.S. are Hispanic; most of them are of Mexican descent. Migo collaborator Joaly Silva, aka Lil Joe Momma, has blown up making TikToks about street vendors, taquerias and mom-and-pop shops across New York City. Her grandmother, she says, used to be a street vendor. It gave the 22-year-old perspective on what it means to work hard and feed a community — that’s why she says she started shooting her videos, some of which receive hundreds of thousands of views.

“I like to create a bond with the restaurants every time I go,” she said. “So I sit down with the owners and not only highlight their business, but highlight the people behind it.”

Zepeda, Montiel and Silva all hope Mexican Restaurant Week is a jumping off point for more visibility and discovery of what the Mexican-American diaspora has to offer.

She recently did that with Andres Balbuena, one of the owners of the upscale eatery Mexi. They bonded over a shared love of pipian, a green mole sauce with pumpkin seeds, chile poblano and chile serrano, which Mexi served over chicken for Mexican Restaurant Week. Balbuena came to New York in the late ‘90s. He worked every restaurant role, from busboy to server to manager, before eventually opening up his own businesses. Balbuena says his first restaurant was Italian, but he has always aspired to serve Mexican cuisine. “Probably in the last 10 or 15 years, there’s been such a resurgence of not just Mexican restaurants, but Mexican identity altogether,” he said.

He cites the global rise of regional Mexican music, Mexican cinema and young creatives like Migo Events – who host parties, publish a DIY magazine, throw fashion shows and raise funds for undocumented artists — paving the way for more avenues of Mexican expression. Noe Zepeda and Paulina Montiel say they’re proud to be reclaiming their roots, and they hope more Mexican Americans feel empowered to unapologetically pursue their passions, too.