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Where is this restaurant? 4351 Hemphill St.
What readers recommend about Birrieria Los Chivos de Oro:“We just found out about it. The menu is loaded with enough enticing items to warrant at least five or six trips. All the meat items are done with cabrito, which is a huge selling point. Don’t be afraid of it, if you haven’t tried it. It’s delicious!”
What else to know: This traditional family-owned Mexican restaurant has been around since 1993, “carrying the recipes of our hometown in Nochistlán, Zacatecas to the heart of Fort Worth.” Customers flock here for their specialty birria. Says one Yelp reviewer: “If you want the real deal Birria and an authentic Mexican food restaurant, this is the place!! Everything here is amazing and will leave you feeling ready for nap time.”
See the full menu. The hours are Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, 9 a.m.-9 p.m.; Wednesday, 9 a.m.-3 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 8 a.m.-9 p.m.
Matt Leclercq is senior managing editor at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He previously was an editor at USA Today in Washington, national news editor at Gatehouse Media in Austin, and executive editor of The Fayetteville (NC) Observer. He’s a New Orleans native.
I arrived at Rio 150 in Steele Creek just before noon, and as soon as the hostess seated me, I whipped out my phone to find the name of the song blasting through the speakers.
Lately, I’ve noticed that I speak to Siri — Apple’s marginally helpful digital assistant — with a frequency that suggests either convenience or mild dependence.
Most of our conversations revolve around a single, recurring inquiry: What song is this? Apple acquired Shazam in 2018, bringing the popular music-recognition service in-house. The purchase allowed iPhones to identify songs through Siri, without needing to open or download a separate app.
The song turned out to be Bad Bunny’s “NUEVAYoL,” a track propelled by a restless, infectious rhythm that marries club-ready momentum with unmistakably Latin influences.
Seconds after I sat down, my server materialized — seemingly from nowhere — to take my drink order, returning with a glass of water in less than a minute.
I didn’t linger over the menu, but when I closed it and looked up, she was already there again, attentive without hovering, ready to take my order.
I ordered an appetizer, and it arrived at my table within five minutes. By then, I had already placed my entrée order, which followed almost immediately, allowing barely enough time to make a meaningful dent in the first dish.
In an era when attentive service often feels like a relic — perhaps another quiet casualty of the pandemic — this kind of efficiency now registers as something close to remarkable.
Here’s what you need to know about Rio 150.
What’s on the menu at Rio 150?
Rio 150 offers a broad, vibrant menu rooted in authentic Mexican and Baja California flavors, featuring classic dishes like fire-grilled fajitas, birria tacos, Willie tacos, enchiladas and arroz con pollo alongside house-made guacamole, nachos and soups. The restaurant also highlights festive drink options, including large margaritas, margarita flights and other Mexican-style cocktails.
Most entrées range from $12-$20, and drinks range from $15-$30.
For The Charlotte Observer’s “On-A-Budget” series, the challenge is always the same: Make $25 stretch farther than it seems possible. I figured the safest strategy was the classic trio: appetizer, entrée and dessert.
But the tres leches was gone, and the xango, a fried cheesecake that promised a sweet finale, had vanished, as well. In the end, I decided to skip dessert.
So, here’s everything I got for roughly $17 (before tax and tip):
Asada fries ($8.99): Bed of french fries, topped with carne asada chunks and melted cheese
Lunch No. 2 ($7.99): Beef burrito, rice and beans
The flavors of the fries come together well, and the dish hit all the right comfort‑food notes, though it didn’t quite have a standout element that would make it unforgettable. Still, it’s a solid choice for a hearty snack or casual bite.
And the beef burrito with rice and beans was simple, filling and reliably tasty. The beef was well-seasoned, and the sides complement it nicely, making for a straightforward, enjoyable meal. It may not be flashy, but it delivers exactly what you want for a satisfying lunch.
Evan Moore is a service journalism reporter for the Charlotte Observer. He grew up in Denver, North Carolina, where he previously worked as a reporter for the Denver Citizen, and is a UNC Charlotte graduate.
Those in search of authentic Mexican fare can find it at a new spot in Charlotte.
Fiesta Patria Mexican Restaurant Bar + Grill has opened in the Mountain Island/Harwood Lane area, serving up classics like chicken fajitas, enchiladas, carne asada and more, manager Antonio Alvarado told CharlotteFive.
It took over the suite once occupied by soul food restaurant Londa’s Place on Mt. Holly-Huntersville Road, which closed last year and launched a new takeout-only concept in West Charlotte, CharlotteFive reported at the time.
Fiesta Patria Mexican Restaurant Bar + Grill is expanding to Charlotte with a new location. Antonio Alvarado Fiesta Patria Mexican Restaurant
Fiesta Patria opened the doors at its new spot on Oct. 11, marking its first location in the Queen City. The family-owned eatery also has a location in Denver, about a 30-mile drive northwest from uptown Charlotte.
On the menu, customers can find an assortment of chicken, seafood and steak options, according to the restaurant’s website. Crowd favorites include arroz con pollo, cheese dip and tacos served with cilantro, onions and a side of salsa.
Fiesta Patria Mexican Restaurant Bar + Grill has opened the doors on its newest restaurant, its first in Charlotte. Antonio Alvarado Fiesta Patria Mexican Restaurant
If there’s room for dessert, customers can pick from traditional Mexican sweets including tres leches cake and churros. There’s also a menu of soups and salad for those looking for light bites.
Fiesta Patria is open from 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Monday-Thursday, and 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday. The restaurant is also open on Sundays from 11 a.m. until 9 p.m.
Fiesta Patria Mexican Restaurant Bar + Grill is expanding from its original location in Denver, about a 30-mile drive northwest from downtown Charlotte. Antonio Alvarado Fiesta Patria Mexican Restaurant
Fiesta Patria Mexican Restaurant Bar + Grill offers traditional Mexican cuisine including carne asada, enchiladas and arroz con pollo. Antonia Alvarado Fiesta Patria Mexican Restaurant
Tanasia is a service journalism reporter based at the Charlotte Observer | CharlotteFive, working remotely from Atlanta, Georgia. She recently joined the NC Service Journalism team and covers restaurant openings/closings in Charlotte and statewide stories. She’s been with McClatchy since 2020.
SOHO — Located on Grand Street, Papatzul has been bringing the authentic taste and vibrant spirit of Mexico City to SoHo for the last 20 years.
“The reason for opening Papatzul was because at the time, there was hardly any good Mexican restaurants,” said founder Thierry Amezcua. “We really were the pioneers of the beginning of the Mexican restaurant scene, which now is amazing. There’s so many places, you have one opening every month.”
Many of the dishes on Papatzul’s menu are of Amezcua’s own creations with authentic Mexican flavors.
One signature dish you can order is the chiles en nogada which, according to Amezcua, has an interesting story.
“The chiles en nogada was created by nuns in 1821 in Puebla, and it was to celebrate Mexican independence. It’s basically a stuffed poblano pepper with ground beef,” Amezcua said. “It has the colors of the flag. So, the green from the chile poblano, and then white is done because there’s a walnut sauce that covers the chile, and then it’s garnished with pomegranate so that’s the red color.”
Customers can also order the salmon tikin xic, which is served with sweet plantains, avocado and grilled onions. Another seafood option is the aguachile, which Amezcua describes as a ceviche that’s “swimming in sauce.”
If you’re looking for meat-based dishes, Amezcua recommends the enchiladas san marquenas, which is braised beef flavored with poblano tomatillo sauce and roasted onions.
In the end, Amezcua wants customers to walk away with an unforgettable impression of Papatzul.
“When you go into the kitchen or you go into a restaurant, it’s a labor of love,” he said.
“Knowing that people are going to enjoy the food and creating a fun experience and fun atmosphere is great. When you feel that, it feels good. We’re making people happy, and that’s great, that’s a fantastic thing.”
A long-abandoned building in the Cass Corridor is now a high-end Modern Mexican eatery serving the traditional flavors of Mexico City and Oaxaca.
Vecino, which means “neighbor” in Spanish, opened on April 19 and is unlike anything in metro Detroit.
Using organic, heirloom corn from Mexico, Vecino makes tortillas, quesadillas, tostadas, sope, and tlayuda through a centuries-old process known as nixtamalization. The result is soft, warm, tender, and flavorful dough.
The menu focuses on seasonal, Michigan ingredients, sourced from local farmers, with the spices and flavors of Mexico. It features bone-in ribeye steak, red snapper, chicken, and vegetables cooked in the kitchen’s wood-fire hearth. Guests also can share carefully prepared plates that include seafood options, mesquite beets, duck confit, and fresh fruit.
The bone-in ribeye is cooked in a wood-fire hearth at Vecino.
The bar features an eclectic collection of agave-based spirits, including small-batch and artisanal tequilas, wine from Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries, and plenty of non-alcoholic options.
The kitchen is led by executive chef Ricardo Mojica, a Michigan native who previously worked at Sava’s in Ann Arbor and was the youngest head chef in the history of the nationwide chain P.F. Chang’s when he was 19.
He’s joined by head chef Stephanie Duran, a Culinary Institute of America alum who hails from Texas and cooked at several renowned restaurants in Mexico City and Chicago.
The heart of the kitchen at Vecino is an open-fire hearth.
Co-owners Adriana Jimenez and her husband Lukasz Wietrzynski dreamed up the restaurant in 2019, but the COVID-19 pandemic put their plans on hold. They had grown bored with their jobs — Wietrzynski was an attorney and Jimenez worked at Industrial Automation — and wanted to do something new and exciting while they’re still young.
Jimenez, a Mexico City native, grew up around restaurants. Her parents owned two Mexican eateries in Waterford and Highland.
“My parents would pick us up from school and we’d go straight to the restaurant, do our homework there and fall asleep there and wake up at home,” Jimenez tells Metro Times. “It was pretty tough on us, but if my parents didn’t have the restaurants, they wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do well in life.”
When the couple was searching for a location for their restaurant, they were enamored with their current spot — a corner building on Third and Alexandrine that was built in 1926 and once served as a grocery store and later a pharmacy. The building was missing windows and a roof, but they could see the potential.
“We fell in love with the building,” Jimenez says. “We wanted a corner building. We picked the most difficult building, but we were in love with it.”
They teamed up with Detroit-based designer Colin Tury, who also has a stake in the restaurant.
Inspired by the ambience of restaurants in Mexico City, the minimalist interior is warm and inviting, with earthy tones, terracotta, ceramic tiles, and hand-blown glass light fixtures hanging from the high, angled ceiling. They used local companies, including Donut Shop for the bar stools and custom hooks, and GANAS Manufacturing for the custom millwork and fixtures.
The restaurant seats 66 people and includes a bar with space for an additional 16 people.
“Vamos al cabron” is a phrase some hungry Phoenicians say, which loosely translates to “let’s go to badass.” For those in the know, it’s a wordplay on a popular local restaurant Ta’Carbon…
Guitars flutter, an accordion wheezes and a singer unwinds the triumphant tale of Fernando Ochoa Jauregui, a Modesto-area builder of food trucks and trailers.
“He still parties just because he feels like it,” the lyrics go. “But what he enjoys the most is partying with a banda at festivals in his town with a beautiful lady by his side.”
In a video accompanying the Spanish-language corrido, images flash of Ochoa beaming in front of shiny cars and atop jet skis. In some, he wears hats with the logo of his company: 8A Food Trucks. It ends with footage of stacks of cash and a money-counting machine.
The narrative ballad, titled “El del 8A” on YouTube, gives the impression that Ochoa is a kingpin at the helm of a burgeoning empire — one who “gives thanks to his father for making him a good kid.”
But unhappy 8A Food Trucks customers across California — from Sacramento to Salinas and San Bernardino — tell their own stories. They describe toiling as cooks, custodians and construction workers, saving for years to get a chance at starting their own business, only to have their dreams dashed. In a rough and tumble industry, largely secluded in poor, immigrant neighborhoods and farming communities, they allege Ochoa stands out for his callousness.
In lawsuits and interviews, former clients accused Ochoa and his company of not delivering trucks or trailers they ordered and refusing to return their partial or full payments. Others alleged that they received vehicles so poorly built that they couldn’t be used. And some have accused Ochoa of taking back trailers they’d purchased from him.
All told, 15 alleged victims claimed more than $475,000 in losses, according to a Times analysis.
In an interview, Ochoa, 28, disputed several of the allegations and acknowledged some mistakes, chalking them up in part to his inexperience in business, which he said led to delays in completing projects for customers. “I’m trying to deal with this scandal so I can make my business better again — I had a real company,” he said. “I’m not a business expert. I just know how to build trucks.”
Ochoa has become a symbol in Spanish media of the perils that lurk in the mobile food industry. In a 2023 report on him, a Univision news anchor warned those entering the business to exercise extreme caution. The controversy comes at a fraught moment for vendors in Southern California. Several in the L.A. area were robbed by gunmen last summer in brazen attacks that highlight the risks of selling food on Southland streets.
Alejandro Gonzalez was in a dispute over payment for a trailer when an old Toyota Camry pulled up to the drive-through window of Mi Casita Purepecha, his San Bernardino restaurant, on Feb. 1.
“Are you Alejandro?” the front-seat passenger asked Gonzalez, who was standing at the window.
The restaurateur said he was — and the man pulled out a gun and pointed it at him.
In the confusion of the moment, Gonzalez said, he turned to help customers inside the Mexican restaurant and the Camry sped away. Gonzalez, 44, didn’t recognize the men. But he said he fears that they are connected to Ochoa. Asked about the incident, Ochoa said he did not send armed men to Mi Casita Purepecha.
Gonzalez and his wife, Paulina Quintal, had contacted 8A Food Trucks in early January about building them two trailers so they could start a mobile food business. Ochoa delivered a trailer to their home two weeks later. Gonzalez said that he and his wife paid for it in full, and gave the builder a check for the down payment on a second one.
San Bernardino resident Alejandro Gonzalez said that this mobile food trailer, which he purchased from 8A Food Trucks, was stolen from his driveway in January.
(Alejandro Gonzalez)
Soon, however, men working for Ochoa appeared at Mi Casita Purepecha to dispute Gonzalez’s ownership of the trailer he’d bought days earlier, he said. Then, after the couple’s check for the second trailer didn’t clear, a third party passed along what Gonzalez said was a threatening voicemail from Ochoa.
On Jan. 21, Gonzalez said he returned from an errand to find his trailer had been stolen from his driveway. Seeking answers, he said he traveled to 8A Food Trucks’ headquarters in Ceres, Calif., but found the site deserted. The next day, Gonzalez said, the men with the gun visited him.
Gonzalez filed reports with the San Bernardino Police Department over the theft and the run-in at his restaurant. Regarding Ochoa, Gonzalez said, “I don’t know how he sleeps.”
Ochoa denied stealing the trailer from Gonzalez and Quintal’s home — “I would never do that,” he said — and alleged that they had not fully paid for it, saying that the check that bounced was meant to go toward the money they owed on it. Ochoa said he had sent two people to Mi Casita Purepecha to address those matters — and not to intimidate the couple.
“None of my people are armed,” he said. “We are businessmen; we dedicate ourselves to working and building trailers.”
Though the dollar amounts in most of the cases involving Ochoa are not large, for fledgling operators trying to break into the mobile food industry — many of them working-class immigrants — it’s enough to sidetrack their business dreams. And their predicaments highlight the vulnerability of California’s food industry workers, many of whom lack a financial safety net or the time and experience required to navigate the legal system. Some are undocumented and fear speaking to authorities.
“There were nights that we would cry, my husband and I,” said Adriana Nicanor, a San Joaquin resident. She and her husband filed a lawsuit against Ochoa and 8A Food Trucks last year that asserted he never delivered a trailer and claimed he refused to return their $20,000 deposit. They secured a default judgment, court records show, but have been unable to collect on it.
“It’s very frustrating,” Nicanor said. “My brother lent me that money. There were times we would struggle. Who asks for this?”
For many of Ochoa’s clients, making a down payment on a truck or trailer — both of which typically include kitchens — was an important first step in fulfilling a long-held entrepreneurial ambition. Some said that the alleged losses were especially painful because they came at the hands of one of their own: a Mexican immigrant who lived in the Central Valley and previously worked at an industrial shop before founding 8A Food Trucks in 2019.
He’s taking advantage of “the campesinos — the farmworkers,” said activist Alicia Espinoza, a Moreno Valley resident who has helped organize some of Ochoa’s accusers. “My dad, when he came to this country, he was a strawberry picker. It just hurts me that this guy could take advantage of people like him.”
Ochoa said he has many happy customers and has gone out of his way to help them achieve their aspirations, noting, for example, that he has sometimes accepted payment in installments. “Not many businesses do that,” he said. “You know, we’re not a bank.” As for the Nicanors, Ochoa denied that he failed to meet an agreed-upon deadline for delivery, and said he plans to pay them back.
Mi Casita Purepecha owner Alejandro Gonzalez said a car pulled up to the restaurant’s drive-through window and a passenger pulled a gun on him Feb. 1.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
Several of those making allegations against Ochoa reside in Stanislaus County, an agricultural hub whose biggest city is Modesto. Wendell Emerson, a deputy district attorney for the county, confirmed that his office is conducting “an active criminal investigation” of Ochoa. He declined to comment further.
After the incident at Mi Casita Purepecha, Gonzalez closed the restaurant and left San Bernardino, relocating his family — he and his wife have three children — to a place they feel safe.
“I don’t know how long it is going to be,” Gonzalez said. “I feel like I lost everything.”
Lawsuits reveal a pattern
Ochoa is an entrepreneur of the internet age.
Food industry workers who’ve done business with the Colima, Mexico, native said that they found him via social media, where his posts depict a professional at the helm of a prosperous company.
The Instagram account for 8A Food Trucks includes several images of gleaming vehicles, their stainless steel kitchens spotless under bright lights. The “8A” in the company’s name is a play on words: pronounced in Spanish, it sounds like “Ochoa.”
A recently divorced father of two young girls, Ochoa has positioned 8A as a brand beyond the world of food services: There are Instagram pages for a hat company with 8A in the name, and another for a jet-ski rental service. It’s all part of a slick image that Ochoa has cultivated online, where it’s easy to find his self-aggrandizing corridos and photographs of him posing in front of his black Chevrolet Corvette.
“Now they see me living well,” the lyrics of one song go, “driving around in a Corvette, buzzing.”
Ochoa’s flaunting of his success has infuriated customers with whom he’s tussled.
For Norma Estevez and her husband, Sebastian Delgado, entering the mobile food trade was a step toward realizing an important goal: owning a business they could pass onto their three children. But Estevez and Delgado, both Mexican American, believe they lost more money than any of Ochoa’s other alleged victims.
The Salinas couple contacted Ochoa in 2021 to build a pair of trailers, selecting him, Estevez said, because he was Latino. “He didn’t have many clients,” she said, “and you could tell he has this aspiration to succeed.”
Estevez needed the trailers for a big opportunity: She had signed a contract with a produce company in nearby Watsonville to feed 70 field workers for 10 months beginning in February 2022. The owner had predicated the deal on her securing a trailer and having proper permits.
Ochoa told her that each trailer would cost $41,000, and promised to complete construction by the end of January, according to Estevez, who showed The Times invoices that documented the deal.
She and her husband sent Ochoa $60,000 over the course of several months, and as the deadline approached, they scheduled a day to pick up the trailers from 8A Food Trucks’ shop, Estevez said. But Ochoa canceled on them, she said, explaining that “his mother had arrived from Mexico and that he needed to pick her up from the airport.” They rescheduled, but he again put them off.
By then, Estevez’s contract with the Watsonville company had begun, and she scrambled to honor it. She was forced to buy meals for the workers, spending about $37 per person a day for the next week and a half — an all-in cost of nearly $26,000. Eventually, she rented a kitchen for $800 a week, and did so until the contract concluded, turning only a small profit on the deal.
And without the trailers, Estevez wasn’t able to renew the contract. “I felt embarrassed … like we had lost a great opportunity,” she said.
Ochoa acknowledged that he didn’t meet the agreed-upon deadline — and that the situation was similar to that of other clients who didn’t receive their vehicles on time. But, he said, others were willing to wait. “Norma’s situation was that if she didn’t get the trailers by a certain date, then she wasn’t going to need them,” he said.
Estevez and Delgado filed a lawsuit against Ochoa for breach of contract and other claims in July 2022. Months later, the parties agreed to a settlement that called for Ochoa to pay Estevez and Delgado about $70,000, including attorney’s fees, according to court documents. Estevez said that Ochoa has only paid $30,000, leaving her deeply disillusioned.
“We were like him, we came to this country to better our lives,” she said. “He knew our dream and ambitions — we told him how hard we worked for it.”
Gonzalez, meanwhile, isn’t the only person who alleged that a trailer purchased from Ochoa was later taken back by him.
Shelly Lopez and her husband, Jesus Avalos, said they paid Ochoa $37,000, and after nine months of delays — and their appearance in a Univision 19 Sacramento segment to discuss them — the Sacramento couple received a trailer in January 2023.
A man Shelly Lopez identified as Fernando Ochoa Jauregui came to her Sacramento home, she said, in February 2023 to take the trailer that 8A Food Trucks had recently sold her.
(Courtesy of Shelly Lopez)
After just a week, though, Ochoa told Lopez that he needed to take it back to his shop to make some adjustments, she said. A video that Lopez provided to The Times shows a man she identified as Ochoa connecting the trailer to the back of a pickup truck in February 2023.
“I didn’t want to let him take it,” Lopez said. “But my husband said, ‘It’s OK, he’ll make the repairs and bring it back to us.’”
It was the last time Lopez and Avalos saw the trailer.
“We had so many fights after that,” she said. “It would come up whenever we were driving and saw people running their businesses, selling food. I would blame him for it.”
Ochoa said that Lopez hadn’t paid for the trailer in full, and that she was making payments in installments. He said that he only retrieved the trailer after she told him it needed repairs. After seeing her negative public comments about him, Ochoa said that he decided to void the payment plan, and resolved to return her funds.
Lopez said she has not gotten the money back.
‘He’s been laughing at us’
In recent days, Ochoa has come under attack online by disgruntled customers — and his former mother-in-law.
Gisela Macias, 48, said that strangers began showing up at her Modesto home over the summer in search of Ochoa. They came, she said, to demand he pay them back for vehicles they’d purchased but never received. The visits were so frequent that she began recording interviews with some of the people to post on TikTok.
Ochoa said that the internet activism and local TV news stories have led to an exodus of clients, which has imperiled his ability to pay back customers like Estevez. He said that he can only make payments in $1,000 increments. “I know it’s not much,” he said, “but I have no business due to everything that’s being said about my company.”
He said he had to close 8A Food Trucks’ headquarters in Ceres because angry clients kept going there to confront him. But his braggadocio is still easy to find on the internet. A 2023 corrido about Ochoa titled “Por 8A Me Conocen” includes the boast that “business is steady and we’re never going to stop.”
“I fought hard and little by little grew the empire that I founded,” the singer trills.
It incenses Estevez. “He’s been laughing at us — the people who had dreams, who worked hard to save money to make those dreams a reality,” she said.
These days, the equipment that Estevez and her husband bought for their two trailers — ovens, cooking wares and more — is mothballed in their garage. It’s hard for her to enter the space without crying.
“That’s our dream right there, collecting dust,” she said.
Times researcher Scott Wilson and columnist Gustavo Arellano contributed to this report.
Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month in style, Milpa caters to Vegas with its handmade heirloom tortillas and bowls, amplifying traditional Mexican flavors into a modern health concept
LAS VEGAS, September 29, 2023 (Newswire.com)
– Renowned for bringing a unique authentic Mexican flavor that local Latinos relate to, Milpa has carved out a name for itself as the leading restaurant providing fresh handmade stone-ground heirloom tortillas. Showcasing a process as old as the Mesoamerican civilization, Milpa makes masa from scratch daily at its modern, healthy Mexican cafe. Milpa’s usage of the 600-year-old corn grinding process, nixtamalization, to make masa in-house significantly distinguishes it from other restaurants that utilize pre-made tortillas.
Rooted in tradition, Milpa is revolutionizing the local restaurant industry by blending traditional Mexican food with health and freshness. The popularly reviewed healthy Mexican cafe sparks attention with its bowls and fresh ingredients, showing locals that traditional Mexican food can be healthy and delicious simultaneously. Milpa’s tetelas, tamales and more, accompanied by their homemade fresh tortillas, detail a flavor profile reminiscent of Mexico.
Behind the tasteful revolution is renowned international Mexican Chef DJ Flores. Having held his forte in some of the biggest restaurants in Vegas and beyond, including Jaleo, Border Grill, Chica, and Quintonil in Mexico City, Flores shows unwavering determination and resilience, mirroring many local Hispanics in Vegas. The establishment of Milpa during the pandemic after being fired from a restaurant is a testimony of Flores’ courage and hard work.
Now, in the wake of Hispanic Heritage Month, Milpa is serving up popular, healthy Mexican dishes designed to transport people right to the heart of Mexico through a bite. By retaining the natural, fresh flavors in the handmade tortillas, the restaurant is not just celebrating a crucial month in Hispanic culture, but also adding to the Vegas culinary experience.
As this unique restaurant continues to gain momentum, it’s evident that Chef DJ Flores is not just introducing Vegas to Mexican cuisine, but he’s carving out a novel narrative of health-conscious, traditional Mexican meals. The continued recognition and praises only affirm that Milpa is indeed the “Vegas King of Handmade Fresh Tortillas.”
