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La Botana's chef tries to break away from the traditional menus of Mexican restaurants
Journal Photo by Lauren Carroll
Rigo Velazquez chops vegetables for a dish in the kitchen of his restaurant, La Botana, off Hanes Mall Boulevard.
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Published: May 27, 2008
While quesadillas and hard-shelled taco combo plates fly out the kitchen doors of many of Winston-Salem's Mexican restaurants, Rigo Velazquez dreams of goat cheese and asparagus. He considers Cornish game hens. He mulls over molés.
Oh, you can get nachos at La Botana, Velazquez's restaurant. But would you want to?
"You don't want that," Velazquez might tell you, steering you toward moljacetes, elaborate soups made with bean stock and served in prehistoric-looking lava-rock bowls, with strips of cactus dangling off the rim. If he recognizes you, he might dip into the restaurant's kitchen -- small, oil-slicked -- and reappear at your elbow minutes later with a taste of tortilla soup, or a poached chicken breast, simple, naked, and pure against a background of pistachio molé tinged with the faint burn of chiles. It's something he's just working on. It's a first draft. Let him know what you think.
La Botana doesn't feel different from many other Mexican restaurants. Maybe there are fewer sombreros.
Then there is Velazquez, the Emeril of Hanes Mall Boulevard, with his own stocky build, close-cropped buzz of dark hair and jovial laugh.
But if Emeril's muse is Cajun and Creole country, Velazquez looks to his family and his roots in central Mexico for inspiration. On his right arm, there's a tattoo of Benito Juarez, a Mexican president who is revered for overthrowing French occupiers and modernizing the country in the mid-1800s. On his menu, there's red cabbage, cactus and bacon -- ingredients that remind him of home. For lunch, the menu is brimming with scrambled eggs, chorizo and black beans because that's what he ate growing up.
"That's the stuff poor people ate in Mexico. We're all here because we were broke in Mexico," he said. "I remember the flavor of something I ate in Mexico, and then I mess around to get that flavor."
Born in the northern Mexican city of Monterrey, Velazquez spent his childhood taking the bus between southern California and San Luis Potosi, the state in central Mexico where his mother is from and his grandparents had a farm. Velazquez followed family to North Carolina when he was a teenager.
He once thought he'd like to be a dentist. But a series of jobs in Mexican restaurants inevitably steered him toward food.
His plan was to learn about the business working at restaurants, then open his own when he turned 35. But he ended up doing that a few years sooner when his stepfather saw that there was an empty restaurant area for lease on the end of a generic-looking strip mall overlooking parking lots and Wal-Mart.
They opened La Botana in 2004 on credit cards and savings, Velazquez said. At the time, he was managing El Palenque, a Mexican restaurant in Kernersville (now closed) as he and his stepfather were trying to open the new place.
Refried beans and taco salad are easy to find at most other Mexican restaurants. Velazquez wanted to do more, so he started tinkering with La Botana's menu.
But he really only started experimenting in the kitchen when his wife, July, was pregnant with their son, Gregory, almost two years ago. He was the one to get cravings for the dishes, not her. Some of them are now on La Botana's specials menu, a tight list of tacos filled with spinach and corn; fajitas with steak, bacon and spring onions; chicken with cream garlic sauce; fish soup; pork chops with caramelized onions and nopales, or prickly pear cactus.
There are dishes inspired by the Mexican states of Veracruz in the southeast, and dishes from Tamaulipas in the northeast. Tacos de Papa are filled with cubed potatoes, black beans, tomatoes and avocado, with a dense, deeply spicy red salsa on the side. "Vegetarian dish typical of Michoacan," the menu reads. The recipe was also invented on the fly by July one night at home when she filled tacos with a few things she found in the refrigerator.
The specials menu is one reason La Botana has achieved the kind of following that only word-of-mouth could build. He doesn't advertise. His customers -- a mix of suburban families, working-class immigrants and downtown-dwelling hipsters -- do that for him.
Mary Haglund, the owner of Mary's Of Course cafe and a local culinary matriarch, is partial to La Botana's red chicken molé. She also loves the chiles rellenos. Another dish convinced her that radishes could be delicious. "I have to stop myself from going there," she said. "We go about twice a week but sometimes we go three."
Haglund is a regular. Regulars still have to ask for the specials menu -- otherwise, "it wouldn't be special," Velazquez explains.
The truth is that those recipes also take longer to make. Mexican restaurants in the United States have backed themselves into a corner, he says, by churning out assembly line combination No. 4's so efficiently that they have almost become fast food. That's about turning tables, not about food. It frustrates him, but he has to do that, too, to make a living.
What makes La Botana different is that it is really two restaurants in one -- the place where you can get the combo plate, or the place where you can get goat tacos and a Michelada, a Mexican cocktail made with beer, hot sauce and lime juice.
Velazquez changes the specials menu about every six months, sometimes more often. He scribbles some of his ideas down in a little black-and-white composition book. He heads for the cookbooks when he shops with his family at Sam's Club. He's thinking about champurrado, a hot drink made with chocolate and cornstarch, and a version of egg nog made with almonds. He's thinking about green rice, and black rice. He's tinkered around with some fish and fluffy egg batter, the kind usually used to make chiles rellenos.
"He'll blend (his dishes with) what he's learned here," Haglund said. "And to me, that's a sign of a good chef, when he incorporates what he's experienced."
Later, Velazquez will test the dishes in La Botana's kitchen, trying them out on his cooks and servers, steps from the 24 tables in the two brightly painted dining rooms where the TVs are always turned to soccer, Spanish telenovela, or of course, the Food Network.
He was there on a recent afternoon, chopping cabbage and pickled jalapenos, adding dried chile flakes to a ceviche of catfish, shrimp and scallops curing in lime and pineapple juice, sauteing longaniza (a spicy loose sausage similar to chorizo) as a caldron of carnitas bubbles nearby.
Velazquez is an untrained chef, a self-taught one, but he properly tucks his fingertips under as he chops onions. He tastes his food as he cooks, working more by instinct than any recipe.
"The easiest way to make a dish is to taste it," he says, flipping chopped fish into a pan. "The dish is going to tell you what it needs."
He slips some of the sausage into the grainy scoop of a corn tortilla. He bites into it, holding his hand underneath to catch the grease.
"I added a little too much salt," he says. "Then again, it's a first draft."
■ Laura Giovanelli can be reached at 727-7302 or at lgiovanelli@wsjournal.com.
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