How we got here.
The Taste of Midland started, like most good things, in a kitchen that was too small for the number of people standing in it. This is the short version of a long story.
Laredo, Texas
A recipe book, a cast iron pan, and a stubborn grandmother.
Our grandmother, Elva, cooked the way a lot of women in her neighborhood in Laredo cooked: without recipes, without measuring cups, and with a profound distrust of anyone who told her to save time. Her birria simmered overnight. Her tortillas were pressed one by one, by hand, into a heavy wooden press that she had owned since before any of us were born. She believed — and she said this often, out loud, to no one in particular — that the only way to cook good food was to actually cook it.
She was not a restaurateur. She had no interest in being one. She cooked for family, for neighbors, for the church, for anyone who showed up to her door hungry. But she wrote things down — on the backs of envelopes, on the margins of grocery lists, in a spiral notebook that is currently in a fireproof safe in a closet in Midland, Michigan — and a lot of what is on our menu today is a direct translation of that notebook into a working kitchen.
“You cannot rush a good pot of birria. You can only choose to cook it early enough.”
Moving north to Michigan.
In the early 2000s, our parents moved the family from Laredo to Midland for work. The adjustment was not small. The winters were longer, the grocery stores were different, and the closest thing to a decent flour tortilla in the entire county was, for a while, a sad little package in the back of a chain supermarket. We started making our own — first for the family, then for friends, then for a growing crowd of people who had heard, in the way of small towns, that there was a family making real Tex-Mex on the west side of town.
What began as cooking for people became catering. Catering became a stand at local events. By 2009, we had a small commercial kitchen and a modest menu that fit on a single sheet of paper. We were not trying to build a brand. We were trying to make the food that we missed, and it turned out that a lot of Midland missed it too.
In 2014, after years of looking, we signed a lease on a small space on South Saginaw Road — a little too much square footage for a kitchen, a little too little for a dining room, and exactly the right amount of parking out back. We painted the walls ourselves, bought second-hand tables, and opened the doors on a Tuesday afternoon with a menu of nine items. We have never hired a marketing team. We have never run a discount weekend. We have grown, slowly, by people telling their neighbors and by people coming back.
The kitchen today
Nothing here is fast. Some of it is quick.
We are not a fast-casual chain and we do not want to be one. There is a difference between food that comes out fast and food that is fast food, and we try to live in the first category. The birria braises for eight hours because that is how long it takes to be good. The tortillas are pressed every morning because the ones we press yesterday do not taste as good today. The salsa is ground fresh daily because we tried it the other way once, in 2017, for about a month, and the regulars noticed within a week.
Our kitchen is run by family and by a small crew of people who have been with us long enough that we cannot imagine the place without them. Our head cook, Mari, started with us in 2015 as a prep cook and now runs the line on Friday and Saturday nights. If you eat at our restaurant on a busy weekend and the food is exceptional, that is almost certainly Mari. If something is wrong, tell us — we will fix it.
Everything we serve is either made in our kitchen or sourced from a small number of suppliers we actually know. Our tortillas come from our own press. Our meat comes from a regional purveyor. Our produce is ordered twice weekly and is spot-checked on delivery. We are not perfect, but we can tell you what is on your plate, where it came from, and roughly when it was prepared.
What has not changed.
In a lot of restaurants, the thing that changes when a place gets popular is everything. Portions get smaller, ingredients get cheaper, and the people who used to care stop having the time to care. We have tried, deliberately and not always successfully, to avoid that. Our birria recipe is the one from the notebook. Our chile gravy is the one from the notebook. Our prices have gone up since 2014 — because every ingredient we buy has gone up — but our portions have not shrunk and our salsas are still being ground every morning by a human being who is not a machine.
We still give food away to the church around the corner when they ask. We still cater for the wrestling team when they come up short on their fundraising. We still hire people from the neighborhood first. We still believe — to borrow the phrasing of the woman who started all of this — that the only way to cook good food is to actually cook it, and that no amount of branding will save a plate that was assembled instead of made.
If you are new to us, welcome. If you have been eating here since the days of the nine-item menu, thank you. Either way, we will see you on Saginaw.