Emilio Vargas wanted to play high school football in Texas. His father, Javier Vargas, wanted the best for his son. As a lawyer, Javier had the means to fulfill Emilio’s wish, so he arranged for the sixteen-year-old to leave Mexico City to stay with family in Georgetown and play at East View High School. Javier and the rest of the Vargas family soon joined him. Because Javier’s Mexican attorney license didn’t transfer to the U.S., he had to take other jobs to support his family. He worked in restaurants and construction. Emilio kept bringing up the traditional Central Mexican Hidalgo-style bar ..read more

Among the culinary mainstays that have made their marks on the palates of Laredoans, few have been more essential than La India Packing Company. This April, the family-owned spice-and-herb company hits a monumental milestone as it turns one hundred years old. An official bash celebrating the anniversary is on the books for April 27, and later this year, the Texas Historical Commission will officially designate the company and its headquarters, in old Laredo, with a historical marker. According to owner Elsa Rodriguez Arguindegui, the reason for the company’s success is simple: “People like the ..read more

There’s Taco Bell, and then there’s everyone else. Torchy’s Tacos and Velvet Taco may aspire to national reach, but they’ll never match the market share—or the international footprint, across nearly thirty countries—of the home of the Crunchwrap Supreme.Yet they and other Texas-based chains—Taco Bueno, Taco Cabana, Taco Casa—share common traits with Taco Bell. Their menus are filled with head-scratching takes on Americanized Mexican food, and they were each launched by non-Hispanic white founders with access to levels of investment capital that most Latino business owners can only dream of.Tha ..read more

Something stops Clay Dover cold as he strolls behind the restaurant’s counter. The CEO of Velvet Taco has been all smiles and high fives since he entered the chain’s location in the Grandscape shopping center, amid the suburban sprawl north of Dallas. But now, staring at a few chicken strips in a bin under a heat lamp, he cuts off his friendly patter midsentence and pulls out one of the little brown hunks. He turns it over in his hand, tears it apart, takes a bite, and throws the rest in the trash with a faint trace of a pucker on his face. He’s not going to call anyone out on the spot, but he ..read more

Arturo Reyes and his best friend, Mark Rubio, were leaving a Naughty by Nature concert in Las Vegas in late 2018, when Rubio’s nephew called at 2 a.m., from Texas. The young man was speaking in a hurried, excited manner. It was difficult to hear him, but one question came through: “Hey, Tío, does Art still make that delicious queso?” Rubio switched the call to speaker and heard his nephew tell the two men that their families were confident enough in Reyes’s recipe to sign up for the Quesoff in Austin. The day of the contest, Reyes arrived with his family’s decades-old chile con queso recipe: a ..read more

If you’ve been paying attention to the culinary world the past few years, you know that foods that have been cured, pickled, fermented, and otherwise deliciously enhanced are “having a moment,” as they say. Humans have been preserving food for eons, but there’s nothing like a global pandemic to get folks in a back-to-basics mindset, diligently nursing sourdough babies and cultivating a newfound appreciation for things that are fleeting.None of that is new to chef Steve McHugh, who opened his San Antonio restaurant Cured in 2013. His approach to cooking has long celebrated the ideas of plenitud ..read more

Growing up in a Muslim community, I knew many people who would fast during Ramadan, a month-long religious observance where participants abstain from food and water from sunrise to sunset. My family wasn’t particularly religious, so I only fasted on occasion, but I admire people who fast—especially when they work in a strenuous, food-centric environment like a professional kitchen. There’s no doubt that working with food while fasting can be a challenge, especially since it’s customary for cooks to continuously taste dishes to maintain quality standards. Aside from the nature of the job ..read more

For a long while in Marshall, a town of 23,000 in far northeast Texas, there wasn’t a place where you could purchase a glass of wine. Like many other towns and counties in the region, it elected to go dry several years before the start of Prohibition and effectively remained so for decades after its repeal. Marshall’s folly was ironic because since at least the 1870s it considered itself “the Athens of Texas” because of its relatively well-educated citizenry and, eventually, its abundance of colleges. The Greeks, after all, were fueled by their viticulture, but that fact apparently found no pu ..read more

National Geographic’s television series Superstructures: Engineering Marvels features Volkswagen’s 70 million-square-foot plant in Wolfsburg, Germany. The episode leads viewers through a meticulously planned and monitored production system reliant on precision robotics and automation in gleaming environs. It doesn’t take long for viewers to wonder: where are the workers? They’re everywhere, just out of sight. Engineers supervise machines from quiet rooms, while articulated arms assemble car parts. At other points, segments are carried along a track hanging from the ceiling. It’s at the end of ..read more

In the corner of the Munday Library archive reading room at St. Edward’s University in Austin sits a four-by-three-foot sculpted metal sign advertising Waterloo Brewing. The first brewpub in Texas, which operated on Austin’s Guadalupe Street from 1993 to 2001, is considered to be the cornerstone of Texas craft beer. The history of Waterloo is preserved via this and other artifacts by archivist Travis Williams, who curates the university’s Texas Craft Brewing Collections. “People who come into the reading room have a very emotional reaction to the sign,” Williams says. “They’ll say, ‘I can’t te ..read more