Carlos Salgado surprised the world of Mexican cuisine the moment he opened Tacomaria in 2013.
His marriage to the high end – Sturgeon Tacos, Flamin’s Hot Chichur Lawn, a handmade blue corn tortilla from kernels imported from Mexico and milled themselves – seemed more suitable for Los Angeles and Mexico City than Costa Mesa’s hipster food hall.
The praise came soon: 2018 LA Times Restaurant of the Year. Four straight Michelin stars. One of the most important US restaurants in Esquire in the 2010s. Salgado was the best chef and California finalist at the James Beard Awards (Oscars in the restaurant industry) in June 2023.
A month later, Salgado shocked the fans by closing Taco María.
As a good friend of his, I am exclusive about the following: Is that… Wisconsin?
A few months after the restaurant closed, Salgada moved to Door County, Emily Coulson Salgado, the home of his wife’s childhood.
If anyone deserves to go to all “Walden”, it was a thoughtful Salgado. He worked non-stop for 10 years. He was angry when he weathered the pandemic and Orange County audience and explained whether his space hadn’t offered tips or salsa or whether “Black Life Matter” was stenciled into the patio windows. The Taco María lease was rising and the location was by no means optimal. Carlos and Emily wanted to recharge together with their two young children and their parents to decide what to do next.
Well, after a while of a break, they once again joined the restaurant business, opening Lailena in Ephraim, a population of 345 this month, about an hour and a half from the nearest metropolitan city, Green Bay.
Expect everything that made Taco María very incredible – focusing on the Prix Fixe menu, local produce and meat, and the fantastic blue corn tortillas that taste like a thyme portal to Tenochtitlan.
There is nothing for the badger nation, but the idea of a Mexican chef in the caliber of Salgado is set up on a peninsula that protrudes into the Great Lakes. Gustavo Dudamel is not a New York Philharmonic, nor a white regional symphony, by determining the next gig. Governor Gavin Newsom abandoned his office to run a friend at the Sacramento Public Library.
About 8% of Wisconsin’s population is Latinos, with Door County 96% white. The Mexican food scene in Milwaukee and possibly in the outskirts of Racine is mostly a combo plate washed away with large margaritas or cartoonishly large burritos of Chipotle models. Wisconsin is… Wisconsin, old fashioned with cheese curds and brats and brandy.
“I’ll push it back [Mexican food] Salgado told me over the phone last week. “We are the foundation of the restaurant and hospitality industry, agriculture and construction. We don’t have to say all the ways in which we are embedded.”
He certainly shuts me up there! Plus, I’m proud that his and Emily’s next step will be in the isolated state where he and Emily went to Donald Trump in two of the last three elections. California needs every ambassador we can get, especially in places that don’t look like us. And we can’t get a better ambassador than them.
Former chef and co-owner of Tacomalia, Carlos Salgado took two children undated photos during an outdoor adventure in Door County, Wisconsin. Salgado and his wife, Emily Coulson Salgado, are opening La Sirena, a luxury Mexican restaurant in Ephraim, Wisconsin.
(Personal courtesy of the Salgado family)
“In parts of the Midwest, you’re from California and want to believe you’ve left California, and you’re inevitably trying to commisulate with us how it’s difficult to live in,” said Salgado, 45. “Of course I don’t believe it. I admire the state of fruits every day, especially the state of my hometown!”
“We actually thought we would live in California forever, but we still think of people in California,” Coulson Salgado, 41, said in another interview. “But this experiment is here [Wisconsin] It turned out to be really good for us and our kids. ”
The two met in San Francisco in 2008. Coulson Salgado worked for a literacy nonprofit, and Salgado was a pastry chef at a high-end restaurant. He returned to his hometown of Orange County in 2011 with the aim of supporting the Cal-Mex restaurant of Orange immigrant families.
Instead, he took advantage of the food truck trends of the era to open Tacomalia. Coulson moved down in 2013 to move Luxe Lonchera into a brick and mortar store, eventually becoming the restaurant’s general manager and beverage director.
Tacomalia was a daily miracle, especially considering its location in Orange County. Salgado received national media coverage and forced Angelenos to do anything unimaginable. We traveled to OC for Mexican food. His recommendations for people to cherish Mexican food and the people who make it were essential in an age where too many Americans loved the former and dislike the latter.
However, the crushing of running a restaurant, which I know better through my wife, was worn by couples. They didn’t want to hurry up and open a new Tacomaria, so they decided that staying at the door was fun and right.
“Emily was with me in California for 15 years,” Salgado said, and moving to Wisconsin was something we felt was fitting for our family.”
He freed himself from the rush of restaurants by hiking the forests of Door County and fishing in the waterways, continuing his mail-order business for Tacomamaria Salsamacha. Emily was Moonlighted as a Grant Writer. The plan was to return to California in 2024 and return to the restaurant Hamster Wheel.
But the slower they slowed the pace of life in Door County, the more they realized it was nearly impossible to replicate it in Southern California.
“We started tacomalia without children,” Salgado said. “This trial gave us the opportunity to imagine the type of balance we wanted, and we realized there was a very good chance to create it here.”
I asked if he meant the cost of living, hard traffic, lack of affordable housing, or what other reasons California resignations give them when they leave their move and whine.
“We certainly aren’t California resignations,” Salgado deadpanned. “People are constantly talking about changing their careers to spend more time with their families, and this is that for now.”
Coulson Salgado said it was “great” to go back to where he grew up “with an adult eye.” Door County has seen newcomers from California in recent years, and is a young family painted primarily on its pure white landscape. She misses Southern California’s multiculturalism – “My son says, ‘Let’s get the pho!’ And we have to remind him that we are no longer in Orange County,” she said with a laugh.
Chef Carlos Salgado cooked organic blue maze corn into a wet factory to grind tortillas at Tacomaria, Costa Mesa on Tuesday, February 16th, 2016.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
She does not frame La Sirena’s opening in the Midwest countryside during Trump’s era as a political act. But she raised the “terrifying” deportive flood that hit Southern California this summer (Wisconsin has so far “but we’re on high alert for it”) as a reason their presence is important.
“We’re not in another universe here,” she said.
Her husband vowed that California “has not seen us yet,” but there is no timeline for return.
In an ideal world, he and Emily ran both the restaurant back to La Sirena and OC.
“I’m proud to be Mexican-American,” Salgado said. “And I’m not going to be ashamed to take up the space and play brown excellence where I am.”
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