Socorro Herrera said when she saw the former shoe shine booth in a Los Feliz liquor store parking lot in 1976, she thought, “This is good enough for me.”
And so it was. For 48 years, Herrera has directed Yuca’s Hut on Hillhurst Avenue with the help of his family and several longtime employees. The menu, and the beloved “Mama” or “Mama Yuka’s” as her longtime customers called her, won a James Beard Award for American Classics in 2005 and marked the inevitable change in the surrounding area. Even after that, not much had changed.
Throughout the restaurant’s existence, Herrera sat at the counter with bright red fingernails, taking orders and writing customers’ names on paper bags.
“She was so funny,” her eldest daughter, Margarita, said Friday over Porto pastries at her home in Glendale.
Since the pandemic, her youngest daughter, Dora, has gone there less to protect her energy and health, but she still visits the “hut” several times a week and is staying at Yuka’s second location in the parking lot. He said he was keeping an eye on it. at another liquor store on Fair Oaks Avenue in Pasadena.
Socorro “Mama Yuca” Herrera passed away on December 23rd at the age of 89 after a short illness.
Socorro Herrera and his daughter Dora Herrera at Yuca’s Hut, a small taco stand in Los Feliz in 2016.
(Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times)
On Friday morning, Yukazu first posted about Socorro’s death on Instagram. Late on a Saturday afternoon, the credit card machine was out of order at the Hut, so orders were cash only, but if we didn’t have enough, the woman behind the counter said it was okay to pay next time.
Dora Herrera, who has worked in the family business since graduating from Brown University in 1980, was sitting at a table with a group of friends. Kara Duffus, an artist born in New Jersey and living nearby, stood in the parking lot, balancing her drawing board on a chock and sketching a cabin in the fading light.
A couple and their teenage son had stopped by to pay the remaining tab from yesterday in cash. Her father, Owen Mugan, moved from New York 18 years ago and has been a Yuca customer for just as long. “As a New Yorker, Yuka’s opened my eyes to a different kind of Mexican food,” he said. “And this James Beard Award-winning taco stand in the parking lot of a liquor store is an L.A. classic. Build your business where you can.”
Socorro’s basic menu of tacos, burritos and tortas comes from his Yucatecan roots. Although her soft tacos educated immigrants who only knew the hard-shelled Taco Bell and sometimes disappointed others who wanted something more complex, she taught many Angelenos that the tacos were steamed in banana leaves. He was one of the first to introduce the Yucatecan-style cochinita pibil. And in 2009, she became LA Taco’s inaugural Taco Madness Champion. Her bean and cheese burritos are rectangular purse-shaped pieces filled with American cheese and whole pinto beans. Her burgers mirror the taco meat that goes with it on a small grill. And her kitchen doesn’t serve quesadillas (though you can order beans and cheese without beans).
Dora said it was important to Socorro that all customers were treated equally. Gang members were also welcomed, without prioritizing the many Hollywood celebrities and famous chefs who came to eat cochinita pibil, carne asada and carnitas tacos. As long as they treated her with respect.
Ruth Reichle, a novelist and food writer, said that even though her mom lived a few blocks away for years while working as a restaurant critic for the LA Times, and had eaten there repeatedly for decades. I remember fondly that I had never known my mother’s face.
“I fell in love with their bean and cheese burrito,” said Reichl, who named Yuca’s “best taco” in this paper in 1990. You literally can’t go to LA without going to LA. It’s great, I go there and they don’t know who I am. We rented a house in LA two winters ago and went there almost every day. ”
Her daughter Margarita said her mom preferred to keep the menu basic, but was also willing to innovate when needed. “We recognized right away that it was her baby, so we helped her take care of the baby, but at the same time we said, ‘I think we should change this,’ and sometimes… She said, ‘Yes, you’re right.’
Socorro Herrera and her daughter Dora (right) chat with customers at Yuka’s Hut in Los Feliz.
(Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times)
She was particular about making her food fresh throughout the day. That means constantly cooking and chopping throughout the day. Over time, she made small changes to improve efficiency and happiness.
She used to mash the beans for burritos, but decided it was too much work and started leaving the beans whole. She got tired of chopping ham to order a ham and egg breakfast burrito and took it off the menu.
Sometimes customers would request crispy carnitas. “It was usually our fault because we overcooked it and they loved it,” Dora said. So Socorro removed the foil, turned up the oven to crisp it up, and saved the crunchy bits for someone who wanted them. “She was always like, ‘Okay, if you really want this, we’ll make it happen,'” Dora recalled.
Socorro del Carmen Sosa Suarez was born in Merida, Mexico in 1935 to a housewife and a law enforcement officer, the eldest of four children. From the beginning, Dora said, her father treated her like the firstborn he wanted. Socorro’s sociability, bravery, and adaptability may be rooted in his childhood experiences of going to bullfights and bars with his father.
“He took her everywhere. He put her, two months old, on a horse and put her in front of him. They watched a bullfight, and then he took her from behind and put her in front of him. He went there and was given his first cup of blood from a killed cow. He often bumped into the iron bars as he rode home.
“When she got older, a lot of bars had a little table for mom and they would give her these little mini beers. Mom couldn’t go in the bar, but she would sit outside. When he was ready, he put her on the horse, tied her to the saddle, and told the horse to take her home.
“My grandfather always said, ‘You can fight, but you have to win,'” Dora recalled. “And she always understood that.”
Socorro married Jaime Herrera in the early 1950s and they had three children: Jaime, Margarita, and Dora. They moved to Belize when Dora was five years old. While Jamie Sr. was looking for work, Socorro used the sewing skills she learned from her godmother to start a clothing business. She was good at it, as her daughters remember, and soon became a bespoke tailor for the elite.
In the mid-1960s they moved to Los Angeles, where Socorro became a successful salesman for Avon and as a sample maker in the clothing industry. Realizing that her co-workers didn’t have time to shop for their kids during the holidays, she and Jamie packed U-Hauls with toys and went from factory to factory selling the toys at wholesale prices to busy parents. .
In 1976, Margarita met someone who was trying to sell an 8×10 space on Hillhurst Avenue in Los Feliz. Although Socorro and Jaime had no intention of opening a restaurant, they figured it would help pay for Dora’s college tuition at Brown University. Initially, they continued to create a menu of Middle Eastern dishes that had previously existed in the space, but Socorro quickly pivoted to dishes from his homeland. Her children say they knew she found her passion in Yuka’s home because she never got bored or looked for another job again.
This neighborhood has changed a lot over the years. Long gone are Pedro’s Grill in Vermont, where Jaime and Socorro used to go dancing after work, and Acapulco at Sunset and Hillhurst, where Mom gathered on Saturday nights for lively games. Pacman. But Yuka remains.
“Because everything she touched was like gold and it worked,” Margarita said. “People ask her, what’s the secret? And she leaves, and I use my hands. I touch everything.”
The sisters often joked that the worst thing about Yuka’s home was not having any home-cooked food, and having to bring everything home from the hut. But the family always gathered around the dinner table at the end of a busy day. They waited for their meal until Margarita got home from her job as a grocery store cashier at 10 p.m.
“We all gathered in the kitchen and talked and drank and ate for a few hours. And it was beautiful. Almost every night we had this nice big party. What happened at work? What happened at school? It was really nice,” Dora recalled. “People always say, ‘Oh, it’s so hard working with families,’ and it’s like, you have no clue. It’s great!”
In a 2016 LA Times interview, Socorro said that working with family “isn’t easy, but if your family loves you and you love your family, you can find a way to make it work, so you don’t necessarily have to do it yourself.” “It’s not like things will go according to his wishes or his family’s wishes.” What I want is balance. ” Her success, she said, was probably because she decided what she wanted.
“I set the rules, I insisted on them, and the same rules still apply. You need a leader because you need consistency, one person making the decisions and setting the tone. That’s how we maintain the quality of what we serve. People come back decades later and say it tastes exactly like they remembered.”
